I still love macOS but Catalina has been the buggiest beta and release that I can recall. When we saw betas of x.1 before there were even GMs/release candidates of x.0 we knew it was going to be rushed out the door.Even after release it's still randomly losing files. Just yesterday my purchased music downloads just disappeared. No explanation (unless I trashed and emptied them in a fugue state). They were still showing as downloaded in the Music app, but when I tried to play them I got the 'File missing. Dialog, so the Music app wasn't aware of this either.

Personally yes, but not too much. I like the idea and the single elements of the interface, but overall it’s quite a mess. Everything should be reorganized a little bit. 9 people also have this question. Mark as assumed answered. Visibility: Drivers & Software 4523 Views. Last modified on Dec 11, 2019 1:26 PM. Tags: interface.

They weren't stored on iCloud Drive either, just the default local music folder, so it wasn't related to the iCloud Drive bug. This was a clean installation on a fresh disk, no third party system level junk, and after the unnumbered OS update they released a while ago.There are quite a few other bugs too. MacOS is still the better alternative to Windows, but the wow factor of 'It just works!' Is becoming rare and bug fatigue is creeping in. Still on my pimped-out 2013 MBP. Still has plenty of horses, and the only things that have failed were a fan ((cats & cigarettes) simple replacement), and the power lead wore through.Super reliable machine, still relevant performance-wise.I plan on using it until it disintegrates.Edit: I wonder if apple regret making these machines.

They seem like a failure of planned obsolescence - at least, until new releases of OS X stop supporting them, which will probably be the next release, looking at the current horizon. Totally broke the upgrade cycle for me - I have grown rather fond of my (t)rusty steed. My mother upgrades more often than I do, usually because she’s left every process open and running, and the machine is slow, and therefore she thinks she needs a new one. I bought my mum a MacBook Pro, I honestly can't remember what year or which CPU. She told me last week she had someone put a new battery in it and an SSD to replace the spinning disk. She's still well happy with it.It's a good point about the planned obsolescence: I've dropped this machine so many times it doesn't quite close properly, the aluminium around the top of both USB ports and the HDMI port are deformed, I've had to clean metal particles out of the MagSafe2 connector many times, I work in a metal fabrication workshop so metal particles follow me everywhere.Six year old machine still in reasonably good condition and works fine. I find planned obsolescence to be fascinating.

First-order, it seems obviously terrible, both of the companies that (deliberately) practice it and for their hapless customers.But second-order (and beyond), particularly from the perspective of the companies, I'm less sure what's best, or if there even is a global, objective 'best'.Consider the most radically distant point you can imagine in 'self-supporting human group' configuration space, that's still capable of making something like a MacBook. What does it look like? How is funded/financed/supported? Is it temporary, i.e. More like a one-time project like making a movie or a video game? Or is it, somehow, a 'going concern'?The 'going concern' attribute is one that I think is perhaps under-appreciated.

One thing that companies, and other long-lived organizations, do well is in organizing people with specific expertise long-term. Think about making a computer, or a washer, or any physical product. Surely the people that make those things, that have done so for an extended period, have a huge amount of detailed knowledge, and wisdom, pertaining to making the specific things they make.

What would be lost by them NOT having made the same things for so long? What would our computers, or washers, or pencils, be like if they were all produced by something more like a Kickstarter project?Imagine another possible world where the 2013 MacBooks were just as good as in our world, but also intended to last indefinitely, perhaps more easily repairable, or made of more common or standard components somehow.

Say they lasted 30 years, easily, before needing to be replaced. How is Apple different in this other world? How do they retain engineers like they do now?

How do Apple's competitors do this? And, maybe most importantly, how much do MacBooks cost in this other world?

A recent major Windows update deleted user documents as well. 0Catalina's file loss was confined to iCloud Drive during the beta, and what happened to me was in the Music app after release.I grew up with Windows, and the recent problems with macOS are still not bad enough to make me want to go back to Microsoft.macOS is the occasional burn, while Windows is a constant assault on multiple fronts. UI, spyware, performance, security, consistency, aesthetics, accessibility, lack of a multi-platform ecosystem (phone/tablet/TV) and bugs of its own like every other software.0. I fully agree with the author, and I am also worried about how Apple treats its users.

