Is Catalina as bad as it looks on this board?

[subjonas]

can you be more specific? how many people is 'way more'? also, are there more people in general on this forum then last year? (or previous years)? that would matter, if.

always love this sort-of thing: "my friends say that", "lots of people think that", "most mac users don't like", etc... absolute statements without actual facts to back them up.

people tend to post complaints and issues (often with good reason), but rarely post 'hey, i have no problems'. something to consider.

anyway, we'll be doing the same thing next year. "10.16 is apple's worst OS yet", etc. etc. etc......

Well, I didn’t actually gather the numbers because I wasn’t expecting to have to prove that to anyone other than myself, so I probably shouldn’t have used that example. But a hypothetical- if I went back and counted all the numbers and proved to you that there were significantly more complaints this year, would that really make you budge on your stance?

I agree that blanket statements (either good or bad) by an individual doesn’t help anyone, but again, when you look at all the individuals in the wider picture, there can be some information gleaned from the annoying cries. And especially when they call out specific issues (which I believe the poster you responded to did; also didn’t you say that people should discuss issues?), it‘s even more useful.

 

[fisherking]

Well, I didn’t actually gather the numbers because I wasn’t expecting to have to prove that to anyone other than myself, so I probably shouldn’t have used that example. But a hypothetical- if I went back and counted all the numbers and proved to you that there were significantly more complaints this year, would that really make you budge on your stance?

I agree that blanket statements (either good or bad) by an individual doesn’t help anyone, but again, when you look at all the individuals in the wider picture, there can be some information gleaned from the annoying cries. And especially when they call out specific issues (which I believe the poster you responded to did; also didn’t you say that people should discuss issues?), it‘s even more useful.

not sure what your point is, but am all for people coming here to get help, and discuss issues. just don't understand when people state their opinions as facts. and there's no way for you (or anyone) to give us numbers... we'd have to include the millions of macusers who spend their time in the real world, and not on this forum.

 

[Seanm87]

People on this board tend to be laughably dramatic about bugs.

In answer to your question Catalina has been fine for me. No issues whatsoever.

 

[fisherking]

every year we get variations on this: "i installed <current mac os> and i have problems. therefore, <current mac os> sucks, and we should all rant loudly on this forum, then threaten to move to a PC, then get help, resolve the issue, and return next year, to go through this again...."

 

[Deadeyeshark]

Only issues I've had have been with albums within Photos, apparently a known issue. I would say if you heavily rely on your Mac to organise a large photo library then I'd wait until this has been fixed.

 

[Macdctr]

I have been using Catalina when it was in beta release. I am now on 10.15.3 beta on my laptops (two MacBook Airs and my MacBook Pro - see sig below) and have 10.15.2 running on my 2012 cMP. All computers have been running Catalina without any major mishaps. I have no complaints.

 

[Martyimac]

No actual problems noted on my 2019 iMac nor on my 2018 mini. Not real happy with the changes in the way some of the programs work, iTunes for example, but pretty sure I will learn the new ways at some point.

 

[revmacian]

can you be more specific? how many people is 'way more'? also, are there more people in general on this forum then last year? (or previous years)? that would matter, if.

always love this sort-of thing: "my friends say that", "lots of people think that", "most mac users don't like", etc... absolute statements without actual facts to back them up.

people tend to post complaints and issues (often with good reason), but rarely post 'hey, i have no problems'. something to consider.

anyway, we'll be doing the same thing next year. "10.16 is apple's worst OS yet", etc. etc. etc......

This is why I always tell people, when you have a problem don't give it enough power to waste your resources.. instead focus your resources on finding a solution. I usually get told to "shut up" by the people who would rather whine than find a solution. But, I guess it's their time to waste.

 

[freakomac]

Catalina has broken the Caffeine app which I use to keep my display awake indefinitely or set period of time. Now despite it being activated the display goes to sleep in the limits set in system preferences. This is annoying as I like to use Caffeine as a quick toggle instead of meddling with system preferences every time.

 

[subjonas]

not sure what your point is, but am all for people coming here to get help, and discuss issues. just don't understand when people state their opinions as facts. and there's no way for you (or anyone) to give us numbers... we'd have to include the millions of macusers who spend their time in the real world, and not on this forum.

I was a little confused about who you thought should get help here and who you thought should go to Apple, but I get it now.

I didn’t realize you were asking for proof rhetorically. Good thing I didn’t put in the effort! Yeah, obviously asking every mac user in the world is impossible, so I just make do with what I have—for the sake of my own judgments (not to convince others).

I get it, it’s repetitive and annoying, and you don’t see the point. I agree it’s repetitive and annoying, but when I take a step back I do see some value. Looks like we’re not going to agree on this and that’s ok.

