Apple Releases macOS Catalina 10.15.5 With Battery Health Management Features, Fix for Finder Freezing

[dantracht]

macOS is so much better, cleaner, more stable than Windows? Which year did you get in a coma and only woke up today, and didn’t get to use a Mac yet? 2010? Any software made by Apple is **** now, sorry no one told you. Just wait until you hear about the butterfly keyboards too...

Yeah, funny that they would develop a feature that’s most needed by older users (that’s the batteries that, if not tended to properly, will fail after a short while), yet only bothered to test on newer hardware. Surely they’re not trying to make people think “well if I buy another battery for this 2015 Mac that’s working perfectly fine (other than the battery), I will have to buy another battery pretty soon, so I might as well open up the wallet and buy new hardware where the battery lasts longer.”

Also, I know for a fact that the commands sent to the battery to stop charging exist on a 1998 standard. If the battery adheres to that standard (and Apple’s do, they did since my first 17” first or second-gen MacBook Pro), it should be a piece of cake to implement. They already have to do Q&A for the whole OS on that hardware, so why not add a tiny little extra workload to test the one feature that would actually be useful for users with older computers? Surely they’re not more excited about whatever new Emoji set Apple added to the OS in the latest update?

The funny part is that the core of the Al Dente could be written in a few dozen lines: it just writes a byte to one SMC key. The Q&A is all the hardware itself, which presumably has been done already.

To conclude: if Apple really won’t do this because of the extra Q&A workload, but does care about its users, why not release documentation on this SMC key so people could write unsupported software that does the same thing?

THIS. Well said. I guess it was on me for not reading too much into the description of this battery health feature, but I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I saw that this feature was only available on 2016 and newer.

I assume there's a 3rd party app that can do this as well?

 

[MJ94]

Anyone know if this fixes the sleep crashes?

Oh, I hope so...

 

[edubfromktown]

I don't know what this update did to my MacBook Pro 2019, but it's slow as hell and battery charge is stuck at 1%....

I suggest you perform a system management controller (SMC) reset and see if that resolves your issue.

Reset the SMC of your Mac - Apple Support

The SMC manages power and hardware behavior on your Mac. This troubleshooting article explains when you should reset it, what issues it can fix, and how to perform an SMC reset depending on your Mac model (Apple Silicon, Intel with T2 chip, or older Macs)

support.apple.com

 

[Tafkas]

Direct download links
macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2039
macOS Catalina 10.15.5 Combo Update: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2040

 

[nt5672]

That may take a while as Apple's focus is on iOS, which begs, the question - Why was iOS 13 a stinking turd from day one?

Because all of Apple's operating systems have been "turds" recently. It is the result of having a supply chain guy determine where the money is spent. All he cares about is getting version number bumped so he can say, "Its new, exciting, and the most advanced operating system Apple has ever produced."

 

[Heat_Fan89]

This was probably mentioned already but this update removed (on purpose?) my startup chime on my 2012 Mini.

 

[nt5672]

This was probably mentioned already but this update removed (on purpose?) my startup chime on my 2012 Mini.

New emperor in charge, have to remove all vestiges of the former icon, Steve Jobs. Think about it, removed: lighted Apple logo, mag safe port, start up chime, etc. All items that made Apple computers distinctly Apple. Now they are just Cook money machines that mostly work, but generate tuns of cash do to the legacy image of former products.

 

[auxbuss]

Update seemed to go fine, but /var/log/system.log is reporting issues with mds:

May 26 23:23:30 mycomputer com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.mdworker.shared.08000000-0600-0000-0000-000000000000[703]): Service exited due to SIGKILL | sent by mds[114]

I updated three computers to 10.15.5 - and one to 10.14.6 - and the same line is repeating on both over and over and over - like 4 times per second. One of the computers was a fresh install of 10.5.5 (downloaded tonight onto a USB - then nuked and paved the computer), the others were regular updates.

I'm seeing this too.

I also get this every minute:

May 27 14:08:03 MBP AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[350]: Entered:_AMMuxedDeviceDisconnected, mux-device:105
May 27 14:08:03 MBP AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[350]: Entered:__thr_AMMuxedDeviceDisconnected, mux-device:105
May 27 14:08:03 MBP AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[350]: tid:971b - Mux ID not found in mapping dictionary
May 27 14:08:03 MBP AMPDeviceDiscoveryAgent[350]: tid:971b - Can't handle disconnect with invalid ecid

What a time to be alive!

