Is Catalina as bad as it looks on this board?

[xnsys]

JM-Prod - that's exactly the feeling that my client has - and as I've said I can't blame them - they feel that the whole software division has abandoned the Mac, and that apple don't even seem to care about the functionality and reliability of the iOS.

The census is that this company has become so pent up on profit that they don't really care what crap goes out of the door.

 

[JM-Prod]

fwiw, your experience is not everyone's, and catalina, for many, is fine (or, at least .2 or .3 fine)... but good luck sorting things out!

Thanks, but my issues affected not one computer, but spread out on several.

And when it comes to professional features, how can Time Machine not support restoring a non-OS volume? Have they turned TimeMachine into abandonware? Maybe some top managers want us to use our iCloud drive for backup. Good idea, looking forward to pushing 32 terabytes per workstation back and forth their cloud...
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The census is that this company has become so pent up on profit that they don't really care what crap goes out of the door.

I read a nice quote somewhere. Apple, an overseas bank and tax heaven that happens to sell phones.

 

[skippermonkey]

In answer to the original question, I was going to say Catalina has been okay on my new Mac Pro – but since the move to 10.15.3 it has been shockingly bad. Endless crashes and force quits, leading restarts. Thank I'll downgrade to 10.15.2 until 10.15.4 shows its ugly face, since 10.15.3 doesn't seem to have added anything worthwhile anyway.

 

[xnsys]

Well, meeting has been interesting - even the design team who are heavily reliant on Apple devices, and were looking forward to getting new toys to play with understand the current situation - they are willing to make the switch if the final go ahead to move to windows is given the green-light - basically sick and tired of machines crashing and losing work, or constantly having to save every 5 seconds...

So my instructions from my client are to obtain devices for test purposes to provide to the relevant teams, and if they are happy with windows counterparts, to look at migrating over as and when devices are due a refresh...

The CTO of the company is quite right and is taking a hard line to protect their business...in his words...while it's appreciated that companies such as apple have their software/hardware issues, the arrogance of not acknowledging it even when it's blatantly demonstrated as an issue, the denial that the issues exist even though several team members have reported it and called it in, together with the length of time taken to fix what is deemed, and reported as production critical issues has nailed the coffin well and truly shut on the apple ecosystem....

I didn't release but they were having the graphics switching issue starting with 10.10 - just accepted it - and the server shortcut has been there with 10.11 and 10.14 being the only OS's that didn't seem to suffer - the users just found a workaround themselves...

This is the most consistently reported items highlighted in the meeting.

• Random WiFi disconnects, turning off WiFi and back on connects back.
• Sluggish graphics occasionally, reboot fixes.
• Network drives not mountain and showing as cannot be found
• Red pixels appearing at random places on the screen, minimising and maximising windows sorts.
• Bluetooth crashing, turning off and on again will re-connect mouse and keyboard.
• ColorSync monitor profile sometimes doesn't work, selecting another and then the profile fixes.
• True-tone seems to pick up shirt colours, for example sitting in front with a blue shirt on will make the screen blue - didn't do this with 10.14.x
• Sometimes machines will not wake from sleep - get a black screen but know it's there as it will chime when pressing keys - rather like the display not powering on.
• Complete System freeze occasionally, requiring force power reset - almost daily.
• Applications freeze more frequently than they did with the older machines, requiring fore quit.

 

[oldmacs]

I still don't get what Apple did to Catalina to make it that much worse than Mojave....

 

[xnsys]

The thoughts are that they had to re-write a lot of 32-bit code, and as a result introduced a lot of bugs...

It's just a guess, but would make sense if that was the case.

It feels kind of like going back to Mac OS X 10.0 DP1

 

[oldmacs]

The next MacOS should be called Santa Catalina, not introducing any new features besides adding some needed professional features (like being able to restore a non-OS volume from a TimeMachine backup), cleaning up UI-frustrations, fix performance issues and clear out bugs and broken features throughout the OS. Santa Catalina is the full name of the Catalina island, and it also alludes to Apple needing some divine intervention to fix this Charlie Foxtrot that makes Windows seem clean, tidy and well functioning compared to this mess.

Would love this.

Stability plus small improvements. For example, fix iOS device syncing in finder. Give messages at least feature parity to the iOS version.
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The thoughts are that they had to re-write a lot of 32-bit code, and as a result introduced a lot of bugs...

It's just a guess, but would make sense if that was the case.

It feels kind of like going back to Mac OS X 10.0 DP1

Yet I was told the 'upside' of loosing 32bit support was 'stability'. Ugh. This may demonstrate my lack of undemanding on how MacOS works, but I had thought MacOS was almost completely 64 bit, besides whatever was left in there to run 32bit applications.

Would love if Apple went back to 2 yearly release cycles.

 

[xnsys]

I'm sure it will be stable - once all the bugs have been ironed out...but for some it's too late as customers do not like it when they are enforce to work with beta operating systems.

 

[JM-Prod]

I hope someone from Apple is reading this thread, having a CFO running the company, who is not a product person, nor understanding the need of professionals in their core Mac-markeds, have truly damaged the reputation of Apple and alienated a lot of their loyal customers.

The Mac Pro 7.1 is a nice computer, but shipping with CPU's that costs 3 times as much as the competitors similar preforming workstation chips, and with GPU's nobody really wants. Replacing one proprietary API (CUDA) with another one (Metal), has absolutely no positive effect for any of Apple's customers. If they were trying to force a non-proprietary standard in the industry, like Vulkan, it _could_ make some sense. Apple used to care about their customers, not just being a narcissistic bitch.

