I am still on Mojave. I'm using a 2018 macbook pro, so I would have no trouble running Catalina. Its just that nobody ever really seemed excited about it, and every time I searched, the word seemed to be that Mojave was preferable to Catalina. So I never upgraded. Now time seems to be running short, though, with Big Sur just around the corner. I don't want to upgrade to Big Sur right away (because there will be bugs until at least January). But the question is, should I upgrade to Catalina now, while I have the chance? Or should I just skip it and wait for Big Sur to settle down? What is the current thinking on this? Thanks!
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should I upgrade to Catalina, or wait for Big Sur?
- Thread starter tamara6
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The imminence of Big Sur makes no change to whatever your established calculus was on Mojave vs. Catalina. It doesn't make Catalina more "urgent", unless you want to make sure your Mac has the pretty island desktop.
I'm still on Mohave. For the first time ever skipped an upgrade, Catalina. As Mohave will be 2 OS's behind I'll upgrade to Big Sur after a couple of updates. Personally see no reason to upgrade to Catalina, fix any problems, then go to Big Sur and deal with its problems. Once is enough.
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I would go to Catalina, as sometimes I have had issues skipping macOS releases in the past.
If not now, upgrade to Catalina and then Big Sur when you go to Big Sur.
It probably won't be an issue, but particularly around the Sierra/High Sierra time there were EFI updates that were required and wouldn't necessarily be in the later OS.
If not now, upgrade to Catalina and then Big Sur when you go to Big Sur.
It probably won't be an issue, but particularly around the Sierra/High Sierra time there were EFI updates that were required and wouldn't necessarily be in the later OS.
Stay with Mojave... Catalina is a mess, we are having all sort of problems with it in quite a few Macs after upgrading from Mojave...
Never install a new OS as soon as it comes out! Wait 5-6 months so Apple has time to patch it (gone are the days that Apple software was working fine out of the box!)
I have MBP 2014 runs on Mojave, and MBA i5 2020 in Catalina. Interesting is the old MBP is faster (at least more responsive) than MBA. I didn’t measure it with benchmark program, but MBP with Mojave does feel snappier. Too bad, I couldn’t install Mojave in MBA 2020.
Had been a Catalina holdout up until the weekend, then thought the transition to Big Surprise might be smoother if I hit the intermediate stepping stone. My thinking was that Catalina by now should be more stable than at release and have fewer bugs, and Big Sur will have the usual intro bugs and issues – which could potentially delay it being something I can upgrade to.
Also, had a look at Legacy software via About This Mac and the list had dwindled to a handful of games. Was planning on creating an install of Mojave to play those, but it turns out most of them are now in the Mac App Store with Catalina-compatible versions anyway (not sure why the updates hadn't shown up – maybe something to do with Mac App Store on Mojave?).
One benefit already is that I can now use a subscription I have for Parcel app on my Mac (I've only been able to use on my iOS devices), as Catalina supports 'Sign-in with '.
I would say go for it, with the proviso of using Eagle Filer or something similar to back up your email if you use Mail, as Michael Tsai's blog page & related comments suggest there are some lingering bugs related to mail data loss on Catalina. Pleased to report there's no sign of them here.
Also, had a look at Legacy software via About This Mac and the list had dwindled to a handful of games. Was planning on creating an install of Mojave to play those, but it turns out most of them are now in the Mac App Store with Catalina-compatible versions anyway (not sure why the updates hadn't shown up – maybe something to do with Mac App Store on Mojave?).
One benefit already is that I can now use a subscription I have for Parcel app on my Mac (I've only been able to use on my iOS devices), as Catalina supports 'Sign-in with '.
I would say go for it, with the proviso of using Eagle Filer or something similar to back up your email if you use Mail, as Michael Tsai's blog page & related comments suggest there are some lingering bugs related to mail data loss on Catalina. Pleased to report there's no sign of them here.
i upgraded my systems to catacrap and it was glitchy as hell with runaway processes. Did a clean install and moved my preferences in and all is stable. I then cloned that new catalina system onto my macbook and both are running great. I mostly upgraded for sidecar as i use that a lot (via Duet)
I wrote a bash script that i run against a clean install of macOS to configure the system to my liking automatically so saves a ton of time.
EDIT: spoke too soon. The runaway processes that were plaguing my previous install of catalina is back again even with a clean install. "Deleted" daemon constantly chewing CPU cycles all day long until a restart. Better pull out my mojave backup. Kernel_task is always chewing a decent amount CPU. Same issue with my macbook. Just small tasks will cause window server to shoot up in CPU.