 

[edubfromktown]

macOS is so much better, cleaner, more stable than Windows? Which year did you get in a coma and only woke up today, and didn’t get to use a Mac yet? 2010? Any software made by Apple is **** now, sorry no one told you. Just wait until you hear about the butterfly keyboards too...

Yeah, funny that they would develop a feature that’s most needed by older users (that’s the batteries that, if not tended to properly, will fail after a short while), yet only bothered to test on newer hardware. Surely they’re not trying to make people think “well if I buy another battery for this 2015 Mac that’s working perfectly fine (other than the battery), I will have to buy another battery pretty soon, so I might as well open up the wallet and buy new hardware where the battery lasts longer.”

Also, I know for a fact that the commands sent to the battery to stop charging exist on a 1998 standard. If the battery adheres to that standard (and Apple’s do, they did since my first 17” first or second-gen MacBook Pro), it should be a piece of cake to implement. They already have to do Q&A for the whole OS on that hardware, so why not add a tiny little extra workload to test the one feature that would actually be useful for users with older computers? Surely they’re not more excited about whatever new Emoji set Apple added to the OS in the latest update?

The funny part is that the core of the Al Dente could be written in a few dozen lines: it just writes a byte to one SMC key. The Q&A is all the hardware itself, which presumably has been done already.

To conclude: if Apple really won’t do this because of the extra Q&A workload, but does care about its users, why not release documentation on this SMC key so people could write unsupported software that does the same thing?

Disagree.

macOS is definitely cleaner and far less brain damaged than Windows. I’ve used both since 10.1 and 2.0 versions respectively.

Resale value of Mac hardware has been awesome for me. All of the Apple refurbs I’ve bought and sold 5+ years later retained 2/3rd’s of their value. Windows laptops... nowhere even close.

Even used ones sniped off eBay- for example: purchased 2017 12” for under $700 and sold it last month for $950.
Sure, Apple could have done better on power management in the past (and development in general). The same can be said of Microsoft, definitely Adobe, ...

5 years or more of battery life is not all that bad in my opinion. Did you constantly (over)charge yours overnight or leave it plugged in for days on end?

Do you buy 72 month or greater car batteries?

 

[cponto]

I have a 6TB Lacie d2 Professional USB 3 (USB-C) External Hard Drive. Since the first beta of MacoOS Catalina 10.15.5 I started having problems that every time the operating system went to sleep and the external disks went to sleep as well, when only the external disk Lacie d2 Professional USB 3 (USB-C) went wake up. ) of 6TB was erroneously ejected. From the feedback assistance application I reported this in each of the new betas, they never solved it and the final version came with that problem. MacOS Catalina is a very unstable system and Apple is no longer what it was, the less the sector should be responsible for testing.

 

[baryon]

Huh? I'm about to have my MBP battery replaced for $129...

That's a good price, it isn't always as cheap. Cost me 2-3 times more than that a few years ago. And they can't replace the battery, they have to replace half the computer with it because it's glued together.

 

[dubmick]

I would love to think this would fix my overheating issue in my late 2015 iMac. Unlikely though.

 

[Boomer5100]

They still haven't updated the full installer in the App Store. Still showing 10.15.4. Would really like to get a USB installer made.

 

[Gianni Danese]

Oh, I hope so...

No, my macbook pro 2018 keeps crashing🤬

 

[Alex.Roams]

Uhm.. the fact that this 'Battery Health Management' feature only works on MacBooks since the they came with Thunderbolt 3 ports, is kinda important to mention. E.g. the MacBook Pro 2016 and MacBook Air 2018 and later.

My MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, 2017) doesn't have the Battery Health feature after the update either. Article should be updated to specifically mention which models are supported. Nothing on Apple's official support documents mention the fragmentation.

 

[star-affinity]

No, my macbook pro 2018 keeps crashing🤬

Oh, no… Do you have a log of the crash to share?

 

[acidblood]

Disagree.

macOS is definitely cleaner and far less brain damaged that Windows. I’ve used both since 10.1 and 2.0 versions respectively.

Resale value of Mac hardware has been awesome for me. All of the Apple refurbs I’ve bought and sold 5+ years later retained 2/3rd’s of their value. Windows laptops... nowhere even close.