And I am also an abandoned Aperture user, with huge libraries full of organized albums with non-destructive edits. I still do not know what to do about that.Having read most of the comments, I got the impression that you could correlate them with age. Younger people are all 'Catalina works for me! Change is necessary!

What are you whining about?!' Perhaps I can relate because I've been using computers for 25 years now, and I'd like to see a division between rapidly changing things (like my applications) and foundation-type stuff that I need to get work done (like computers and operating systems). I'm in the same situation with Aperture. It's not only a problem because of the issue you describe with losing the product of my prior work, but it's not clear what the migration target would be.

The most obvious alternative is Lightroom, but this would mean trading a tool I have been using happily for free for 7 years for a 20EUR/month subscription service I would have to maintain the rest of my digital life.My current solution is just to keep a bootable Mojave volume around, but long term I don't know. Incidentally, I am thinking about writing an Aperture export/migration tool. I want to at least preserve the album structures, ordering within albums, version grouping/selection and image metadata.I thought about doing this as a commercial project, but it's likely I'm the only one who cares (I have a large archive of historical photos organized using Aperture).One thing I've learned: from now on, I will organize my image archives using my own software.

I am done with trusting any large company. I think there is something to this idea that Apple's products are for the young.

Older folks like me learned to use computers as toolboxes of specialized tools that we could use in combination to create customized solutions to whatever we had to do. But Apple would rather sell you solutions (higher value-added) than sell you tools to make your own.By 'courageously' taking things away from users, they frustrate older users who know how to do what they want for themselves, but Apple seems to be counting on a new generation of users who never learned to do things for themselves to be just fine with letting Apple do them. I always appreciated Apple's dedication to 'quality', but the quality involved in computers as 'bicycles for the mind' is not the Apple of today, where 'quality' is about looking young, hip, fashionable, and somewhat wealthy. I don't think their products are for the young.Short answer: I'm definitely not young—I started on an Apple II in high school.I do keep my software current and pay attention to things. I lived through 68000 - PowerPC - Intel, so I know how this goes.I've been running Catalina since the late betas and haven't experienced the issues others have, other than my old Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad not working with Catalina, which is kinda annoying, since I really like the extra keys, etc. Instead of the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the iMac.Know what I did?I submitted a bug report to Apple.There's no doubt that Catalina (and iOS 13 for that matter) are more buggy than recent past upgrades, which is not good.I don't think it's Apple not caring; I think they're trying to do a whole lot with overlapping groups.

If the rumors are true and there's a 16-inch MacBook Pro about to come out and ARM Macs will likely become a thing in 2020, I suspect a lot of engineers are juggling multiple projects across multiple groups and this is the result.I also switched to Zsh before I upgraded so I'd have my config all set before hand. So far, so good. And thank goodness for Homebrew and how quickly it had Catalina-compatible packages ready to go. Yeah I'm a younger generation and I believe macOS and Apple's software in general has gotten worse and worse.I've wasted hours this week wrestling with issues in Xcode 11 and the command line tools because of bugs in Apple's code.The bluetooth on my MBP2015 constantly drops, requiring a full restart in order to work again. Apps run slow whenever I have multiple monitors attached.And don't get me started on the MBP2018 hardware, that damn keyboard keeps sticking.I am not impressed with Apple's recent offerings. Catalina is working fine for me too. Mac user since 2006, I think the first intel chips.

It's definitely not a noticable change. The only such change was the upgrade to Snow Leopard. That was a 'wow' change. This is more like a 'meh' change. I haven't tried the iPad sharing thing yet, not too excited by that either.What I have noticed is that Apple hardware is highly inconsistent these days.

I think it's a function of the Retina displays. The non retina Macbook air with such an underpowered processor sesms to work better than the current Macbook air.OTOH the Macbook pro is seemingly working great. The 1.4GHz entry model outclasses the older generations by leaps and bounds. I have also started appreciating the touch bar, despite being a heavy vim user. The one touch shortcuts for da y to day stuff like zoom sharing desktops etc are very welcome.

