Apple Seeds First Beta of Upcoming macOS Catalina 10.15.4 Update to Public Beta Testers

[John Tandy]

well I would like to try this but my 2018 mbp won't even update to 10.15.3

 

[bpeeps]

Interesting you say that. Catalina works great for me. Totally usable
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No issues with my 2014 MBP

There's enough people with issues. Glad it works for you!
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There wasn't a good macOS release since... OS X Mountain Lion. It all went South when they gave up on the cat names.

That being said, for every day use, Catalina isn't really worse than Mojave -- provided that all your software is available as pure 64-bit builds. The "allow notifications" thing is annoying in the beginning, but once you're through that, Catalina does its job. It's completely boring and underwhelming and does not bring a single useful new feature to the table, but it does it's job. Is it worth upgrading? In all honesty: No. But neither was Mojave. Nor were High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite or Mavericks. macOS no longer is a platform where anything interesting or exciting or innovative happens. If you need a work horse, that's a good thing. But if that is the case, then frankly speaking, let's stop pretending that these annual releases are "major upgrades

These are your anecdotal personal experiences and I would make sure you express them as that. Everyone's expereince will be different. I've never had a problem upgrading OSX until Catalina with it's host of well known bugs. Including the finder refresh bug that made the OS unusueable for me. I am sure there are plenty of others who never experienced that problem, however.

 

[domsodidavid]

it's only me, who feel, that they've changed the mouse/trackpad tracking and scrolling speed in this beta?

 

[cmaier]

Anyone know if this addresses the "can't connect to a network share by name if you previously disconnected from the network share unless you restart finder or the share daemon" issue?

 

[kepardue]

I've experienced as many "papercut" bugs as anyone with Catalina. Dialogs that you're supposed to click where nothing actually happens, only to work later. Deleting an app from Launchpad not actually deleting the app. Random things disappearing. iCloud constantly getting hung up trying to sync or download files. Don't even get me started on mail search.

But increasingly it's more than that. It's usability. I used to refer to macOS as the OS where you "unlearn" the goofy workarounds you've had to learn with Windows and just ask yourself what makes sense, and 9 times out of 10 that's the way it works. But it seems like there's a half-competent team charged with just iOS-ifying it as much as they can without actually using it. For instance, in the TV app on macOS, you can't even view which episodes in a TV show you've watched vs. those you haven't. Who on earth let that slip?

Now, abandoning macOS would be fine if iOS/iPadOS were half as competent, but there's still so much more you can do on macOS that you simply can't even conceive of in iOS/iPadOS. Like... saving a mail message as a PDF, or change the date/time or location or manually tag a face in a photo in the Photos app, or put spreadsheet formulas in a Pages table.

I'd be okay having everything as a unified platform, and maybe that's what the eventual Swift/SwiftUI goal is, but until we get there Apple really needs to hire *somebody* to use this stuff before they publish it.

 

[bn-7bc]

It's about time! I'm tired of re-paying for an app on my Mac that I already have on my iPhone. That never made sense to me. After all, it's supposed to be based on the same underlying OS X coding.

Why, different os differen hw, esp ISA why shold adeveloper develop to versions and only be payed for one? Is this aming to be a type of java for ios/mac ei develop+compile once and run slowly (relatively) evrywhere?

 

[loby]

I have had generally no issues with macOS Catalina after version 10.15.1. 10.15.2 generally was ok...but with 10.15.3 have not had any so far.

When issue came it was with Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X, but now for what I do with these programs, everything has been working so far now without issues.

Apple "probably" does not work hard to test for older system compatibility, so my guess is probably many who have consistent issues are not running macOS Catalina on recent hardware. But to determine what would be considered "current" or "recent" hardware can only be probably what they are currently selling (or just recently discontinued).

I run macOS Catalina on a MacBook Pro 2018, Mac Pro 2013 and MacBook Air 2013 (fix blurry text in Terminal) and do not have really issues.

 

[MikhailT]

FYI: Windows isn't any better either. They do new "releases" every 6 months for Windows 10 and at least 3 times, I had to reinstall Windows in the past few years. The most recent reason was Windows update killing my bluetooth completely. Driver reinstall and reverting to previous Windows version did not fix it and I wasn't the only affected one either. Since it was a desktop, I just waited for another update and that update did actually fix it, two months later.

I don't even remember when I had to reinstall macOS on my 2012 rMBP, maybe once in 5-7 years. However, 16" rMBP was bought to replace it, I returned it because Catalina was just....bad plus I hated touchbar; Wi-Fi kept dropping down to 10mbps, bluetooth drops (bluetooth was fine on every other devices, so it is not a dead spot here), gfx glitches, external monitor felt slow to use too, and other glitches.

 

[vixster1901]

This is also down to the Intel CPU fixes Apple have issued overt the last year.

The performance of my late 2013 MacBook Pro is absolutely pathetic now. There's so little CPU power that even OneDrive syncing a bunch of files causes CPU to throttle to 100%.

People overlook how seriously smashed older CPU's are now.

I have done clean install of Catalina on a current iMac 2019 (edit here, todays current 2019 iMac is really a 2017 model :'''( ). (it was so bad, and apple support made it worse after client called them with issues) The only way I can get some performance is to NOT to use iCloud / dropbox or any syncing service. Unfortunately, client purchase with only 8gigs. I could NOT install an early OS because of the logic board (I'm thinking).

 

[ErikGrim]

Neither the developer beta nor the public beta installed for me. Just restarts, goes to a blue screen with the login and then when logged in nothing is installed and it's prompting me to install again.

Revoked the beta certificate for devs, changed to the public beta. Same thing.