Even used ones sniped off eBay- for example: purchased 2017 12” for
Sure, Apple could have done better on power management in the past (and development in general). The same can be said of Microsoft, definitely Adobe, ...

5 years or more of battery life is not all that bad in my opinion. Did you constantly (over)charge yours overnight or leave it plugged in for days on end?

Do you buy 72 month or greater car batteries?

Yes, it is plugged in most of the time. If I purposefully ran it on battery when a charger was available, batteries would last only 2 years or maybe even less. Batteries last only for a given, although highly variable, number of cycles (keeping the battery half-full does increase the number of discharge cycles before the battery dies, as well as some other measures such as avoiding hot temperatures, slow charging, etc.), so putting on extra cycles aiming to make the battery last longer will have the opposite of the intended effect.

Unless your computer is a toy which you use only once a week, then you can unplug it during your weekly use session and leave the battery half-full, not plugged in to power, until next week; unfortunately mine needs to be used every day. Good thing this is easily remedied by the battery management feature which is unfortunately quite a few years too late (BTW, this feature existed in the PC space, at least for certain manufacturers, for many years).

12 V car batteries are lead-acid, about the only thing in common with a Li-Ion battery is that they're both called a battery. There's simply no way they can last long given the chemistry and the load profile (cranking up an engine is about the worst load you could conjure up for a battery). This is a fact, and before you ask, I won't bother digging up "The Science", I have read up on it and I know that it is out there for those who bother to look it up.

A better comparison is to EV batteries: would you buy an EV if its batteries only lasted for 5 years? Don't tell me there is a difference between EVs and MacBook Pros, the only difference is that EV automakers were forced to think about battery lifespan management from the start, exactly because the market wouldn't take too kindly to 5-year battery replacements. The minute Apple switched to internal, non-user-replaceable batteries, they should have done the same if they really cared about their users (especially since a 7-year old computer is considered vintage and will be refused service at Apple stores or AASPs, leaving you to use Chinese junk of dubious precedence, which may explode and set you/your house on fire.)

 

[scrappykoko]

Anyone know if this fixes the sleep crashes?

Updated and it got even worse...
2nd time shuts down/restarts when left open and goes to sleep..mac 16inc

 

[petvas]

It did for me. Just make sure you rest the SMC and disable PowerNap and re-enable it again.

 

[Steve121178]

Because all of Apple's operating systems have been "turds" recently. It is the result of having a supply chain guy determine where the money is spent. All he cares about is getting version number bumped so he can say, "Its new, exciting, and the most advanced operating system Apple has ever produced."

Ultimately it's the responsibility of Craig Federighi as he's the VP of software engineering for macOS & iOS.

As entertaining and likable as he is, he's doing a horrendous job leading a bunch of clowns who can't get much right.

 

[dvdns69]

Anyone know if this fixes the sleep crashes?

If you had sleep crashes on a 16-inch MBP under 10.15.4, disabling Power Nap was a temporary fix. I had sleep crashes regularly on my MBP under 10.15.4 with PN enabled.

I installed 10.15.5 last night, then re-enabled Power Nap. So far, after the first overnight sleep, so good - no crash.

 

[tonywalker23]

-Reminders still will not remember "sort by due date" and resorts back to manual.
-Location bug still there, so no location-based services work (weather, auto switch to dark mode, calendar alerts for when to leave, maps, and directions).
-Screensaver still will not activate if I have output in Music set to play to both the internal iMac speakers and Airplay to the Apple TV in my office.

Again, I sent a feedback form to Apple, hoping against hope, that it'll one day get fixed.

 

[FlyingDutch]

Anyone else pissed off that the MacBooks that can most use this battery management right now, older ones, don't have the feature?

I know Apple wants us to upgrade our hardware but at least don't be so blatant about it.

Is it not for every Mac running Catalina ? 🤔

 

[lexvo]

Are the SMB issues (loosing a network connection to a server, for example to a NAS) solved?

 

[happygodavid]

If you had sleep crashes on a 16-inch MBP under 10.15.4, disabling Power Nap was a temporary fix. I had sleep crashes regularly on my MBP under 10.15.4 with PN enabled.

I installed 10.15.5 last night, then re-enabled Power Nap. So far, after the first overnight sleep, so good - no crash.

Man, I hope you're right. I bought a 16-in last week, and I've been on the phone with AppleCare for the past several days over this issue. It eventually got escalated to engineering, and I'm waiting to hear back from them before updating.