I have used Macs for quite some time now, mostly as secondary machine. PowerMac G4, Quad G5, first Intel aluminum iMac, 2013 iMac (and a few others occasionally in between), and basically all the OS versions up to and including Mojave. That's where I stopped and moved away from Macs (at least for the time being). Not because they're bad but because I can't find a compelling reason to keep using it, it just steered away from what I considered a good match with my preferences and use cases. Still very much enjoy the iPhone and iPad. Just no room for the Mac.I guess my point is something doesn't have to be ' good OR bad' for some people to like it and others to dislike it. Pretty sure it can be both at the same time, depending on where you're looking from.

I am the author, and I may be guilty of writing an extremely long blog post; but judging by your response, you didn't bother to read it that thoroughly. The new layout in Catalina's Mail.app is actually my smallest complaint.I don't like change when it unnecessarily breaks things that used to work just fine. I don't like change when it is haphazardly imposed on a yearly basis by a company which has clearly stopped caring about Mac OS as far as management is involved.I used to like change more when it actually made me work better, when the advantages clearly outweighed the downsides, when progress and improvements were noticeable and thoughtfully implemented.But hey, that's me. He mentioned that a couple of hours before your question (and I do not know how to link to a comment):Hello! I am the author, and no, I haven't tried Catalina because, as I state at the very end of my article:'Both my main Macs are really working flawlessly at the moment, and Catalina is beta-quality software that’s likely to give me headaches I don’t need right now. Who knows, maybe down the road I could acquire a cheap used Mac that can run Catalina (something like a 2014 Mac mini) and use it as a test machine. As things are now, I absolutely do not want Catalina to mess with my current setups and data.'

He is evidently NOT opposed to changes, read these quotes from him: I don't like change when it unnecessarily breaks things that used to work just fine. I used to like change more when it actually made me work better, when the advantages clearly outweighed the downsides, when progress and improvements were noticeable and thoughtfully implemented.He is opposed to changes that 1) break things that used to work fine, 2) do not make him work better, and so on, you get the idea. If those changes make him work better, or when the advantages clearly outweigh the downsides, and when improvements are noticeable and thoughtfully implemented, then he is all in favor of those changes, i.e.

Not opposed to changes in general, just some changes that do not meet some criteria. People who've been using an OS for a fairly long time tend to accumulate applications. Many of them will have been 32-bit at the point they got them.

Many of them still will be, or will be fairly awkward to update. While I'm happy I should be able to find 64 bit versions of everything I want to upgrade, I'm confident I wouldn't be able to talk my mother through it on the phone.It's been flagged that it's coming for a while, but at best it's a massive ballache for an awful lot of customers. Apple are going to need to provide me with a pretty compelling reason to persuade me to willingly undergo that pain. I read a few paragraphs, got the same impression, and closed it, because the author admitted they're using practically none of the Apple ecosystem and therefore have already discounted the overwhelming majority of the improvements in Catalina.It's certainly disingenuous to have a clickbait headline 'Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it's worth' when it's missing 'as explained by someone who doesn't use music, photos, TV, reminders, notes, or really anything else from the Apple software ecosystem'. Maybe this is why all my posts are being downvoted, then. I obviously missed the boat on the whole 'personal blog' thing. When I think of a personal blog, I think that the person is writing their personal opinion about something that they've concluded in good faith.

This article, specifically, doesn't seem like it was written in good faith to me and so, as a result, comes off as nothing but complaining for the sake of complaining. I'm not asking for anyone to prevent people from complaining but I just don't think it has any value when even the complaints come from an inherently biased place that doesn't even acknowledge its bias.I'm only saying this because I updated to Catalina without going through the betas first and I haven't had any issues whatsoever. To read something like this that is so negative about it seems like astroturfing or manipulation, especially when the only articles this website has ever posted on HN are all critical of Apple. I couldn’t tell from the article if the author had actually tried Catalina. I have been running the beta since day one of the beta release and the only issue is that applications have to be signed or built locally.Apple wants macOS to be a safe walled garden like iOS and Chromebooks.

I am fine with this, but I also have a very nice Linux laptop to play with.I expect organized crime and most governments to continue hacking activities so it makes sense having my Apple devices locked down as much as possible. I avoid arbitrary web browsing on my Linux laptop and just use it for coding. I am the author, and no, I haven't tried Catalina because, as I state at the very end of my article:'Both my main Macs are really working flawlessly at the moment, and Catalina is beta-quality software that’s likely to give me headaches I don’t need right now. Who knows, maybe down the road I could acquire a cheap used Mac that can run Catalina (something like a 2014 Mac mini) and use it as a test machine. As things are now, I absolutely do not want Catalina to mess with my current setups and data.' I'll add — I'm in a position (work-wise) where I can't afford to risk Catalina messing with my current setups and data.

Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access.But we have a number of solutions for running things in containers if you just use them. Early on firejail was popular, these days I just run nspawn containers for browser instances and bind mount in some stuff for a shared Downloads directory etc.I can't speak to how that compares to OSX as I've never used it, but it is worth noting that the security story on Linux can range from bad to somewhat OK depending on your setup.Edit:In responses people seem to be completely ignoring that I already stated above in my original comment that I can't speak to how it compares to OSX. I don't know what OSX is doing for application sandboxing defaults.I can however speak with some authority on the Linux situation. And today, if you're running firefox/chrome as your regular user as installed by apt/yum etc, without any additional sandboxing, and that user has access to secrets like ssh/gpg private keys, you're being unnecessarily reckless. And unfortunately that is basically the default way browsers are run today on most distributionsThis is a major reason why the Flatpak/GNOME people have been working so hard on portals and namespaces are an integral component of the runtime.

It's not just about application distribution. They're trying to close a major security hole in desktop linux as it's often used today.

They want applications like the browser run in its own namespaces with just the minimum of host filesystem paths bind mounted in.There's absolutely no reason for your browser process to have the ability to access all of your private keys, just because they happen to be under the home directory it happens to have access to, full stop. All it takes is a browser exploit, in any OS.What does the possible existence of exploits have to do with macOS being more secure than Linux? MacOS can also have exploits.I don't understand where your claim that there's a specific risk of unrestrained file access to websites comes from. In my eyes, saying that it could be true because exploits could exist nullifies everything you said.You could apply that argument to everything: There is a substantial risk in iPhones giving websites unrestrained access to making phone calls on your behalf because all it takes is an exploit. Different OSes have different sandboxing capabilities.Until relatively recently, Linux had effectively none, just chroot, and selinux which almost everyone disabled for a decade.The point, which you seem to be missing, is that with generalized sandboxing tools like containers, you can isolate any application to limit the potential damage of application exploits.It's a form of defense in depth. We must assume browsers have many bugs and are exploitable.

Ok, from that perspective, what do we do to safely access untrusted input (the entire internet) with the browser on a computer we also do things like banking, private communications, and access privileged servers from? We run it in either a dedicated VM or more recently, we use sandboxing technologies like containers.I don't understand why this is so difficult for you to grok. Chrome was also found to be secretly downloading binary blobs for execution, we should not be trusting Chrome's sandboxing exclusively to protect us from the internet, we can't even trust Chrome itself. 0In-browser sandboxing is more for attempting to isolate tabs from accessing one another's state. It can't be relied upon exclusively for protecting the larger host from the browser itself.One should really put the entire browser in a sandbox where it can only access data and functionality necessary for its operation. Nothing more.How one achieves that, what tools is at their disposal, is greatly OS-dependent and that's the core of my point. On Linux systems, the out-of-box configuration for most distros is to just run the browser on the host with no sandboxing.

It's not sufficient.Flatpak is one of the active efforts to fix this. If you run firefox or chrome from a flatpak, it will be run in isolation, and accessing external host resources will be done in a controlled fashion via portals or explicitly enumerated mounts in the manifest.As mentioned elsewhere, I used firejail in the past but now prefer systemd-nspawn containers, often ephemeral ones that are spun up and thrown away per browser session.0. You keep trying to shift this conversation into sandboxing. Of course, any form of sandboxing is going to add defense in depth to anything. It isn't of any particular relevance to this conversation.You said: Unless you're going out of your way to run your browser in a container or dedicated VM on Linux, there are substantial risks associated with browsing the web in terms of exposing all of your information in /home, which might include ssh and pgp private keys, basically everything your user can access.You're saying that there's this particular substantial risk in this particular OS, in this particular scenario. When I ask for any details that can back it up, you reply 'All it takes is a browser exploit'.I would hope it would be self-evident that that is no reason to think that the particular risk you mentioned is real, or at least any more real than it is for any other OS, for any other app, or in any other circumstance.My only interest in the comment was determining if the particular risk is real, but now it seems it was just FUD. My father feels the same, he initially started using apple because he felt his Windows machine was using too much of his time for bs.