 

[oldmacs]

I'm sure it will be stable - once all the bugs have been ironed out...but for some it's too late as customers do not like it when they are enforce to work with beta operating systems.

I dunno... I see bugs in Catalina that have existed through multiple MacOS versions... each year last year's version of MacOS is barely stable by the time a new one comes out and that's the end of the road for the old MacOS (besides security updates) and the whole process starts again.

 

[xnsys]

And sometimes it's almost as though they fix the issues in a security patch, only for that issue to be returning in a major update - some of the things that were resolved in 10.14.x were back in 10.15...

 

[JM-Prod]

Jesus ******* Christ. I'm trying to write an e-mail to two of my contacts, that I've not written to in a year or so, and Apple Mail is not able to autofill and find their addresses. How ****ing buggy should this **** be before one puts it to rest? Earlier today I lost a client because Spotlight could not find a file, even though I gave the correct name in the search field, found the file later today, but they though I had lost the file.

 

[tommiy]

I'm not a power user and just trying to use my Mac for work so just general office style apps but i use external monitors and all my issues started with the supllementary updates to Mojave which created high CPU issues with external displays and nightshift. That took me ages to convince apple to raise a ticket right down to the point where I had to identify and prove the issue in debug logs to the kernel. While that issue was fixed in Catalina, Ctalina itself created 3 additional issues for external monitors. Not only that, i was one of the lucky people where the Catalina Bios upgrade fried my logic board. Lucky for me it was just inside of my countries warranty laws. 10.15.2 resulted in kernel crashes on wake and a number of other issues for myself so i returned to 10.15.1. Looking at the issues reported in 10.15.3 and the lack of fixes and yet even more issues I'm staying on 10.15.1. If I possibly culd find a way I'd return to 10.14.5 as that was the last version that was stable for myself. Everything since has been an immense time waste on testing beta software.

 

[jk73]

Reading this thread, I'm glad I've been traveling for months and too busy to install Catalina. I guess I'll stick with 10.14.6 for awhile longer. Sad.

 

[nickdalzell1]

At least a Mac allows you to downgrade if you hate the experience. I wish iPhones allowed that.

 

[timidpimpin]

Jesus ******* Christ. I'm trying to write an e-mail to two of my contacts, that I've not written to in a year or so, and Apple Mail is not able to autofill and find their addresses. How ****ing buggy should this **** be before one puts it to rest? Earlier today I lost a client because Spotlight could not find a file, even though I gave the correct name in the search field, found the file later today, but they though I had lost the file.

I'm certainly not making excuses for Apple, but relying on spotlight to find client files is fundamentally ridiculous. There are proper client management apps for that, like all these.

Seriously... your method is ridiculous.

 

[JM-Prod]

I'm certainly not making excuses for Apple, but relying on spotlight to find client files is fundamentally ridiculous. There are proper client management apps for that, like all these.

Seriously... your method is ridiculous.

Google is able to find a file from the whole World Wide Web in microseconds, the whole idea about Spotlight was to be able to do the same thing on your personal computer, anything else would be absurd; the idea jobs presented. So - shut up! ? There is no excuse for Spotlight to be as damaged as it is in its current miserable state.

 

[revmacian]

I still don't get what Apple did to Catalina to make it that much worse than Mojave....

That's what happens when you try to fix something that aint broke. What they need to do is fix the bugs and then leave macOS alone.. we don't need dozens of new features every year. New features introduce new bugs and code bloat for things that not all of us will ever use.

 

[timidpimpin]

Google is able to find a file from the whole World Wide Web in microseconds, the whole idea about Spotlight was to be able to do the same thing on your personal computer, anything else would be absurd; the idea jobs presented. So - shut up! ? There is no excuse for Spotlight to be as damaged as it is in its current miserable state.

Your argument is even more ridiculous than your method. Spotlight has ALWAYS been a simple solution for non-professional computer users that have no sense of file or computer management. It's literally as if you're using a plastic spoon to steer an oil tanker, if you're using Spotlight to find client files. And rather than be aware of how flawed your method is in the first place, you blame Apple.

Apple didn't lose your client. Your bad habits did. Period. You're doing professional work, yet your outlook, and possibly your ability, is very very basic consumer user. If you want to use a computer to manage what makes you money, then you should actually know how to use it at a professional level. Otherwise... you only have yourself to blame.

 

[xnsys]

Then what is spotlight for if not to find things?

 

[timidpimpin]

Then what is spotlight for if not to find things?

The main thing Spotlight accomplishes is using unnecessary system resources to locate things that capable users already know where to find. I have it disabled system wide, because it's useless to me. Figure out how to organize things in a way that suits you, and then access their location directly in the Finder via your own memory.

Spotlight is one of those features that's only relevant to the most basic users. Bottom line... if you're going to have a lot of storage and files, then you should be able to keep it in check yourself. Otherwise, you're in over your head.

 

[xnsys]

I HAD no problem with spotlight and use it daily, for similar purposes as @JM-Prod - it's quite convenient to be able to just press command + space and type the name of the file you want - rather than traps through a hierarchy of folders to find it.

Catalina is hit and miss, although a fresh install rather than upgrade seems to have fixed spotlight for me.

 

[timidpimpin]

Here's a thought... if you're banking all or most of your file access on one feature, then you're doing it wrong. If your ability to access something can be blocked by a feature not working, then your're doing it wrong.

 

[xnsys]

So what is APFS if not a feature? What is the finder and the ability to open folders if not a feature? What is anything in the os apart from a feature?

We bank on APFS and the finder to work...we could go back to HFS+ if we liked - and what about FileVault, should we not use that because that's a file access feature...

 

[upandown]

Everything on the web looks worse than it really is