Restored my Mojave backup. 97-99% Idle cpu once the initial indexing completed. Everything is running cool and stable.
I wrote a bash script that i run against a clean install of macOS to configure the system to my liking automatically so saves a ton of time.
EDIT: spoke too soon. The runaway processes that were plaguing my previous install of catalina is back again even with a clean install. "Deleted" daemon constantly chewing CPU cycles all day long until a restart. Better pull out my mojave backup. Kernel_task is always chewing a decent amount CPU. Same issue with my macbook. Just small tasks will cause window server to shoot up in CPU.
Restored my Mojave backup. 97-99% Idle cpu once the initial indexing completed. Everything is running cool and stable.
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If Apple is gonna rush out MacOS updates every year whether they're ready or not, I'm gonna hold off and let others suffer through the bugs until they're squashed. I'm planning to wait a few revisions into Big Sur before I update -- same as I did with Catalina earlier this year.
I'm sticking with Mojave until 11.1, probably, where hopefully they'll iron out some of the visual kinks with Big Sur. I'm enjoying not worrying about losing compatibility for now; eventually I'll just set up a partition for legacy stuff on my Mac but while the OS has support I'm content.
Went back to macOS Mojave for all of production macs.
macOS Catalina is a "hit or miss" type of OS. Some macs ok, while others are buggy depending what you use it for.
I downloaded an installer of Catalina just-in-case I want to install in the future ONLY because my iMac 2012 late and mac mini 2012's end-of-the line for its OS is macOS Catalina.
macOS Catalina is the only OS that I have experienced going back to OS X Lion I had mixed feels about. Lion worked ok...for a few of my macs, but macOS Catalina is an OS that I kept on trying to make it work all year, but always for some reason, going back to macOS Mojave which at the end of its development is stable for everything I do.
Very disappointed with macOS Catalina. Looks like Apple abandon it basically through mid-cycle and jumped to Big Sur and just continued to address any major issues and left the bugs for history..
macOS Catalina is a "hit or miss" type of OS. Some macs ok, while others are buggy depending what you use it for.
I downloaded an installer of Catalina just-in-case I want to install in the future ONLY because my iMac 2012 late and mac mini 2012's end-of-the line for its OS is macOS Catalina.
macOS Catalina is the only OS that I have experienced going back to OS X Lion I had mixed feels about. Lion worked ok...for a few of my macs, but macOS Catalina is an OS that I kept on trying to make it work all year, but always for some reason, going back to macOS Mojave which at the end of its development is stable for everything I do.
Very disappointed with macOS Catalina. Looks like Apple abandon it basically through mid-cycle and jumped to Big Sur and just continued to address any major issues and left the bugs for history..
I'd wait until Big Sur comes out and just either upgrade or clean install to it. Skip Catalina. The current Big Sur Public Beta is proving to be way less glitchy than Catalina even on its .7 release. You should have no trouble doing a standard upgrade to Big Sur. But I'm always a fan of clean installations (plus then you can create a Mojave partition if you want to devote some of your drive to legacy 32-bit apps. But I see zero reason to go to Catalina whatsoever. Apple didn't polish it enough before releasing.
The only OS upgrade path that was wonky for some reason was Tiger directly to Snow Leopard without doing Leopard first. Everything since Snow Leopard hasn't mattered too much. Skipping 4 or 5 or more OS releases isn't great. If Big Sur's oldest supported OS for doing an upgrade for is 10.10 or 10.11, then yeah, I would say a clean install is better. But going from Mojave to Big Sur really ought to be just fine.
As for the EFI updates, post Sierra, every minor point release of the operating system (let alone major updates) will update a Mac's EFI to whatever the latest version is as of that update. So, if the OP keeps on Mojave and then updates to Big Sur, they will get whatever the newest EFI update is as of the version of Big Sur they're upgrading to. Similarly, even if they didn't update to Big Sur, but instead ran the latest Security Update (concurrent to Big Sur), they'll still get the updated EFI for that particular Mac.
Again, Big Sur Beta 9 is smoother than Catalina 10.15.7. And you got lucky with your games. Most of my Steam Library is gone thanks to Catalina's culling of 32-bit support. My Blizzard games that worked in Mojave are no different in Catalina thankfully, but I miss Valve's library, I miss Quake 4 and Doom 3, I miss Batman Arkham Asylum (though I am grateful that Arkham City survived), I miss the BioShock games (though am grateful Remastered is okay). Idunno man. I'd say you got lucky.