 

[revmacian]

Catalina has broken the Caffeine app which I use to keep my display awake indefinitely or set period of time. Now despite it being activated the display goes to sleep in the limits set in system preferences. This is annoying as I like to use Caffeine as a quick toggle instead of meddling with system preferences every time.

Until you can get it working again, I wonder if Hot Corners would be of help to you (Screensaver settings). You can set a Hot Corner to put the display to sleep or set one to disable screensaver - there are other settings there.

 

[gwang73]

Catalina has broken the Caffeine app which I use to keep my display awake indefinitely or set period of time. Now despite it being activated the display goes to sleep in the limits set in system preferences. This is annoying as I like to use Caffeine as a quick toggle instead of meddling with system preferences every time.

Caffeinate is built into Terminal. Type caffeinate directly in Terminal and then CTRL-C to stop it.

 

[Glenny2lappies]

Shirley you're joking?

Like apple give a toss nor can/will do anything about it other than maybe in a later release.

I feel that is a lazy excuse - you'd rather complain than do something that has a chance of solving a problem. I happen to know people who have called Apple about a problem and were provided help during the call.

What, exactly, do you expect Apple to do? They're hardly going to fix those problems just for 'me' when they can't fix these for all of 'you'.

The one thing about this forum is it's NOT owned by nor moderated by Apple. So we can speak the truth. A problem shared is a problem halved.

 

[xnsys]

Personally I do like to help with the bugs - but I also will report my findings here to assist others...

Currently have these open, not just for macOS but iOS and tvOS.



To go back on-topic of this thread, Catalina is okay and can be reliable, just depends on how you use it - for example if you don't use network drives or put the machine to sleep then it's a lot more reliable than if you do...

I've nearly made it to 2 days without a reboot by connecting to network shares, copying the files locally, disconnecting the shares and then uploading them when updated - and it's been a lot better - still had the jerky core graphics, so have disabled GPU switching when I'm on power in the office, but after a few sleep wake cycles, this seems to fix itself anyway.

 

[LeeW]

I went in on day one only because it had features I really wanted and knew the risks I was taking. Like it or not it was a complete ******** of bugs, there is no getting around that. It was one of their worst releases for day 1 issues that varied depending on the device you installed it on. Today, very few issues. The occasional bug but nothing to get bothered about in the main, for me at least.

Fortunately, Apple are finally putting some proper structure around future releases, which you expect them to have anyway but there you go!

 

[xnsys]

Fortunately, Apple are finally putting some proper structure around future releases, which you expect them to have anyway but there you go!

About time - You are only as good as your reputation, and it takes one bad move to ruin all that hard work in order to build your reputation in the first place.

To be honest I would have preferred them to have delayed the release rather than put something out that would cause so much pain to their customers, I think a lot of people would agree with this.

 

[Jim Higgins]

There is just a page of people posting issues with new replies every few minutes. Is catalina as bad as it looks form this forum?

I was going to install it but now i am not so sure at all.

Thanks!

DO NOT INSTALL CATALINA, I did and deeply regret it.
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About time - You are only as good as your reputation, and it takes one bad move to ruin all that hard work in order to build your reputation in the first place.

To be honest I would have preferred them to have delayed the release rather than put something out that would cause so much pain to their customers, I think a lot of people would agree with this.

I deeply regret installing Catalina and its habit of restarting instead of shutting down dependably.

 

[fisherking]

DO NOT INSTALL CATALINA, I did and deeply regret it.
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I deeply regret installing Catalina and its habit of restarting instead of shutting down dependably.

it's a problem you're having, not everyone has this. get help (on this forum, or with apple, or get someone to look at it).

catalina is not a disaster, it's an OS, and, as such, works for many people. for those with problems, again: asking for help will be so much more rewarding than whining...

 

[xnsys]

catalina is not a disaster, it's an OS, and, as such, works for many people. for those with problems, again: asking for help will be so much more rewarding than whining...

I agree, it’s not a TOTAL disaster, there is a lot that could have been done better - and for a lot of people they will not notice the bugs that exist, but as said before there are parts that are riddled with bugs and some user will stumble upon them.

The bit I find of annoyance is that these exact same bugs have existed in previous releases, and then, like now they would bring the entire system down...

I also find it annoying that these have been reported by several users, during the beta cycle- together with the explanation of their impact of these users, and yet 7 months later they still exist, and have the result in angering more users, and losing Apple revenue in returned products.

 

[fisherking]

I agree, it’s not a TOTAL disaster, there is a lot that could have been done better - and for a lot of people they will not notice the bugs that exist, but as said before there are parts that are riddled with bugs and some user will stumble upon them.