Now he just upgraded to Catalina and Photos stopped working with this Synology based library, even I, a computer nerd, have already spend an hour at the problem. We are about done. I feel that Windows 10 would be just fine for him (or maybe I can get him sold on Ubuntu). Where pictures are simply in folders and any backup program will just sync them anywhere.My in laws are very happy on Ubuntu Mate, it looks like old Windows (after changing one setting), and the Pictures and the email app are simple and clean. It's all they do. I did some research, officially Apple does not recommend or support any photo Libraries on a NAS. It has to be a local APFS or HFS+ disk.

My father is now pulling his 120 GB library over wifi to a local disc to see if it can be fixed. They really want you in the Apple cloud. I thinking maybe use Synologies 'Moments' but apps get less than 2 stars. Meanwhile over here in Ubuntu-land I have Shotwell sitting in a nice folder structure working perfectly, simple, easy to move to something else and easy to backup. For what its worth, Catalina has made my 2019 run slightly smother and less buggy. This might be because it reset all the preferences or its just in my head.

All my 'pro' audio stuff seems to work and my Apogee Groove works like before. My usb hub network port/driver would fail/crash randomly on Mojave needing a reboot but this has not happened on Catalina.Edit: And someone else replied, the DPI/font stuff seems to be fixed as it was driving me crazy in Mojave. The upgrade is worth a try for that alone. I do not even get the transitioning part within this context. If you are pretty sure that the software you are using will not work on Catalina, then what significance does transitioning have? Having more time saying your goodbyes to your old games (in this case), or what? 32-bit applications will not magically turn into 64-bit ones.In any case, I think it was a silly decision to 'force' the customer to pick between old vs new software, but I am sure they can afford it.

People will probably forgive them for it, and then completely forget about it. New users in the future probably will not even have anything to forget (or forgive), unless they want to run 'really old' software, in which case people will just boo on them, and say 'times change, technologies change, you gotta adapt, man' and the like which seems to be the case today with respective to both old software and hardware. 'Apple Music, TV, Podcasts, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Screen Time, and Apple Watch'Apple has, for the entirety of Mac OS X and macOS, has spent a substantial amount of time enhancing media and mobile quality of life. Catalina is no different. Take a stroll down memory lane: iTunes (was the amalgamation of the first three apps you mentioned), DVD playback, iChat,.Mac syncing, Dashboard (Widgets), Back to My Mac, MobileMe, Front Row, Photo Booth, App Store, iMovie, iPhoto, iChat, AirDrop, Messages, FaceTime, Game Center, and iCloud.Some of the apps you mention have been getting updates for longer than just Catalina. Photos was launched in Yosemite, while Notes and Reminders launched in Mountain Lion.I am sure we can both imagine people who were disappointed in 2007 when Apple redesigned Mail and were posting on digg about how Lion is more trouble than it's worth.As for the lack of 32-bit support, this is really not a sticking point for customers who pay to have their applications supported. If a product is no longer being developed, why is it that you blame Apple's software update?Oh, and another thing that isn't new: initially buggy releases of macOS.

I find it slightly annoying too, especially when an upgrade breaks the command line tools, or homebrew, and make me lost a few GB of SSD space. The last upgrade made me lose about 30 minutes of my day to fix a few issues. And I didn't notice much changes, besides the welcome screen picture, and that something changed with itunes, which prevented me from using it.So overall, I tend to think that there are too frequent upgrades and that I don't need them. But overall, I'm still a satisfied mac user so I give Apple the benefice of the doubt.

I'm the author of the article, and I would like to add a few things to hopefully make my point clearer.- While I'm flattered by the attention my piece got by 'making Hacker News', it is simply a personal view and a personal disappointment towards the direction Apple is going with Mac OS. It's not a prescriptive article. I'm not telling people to avoid upgrading to Mac OS 10.15. It's your Mac, it's your work, it's your data, it's your time. Do whatever you please.My decision to not upgrading is the result of a lot of time spent gathering information and evaluating costs and benefits of the upgrade. And my conclusion, as I clearly stated in the article, is that I'm not upgrading because 'what Catalina takes away from me is more than what it gives me.'