I used to think that waiting made a difference. I think skipping the .0 release on Macs where it really matters is important. But with Mountain Lion, El Capitan, and Mojave (which have been the only really good post-Snow Leopard releases, in my opinion), they were good pretty much from the .0 or .1 release. With problematic releases like Lion, Mavericks, High Sierra, and Catalina, they didn't get better past the .1 release. High Sierra might have stabilized somewhat in 10.13.4 and moreso in 10.13.6, but those releases were crap from the start and they remained crap until something better replaced it. You can usually get a good feel early on how it'll be. I think Big Sur in its .0 release will be smoother than Catalina is in its .7 release. Though, I'd still wait until 11.0.1 just to be safe.
My theory is that where Jobs was content to have the OS release when it was ready, Cook is still letting people get the OS polished on the same timeframe, so long as they have something to pump out annually. It's terrible though. They need to revert to the way it was done with Jobs. That OS does not need to release on a schedule. It's not like it's trying to compete with Windows 10 in terms of what it can put out every iteration. They can afford to revert to Jobs' schedule.
Went back to macOS Mojave for all of production macs.
macOS Catalina is a "hit or miss" type of OS. Some macs ok, while others are buggy depending what you use it for.
I downloaded an installer of Catalina just-in-case I want to install in the future ONLY because my iMac 2012 late and mac mini 2012's end-of-the line for its OS is macOS Catalina.
macOS Catalina is the only OS that I have experienced going back to OS X Lion I had mixed feels about. Lion worked ok...for a few of my macs, but macOS Catalina is an OS that I kept on trying to make it work all year, but always for some reason, going back to macOS Mojave which at the end of its development is stable for everything I do.
Very disappointed with macOS Catalina. Looks like Apple abandon it basically through mid-cycle and jumped to Big Sur and just continued to address any major issues and left the bugs for history..
Again, I think they manage to perfect it every third OS release and that they really need a 2-3 year cycle as they are pretty much operating on that schedule anyway and just releasing garbage in the interim years. I do have a good feeling about Big Sur though. I have Catalina on one Mac and the Big Sur Public Beta on another. The latter OS seems quite polished and stable (almost like Mojave). I'm not huge on the new look, but it seems to run well and that's all I care about.
Like your analysis and comments and agree.
My concern with Big Sur is will Apple take the time to make sure some of the last few year releases of Macs works well or will they just make sure that this years offerings (our what is currently selling) is good.
Rendering video in Catalina does not use fully the GPUs on my macbook pro i9 2018 or mac pro 2013 12-core. Throttles both GPU and CPU WAY too much. Mojave uses both GPUs and all cores in my mac pro 2013 and macbook pro 2018 and renders faster.
I cannot use Catalina for production. Not sure if it will change with Big Sur if they just updated Catalina and polished it with a new U.I.
Anyone know if GPUs are fully used in Big Sur with FCPX (checking with active Monitor)?
Steve Jobs was not immune to this problem. Look at the Mobile Me rollout as one example:
"MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing."
That was almost 10 years ago now. The operating system world is much more complex. The code base is larger. There are probably millions or more additional ways things can go wrong given the interoperability with all of the new devices - watches, HomePods, all of the new OS features added since then. When you add in non-Apple devices - printers, HomeKit devices, Docks, etc. it is impossible to anticipate and test all of the possible combinations. If the OS stayed exactly the same for years then they would be able to get most of the bugs out as unanticipated issues are fixed. But people want yearly updates, more, better.
It is a tradeoff. A stagnant OS with few bugs, or a dynamic OS that keeps changing and adding features. I vote for the former.
They should just fork macOS based on the user base.
macOS <rainbow> <font = Comic Sans MS> Animoji Edition</font></rainbow>
and macOS Pro for the rest of us sane users.
They love to do that with phones. why not the OS?
Yes, but there is a way to do both... go back to a two-three year cycle; add new dynamic stuff as .1+ versions and that will give enough time to work out the major bugs. Of course there will be bugs, but this one year “new” OS each year has proven it is a train wreck of a method.
Just give it a new paint job with new wall papers etc. each year to make people feel it is fresh and new and then slowly add new “tested” features with a real QA process and not have the release version as the real beta tester (as is currently) and that will cover those who want new and those who want their OS stable enough to work.
Most users now a-days would not know the difference between a 1 year or 2 year cycle releases.
I have a feeling that you're not going to have issues with GPUs on recent era MacBook Pros. I'm not fully convinced that the issues that 16" MacBook Pros have with external displays aren't OS/driver related either. Catalina did not have enough time in the oven. If anything, it was better as a SUPER EARLY Public beta for Big Sur than as a standalone release.