The bit I find of annoyance is that these exact same bugs have existed in previous releases, and then, like now they would bring the entire system down...

I also find it annoying that these have been reported by several users, during the beta cycle- together with the explanation of their impact of these users, and yet 7 months later they still exist, and have the result in angering more users, and losing Apple revenue in returned products.

how many returned products have their been because of catalina? how much revenue has apple lost because of this? and how many angry users are there, vs happy users? without facts, you're just stating opinions. the two things (fact, and opinion) are not the same...

 

[xnsys]

how many returned products have their been because of catalina? how much revenue has apple lost because of this? and how many angry users are there, vs happy users? without facts, you're just stating opinions. the two things (fact, and opinion) are not the same...

I get your point, but from me I’ve returned 10x 16” MacBook Pro’s, well I say me, the IT dept that I contract to has - and they have been replaced with the last 15” we could find, and also further replacements as per the hardware refresh program has been put on hold until this has been confirmed resolved.

I doubt that this is the only incident like this, especially with the comments from the apple store who replaced my screen, when I mentioned it they knew of similar complaints and offered to downgrade the machine to 10.14.6.

 

[fisherking]

I get your point, but from me I’ve returned 10x 16” MacBook Pro’s, well I say me, the IT dept that I contract to has - and they have been replaced with the last 15” we could find, and also further replacements as per the hardware refresh program has been put on hold until this has been confirmed resolved.

I doubt that this is the only incident like this, especially with the comments from the apple store who replaced my screen, when I mentioned it they knew of similar complaints and offered to downgrade the machine to 10.14.6.

hmmm, ok. that's 10 16" macbook pros, and 'similar' complaints from one apple store. plus some more anecdotal evidence on the web. so yes, some people are having problems... and some love the new 16" (one of my collabs got hers last week). so, out of the millions of macusers, we know, for sure, that some people have issues. got it.

 

[xnsys]

And how is this user using the os? Do they connect to network drives? Do they put it to sleep or shut it down.

There are so many contributing factors, but one thing reading these forums, everybody who has issues connects to network volumes and uses sleep.

Yes not everybody will be experiencing this issue, and there will be lots of happy users that don’t use machines this way that won’t see the bugs.

Doesn’t mean that they are not there, and doesn’t mean that everybody experiencing issues is reporting it...

At the end of the day, the issues can be evidenced and replicated, so should be an easy fix one would have thought. Just got to play the waiting game for a patch.
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Plus you have to consider the number of "bad" reports that this OS is getting compared to previous - seems to be a lot more, or maybe it's my imagination?

 

[revmacian]

I get your point, but from me I’ve returned 10x 16” MacBook Pro’s, well I say me, the IT dept that I contract to has - and they have been replaced with the last 15” we could find, and also further replacements as per the hardware refresh program has been put on hold until this has been confirmed resolved.

I doubt that this is the only incident like this, especially with the comments from the apple store who replaced my screen, when I mentioned it they knew of similar complaints and offered to downgrade the machine to 10.14.6.

And at the same time we cannot factually say that every 16" MacBook Pro will have the exact same issues.

I remember buying my first iPhone 8. I took it home and opened the box to find the bottom front glass had a large gap between the glass and the metal side of the phone - clearly not normal for an iPhone. And this was a brand new iPhone in the box.. never opened until I got it. I returned to the store and the phone was replaced with a new one in about 10 minutes.

There are going to be issues with a number of mass produced items, there is no way to avoid that - mankind are fallible and you cannot obtain perfection from imperfection. But we cannot take one or two samples that have issues and conclude that the entire line of product should be thrown away - that would be a perfect example of how harmful gross generalization can be.

If we have an issue with a product, the best use of our resources is to drop everything and focus all of your resources on finding a solution to the problem.

 

[xnsys]

And at the same time we cannot factually say that every 16" MacBook Pro will have the exact same issues

The 16" from a hardware perspective is a great machine, it's the OS 10.15.2 that has the problems - and the same problems we experienced when upgrading from 10.14.6 to 10.15.x.

If the option to downgrade the 16" to 10.14.6 I dare say that the issues would have gone away and we would have kept the 10x machines.

I dare say that it will (hopefully) be fixed in 10.15.3 - but with no ETA on this, you try explaining to a business that these new machines will have to be a paper-weight for the time-being...the decision was to return them as with no ETA and the ability to refund exists, the risk wasn't worth taking.

If we have an issue with a product, the best use of our resources is to drop everything and focus all of your resources on finding a solution to the problem.

Agree - the issue is not with the hardware, but with the software that is installed on the hardware for it to function - the solution to this problem was to return the machines and get machines that we knew would work, as they have been tried and tested elsewhere in the business and functioned as expected.