I also took the opportunity of sharing a few reflections and my criticism towards Apple's recent treatment of Mac OS. Whatever the underlying causes, it's undeniable that Mac OS is not as robust, consistent, and well-designed as it used to be. It wasn't bug-free before. Nothing is bug-free. But I remember past versions very well. I use a variety of Macs of older vintages, so I still use older Mac OS X versions. The degrade in software quality and system stability isn't a matter of opinion.

It's out there to see.And yes, I don't like the direction Apple has been moving after Steve Jobs's passing. That's an entirely personal preference, and I respect the point of view of those who, instead, love what Tim Cook & Co. I'm not really 'complaining' that Apple's not doing things 'my way'. However, as someone who has been using computers for 38 years and Macs for 30, as someone who knows a thing or two about user interfaces, user interaction and user experience, I think I'm allowed to share a few criticisms about the direction Mac OS is going without being called a 'whiny entitled teenager'.I try to approach technology by focusing more on the forest than a single tree, and sometimes I struggle to see all this 'progress' and 'future' other tech geeks keep talking about.Technology should adapt to us, not the other way round. Progress should mean making things better, improve what we do with the help of computers and devices. Instead, as I wrote, 'I also notice that — for everything to keep working smoothly — you have to do more work than before.

It just works, with Apple products, has lost the frequency and consistency it once had. It is a strange progress when you keep feeling the sting of two steps back for every step forward.' Despite all this wall of text the one thing voids everything: you haven't even tried the new OS.And thinking that 'knowing a thing or two about UI' makes you better than Apple well, I'll leave it here.' Apple is going downhill since Steve Jobs' and 'this is a buggiest (i)OS( X) ever' got old years ago.Just look up comment after any major upgrade of OS X. It will be a deja-vu.

People compare the last x.x.xx release with tons of bugfixes to the y.0.00 and are so shocked there are bugs. Hey - thanks for commenting on this thread. I personally enjoyed the article. I think I'm allowed to share a few criticisms about the direction Mac OS is going without being called a 'whiny entitled teenager'.I do as well - and, to boot - I wholeheartedly agree with your critique for the most part. Progress should mean making things better, improve what we do with the help of computers and devices.For sure, and removing access to a lot of my commonly-used applications doesn't help with that, for sure.

When it was time to get that 4K retina iMac, I only had money for one built-to-order upgrade. It was a tough decision. It was either leaving the internal 1TB hard drive and choose to have 16GB of RAM instead of the base 8GB, or choosing a 256GB internal SSD and keeping the base 8GB of RAM. Since RAM in that 21.5-inch retina iMac is only upgradable at purchase, not down the road, I opted for the 16GB of RAM and staying with the hard drive.

My reasoning is that I can upgrade to an external Thunderbolt SSD at a later date when I can afford it. RAM is not upgradable later.

Surely you can just swap the internal drive. External thunderbolt disks and enclosures are very expensive for no good reason.Source: I have been looking for cheap ways to have fast external disks for years.

4 years ago I went with a hacked Buffalo LinkStation (it’s one of the few products that can be easily taken apart, so I swapped its slow disk with an SSD), and now I just ordered a new TB3 enclosure from aliexpress (plus a super-fast disk from a reputable source) to replace it. External TB disks are still overpriced, let alone TB3. I honestly don’t know why that is - I suspect it’s something to do with the main market being Apple users with deep pockets and limited knowledge.

Not a Mac user, so I have a little anecdotal evidence here, but with all the buzz about Catalina being broken, has this been a problem in earlier versions?Just last night I spent all day trying to do some work on a friend's 2011 or 2012 MBP (16 GBs RAM, i7, should be fully capable). They needed Windows 10 for some special software, and wanted some help cleaning the hard drive to make room for the partition. I have been using Macs to manage my digital life (personal photos, files, videos, music, notes, documents etc) since Tiger/Leopard days and have been mostly happy with the experience. But I feel now more than ever before that my decade and half old collection is on shaky ground and at risk of being lost with any given OS upgrade. Lost because of file system or crypto or some such software deprecation/compatibility bug or because of the software apps may become unusable. (Btw iOS 13 upgrade did cause me data loss on my phone – it wouldn't unlock after upgrade because my passcode had a special character that it would no longer accept as input, post upgrade. I had to wipe reset the phone and lost data that hadn't synced yet.)Standards based software engineering seems to be all but dead in consumer apps (it never existed?).