But again, some releases are just good and stable and they are from the .0 or .1 release onwards (El Capitan, Mojave) while others are crap pretty much all the way through (High Sierra, Catalina). We just have to get lucky and strategic in which ones we adopt. (This is part of the reason why I'm making a very slow switch back to Windows for most use cases; this kind of quality track record is abysmal and way worse than what Microsoft has going with its semi-annual Windows 10 releases.)
Steve Jobs wasn't immune to that problem. But he was WAY WAY WAY better with it than Cook currently is. And, to be fair, Eddy Cue has never been good at running the services division at Apple. He still isn't. Damn near all of those services are total crap. Apple One is a joke.
Exactly. They need to either shift to a Windows 10 style of releases where the releases are more frequent and really not that substantial, or they need to go back to a one and a half to two and a half year cycle where things come out when they are done and ready and the intervening WWDCs are there to keep developers current on progress (rather than give them a three month head start to hopefully reinvent the wheel in Apple's intended method and hope that nothing breaks).
Users don't care about frequent software releases. And it's not like they're doing it out of fear that Android will one-up them anymore.
Stay with Mojave as long as you can. For the first time since I have a Mac, Catalina is by far the worst OS I had. I have all sort of issues since the day I installed this crap. Some were fixed on a .x update, and others came after another .x update lol. At this point I can't wait for Big Sur release hoping it will be better than this horrible OS.
I am hoping this is the case. Does anyone have a MacBook Pro 2018 and a Mac Pro 2013 and noticed if the CPUs and GPUs are being used fully in Big Sur beta with FCPX? Using Active Monitor when rendering, looking at CPU and GPU History would show if they are.
With Mojave, they are, with Catalina they are not, but throttle down in order to keep the laptop cool and the fans from running.
If we buy a high end MacBook Pro or a Mac Pro, we are buying it not to use Office, twitter or facebook, emojis or surf the internet. We are buying in order to work and produce things. We need it to do be productive and process/render hard etc. at a quick pace. Catalina is good for the casual user, nothing else really.
Just a different view here to add to the conversation. My 2017 iMac has Mojave and seems to be working well; I have no plans to move to Catalina. In another thread I asked the question: are there any compelling reasons to move to Catalina? The most-stated driver is Sidecar. Not needing that at all, I’ve postponed. My analysis to changing/upgrading any product goes something like this:
1- what are the new features I don’t have, and do I need or want them?
2- what features will I lose, and do I need or want them?
Generally, those two questions will lead you to a decision that works for you. For example, I don’t need Sidecar. But I don’t need 32-bit apps either, so I continue searching for things in Catalina I need/want. Haven’t found any so didn’t bother with changing.
1- what are the new features I don’t have, and do I need or want them?
2- what features will I lose, and do I need or want them?
Generally, those two questions will lead you to a decision that works for you. For example, I don’t need Sidecar. But I don’t need 32-bit apps either, so I continue searching for things in Catalina I need/want. Haven’t found any so didn’t bother with changing.
What will probably end up being your driver is when your favorite app (whatever it is) adopts SwiftUI and will no longer run on Mojave. Then you'll have to make the call.
I think its been asked, but I've not seen anything definitive back from Apple - I'm not sure a user will be able to go from, say, Mojave, straight to Big Sur without first installing Catalina. While High Sierra changed the file system, it's Catalina which finally nixed 32 bit software. Will Big Sur simply assume that you've already killed off older software?
Already getting nags from Catalina that there are legacy issues with some 64 bit software I currently run - including stuff that is 'new' and 'updated' - in advance of Big Sur's arrival (so assuming those providers will get their act together) but how would Big Sur deal with 32 bit stuff if it's still there?
Already getting nags from Catalina that there are legacy issues with some 64 bit software I currently run - including stuff that is 'new' and 'updated' - in advance of Big Sur's arrival (so assuming those providers will get their act together) but how would Big Sur deal with 32 bit stuff if it's still there?
Hmmm, interesting, but I don’t follow the logic here. Big Sur is a new operating system that will supplant, not supplement, its predecessors regardless of what they may be. It is not a set of bolt-on new features added to a Catalina base, it is an entire rewrite of macOS. It will do what it does and it will not do what it doesn’t. I don’t understand how it will depend upon what an earlier OS changed. What am I missing?
I think it would not. 32-bit apps on macOS have gone the way of the dodo bird and the iPhone headphone jack. If it recognizes the apps at all you might get an error message but most likely it will treat them as so much unrecognizable cruft and disregard them altogether.