Clearly, there is no explicit guarantee of longevity to your data and the metadata (edits, collections, albums, tags, comments) you create upon your own data.This is a really poor way to live one's digital life.Do you think about longevity of your data+metadata? What's your setup deal with this?

I think it's about diversifying. The general rule is 3 copies of your data in different places - for me personally, I keep important data in an external drive at home, another in an external drive at my parent's house (updated less frequently for obvious reasons) and an account in the cloud with a third one.Funnily enough, the cloud account is the one that worries me the most. The data I want to keep includes some indie movies and music that I fear might disappear from the internet (like mixtapes from very indie local groups I listened as a teenager that nobody cares about) and I fear the whole account might be suspended if at some point they set up a copyright filter or something. I was really shocked when I tried to upgrade from High Sierra to Mojave about a month ago and found that my work directory was completely gone. It turned out that I rigged the work directory to Dropbox via a hard link, which is emulated in HFS+ as a shadow directory plus a placeholder, and the conversion to APFS broke this emulation. Fortunately for me I had a shortcut to that shadow directory in the Finder and was able to recover it, this time using a plain symlink (less than ideal, sigh), but I now have a big question about Apple concerning about existing users. At least I trust Dropbox more than Apple though.

I worked at Apple during the 64 bit transition. The answer is that 32 bit was quite painful to maintain.The 64 bit transition was a compatibility break that enabled shedding technical debt, like NeXT-isms that no longer applied. In particular it added the ObjC 2 runtime, which allowed features like adding a variable to a class without needing to recompile subclasses.So long as 32 bit is supported, it is difficult for Apple to use these features internally.

If you add a variable to a class you break the 32 bit system. If you add a variable conditionally under an #ifdef then it is annoying to manage the separate build configurations, or disparate 32bit/64bit behaviors.This only applies to the Mac; iOS always had the modern runtime. But macOS engineers are very very happy to see 32 bit go because it was painful to support. Windows 64bit mostly uses 32bit shims which call the 'real' 64bit API.

This means that 32bit support is almost no-cost to maintain - I am certain MS will support 32bit for the next decade at the very least - but at the cost of having the 64bit API itself slightly less breaking compatibility so shims are easier to make (e.g. 'long' is still 32bit). Arguably MS would have made the same API compromises anyway just to make porting easier.Linux has some 32bit shims in the kernel and a few separate syscalls, but userland does the separate libraries approach where all 32bit libs are separate than 64bit libraries. So the kernel pays a small cost, while userland needs to maintain separate versions of the libraries - which often costs very little (many can simply be recompiled, this is open source after all), but can bite the maintainer sometimes.MacOS uses the fat binaries approach, where every binary carries all the arch versions.

I don't think the system supports a different method - so Mac pays a bigger cost than Windows or Linux in order to maintain 32 bit. Also Mac kernel API is unstable by design, and I guess Apple would like to drop some older stuff. For better or worse that's the Apple Way - they don't maintain anywhere as much backward compat as other platforms. Operating systems increasingly seem to be expecting an SSD.

Windows is unreasonably slower on an HDD, extremely frustrating to use at all. IIRC that started with Win8, but might've been 10. Linux DEs, heading the same way. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that MacOS is like that these days, too.That does mean OS/DE devs are hitting disk way the hell too often and just hoping modern disk speed makes it harder to notice, but there's no way that's not adding up to some real (but less crippling) latency even on SSD-equipped systems.

I got hit with the 'not enough space' endless reboot loop during installation. Booting into Recovery Mode and reverting to a previous local Time Machine backup fixed everything in about 5 minutes. However, discovering that 5 minute fix took about 24 hours hours of frustration and command line experimentation. I didn't even know Mojave created local snapshots.Then I hit the 'configuring macOS' forever bug after the second install attempt (just force reboot).I think both of these installer bugs have been addressed in the recent supplemental update to 10.15.0 for any downloads going forward. Despite all these issues, things have been fine actually running Catalina, but I'd wait a few point releases if I did it again. The whole thing 'feels' very fragile, for lack of a better word — mostly due to the online conversation about it.I'm definitely leaving my home theater Mac Mini on 10.14 for the foreseeable future after reading about the HDMI issues.

Unfortunately Apple has lousy backward compatibility, particularly for games. Dropping 32-bit is going to kill a bunch of games.On iOS it seeem even worse, with yearly releases breaking many apps; Apple's aggressive ABI changes offload a large maintenance burden onto app developers, who have to keep updating their apps every year just to keep them working the same way.Windows seems to do a lot better, and game consoles do even better: with the exception of multiplayer games whose servers get shut down after a year or two, most games keep working indefinitely across firmware revisions. FWIW I installed Catalina from the first beta and it's worked flawlessly for me. Maybe because I'm on a newish Macbook Pro and I don't use shitty Adobe software, produce music on this machine, or have a complex testing setups with purposefully old stuff.If you mostly use a browser/terminal for everything its nothing to worry about.I will say that Podcasts app kinda sucks, just like the iPhone one it's needlessly confusing when trying to open the show's page with the episode list, instead of just 'recently played' or w/e you've downloaded. It tries too hard to be clever, while abandoning simple descended by when the show was added. Idk why they can't do both.

I didn't have any issues with my personal laptop (2013 MBP) (which is superior, by far, in almost every way, to my work laptop, a 2019 MBP).The only difference I noticed (and I don't really have time to obsess over little details) - was that WINE was broken.As far as my work-laptop goes, I'm just going to hold off. I don't really need any of the new features; and I don't rely on WINE for anything I do for work. I just don't have any strong feelings for a major OS X update right now.I think the last time I even used Safari was about 5 years ago for testing a website I was developing. This also raises the question: not only is it suspected that an email application is being monitored for engagement metrics, but is it also the case that growth-enhancing UI features are being a/b tested on us as well?Well that is of course all silly conjecture and I doubt its anything more than a bug, but if it were true then that’s some real Silicon Valley stuff right there.Maybe Apple own stock in whichever paper manufacturer is post commonly used for printing emails from meemaw. More emails really pushes the needle on those paper sales! Q4 performance summary cycle bonuses all round!

That reads less like a reasonable, well-thought breakdown and more like a whiny diatribe coming from an entitled teenager. If the entire argument boils down to 'I don't wanna!' , then what's the point? Don't upgrade. Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade at all. If you need to run all your old software, don't upgrade. That's not a fault of the new OS.

Technology changes. That's a fact of life. Even the example of Aperture is a little far-fetched. It's literally been years since Aperture was discontinued and taken off the shelves.I dunno. To me it sounds like someone complaining that their new computer can't run DooM anymore because it didn't come with a 3.5' floppy drive. Yes, you can run DooM still but not in the very specific, needlessly encumbered method you want to run it in. Times change, technology changes, and it's just not productive to lock yourself in to something and then complain when what you've locked yourself into doesn't work out the way you predicted.

Keep using the old OS. Just don't act surprised and attacked when it doesn't work anymore years from now. That reads less like a reasonable, well-thought breakdown and more like a whiny diatribe coming from an entitled teenager.A customer is legitimately entitled to upgrades that aren't actually downgrades.

Apple isn't forcing anyone to upgrade at all. Just don't act surprised and attacked when it doesn't work anymore years from now.Well.

If Apple isn't forcing people to upgrade now, but will later, then there's still grounds for complaint.An unhappy customer always has the right, nay, duty, to publicly complain until the business changes its behavior. legitimately entitledNo, they are not. This isn't an upgrade to their existing OS like a patch release.

This is a new OS completely and developers were all warned years in advance that Catalina would drop 32-bit support. This is not a downgrade in the slightest.but will laterI have a Mac Mini from 2005 that still runs MacOS Leopard just as well as the day I bought it.

I can't install all the latest, greatest software on it and I can't even access every website anymore (TLS updates and all that) but it still functions as good, if not better, than it did when I first bought it and runs all the software that's still installed on it.No MacOS update has ever been forced or mandatory. Ever.The customer is not always right but I'm pretty sure offering an OS upgrade is doing right by the customer considering it doesn't cost anything and, for most people, adds far more than it takes away and is, again, optional. It is a problem for them, and they express it. What do you think is wrong with that?

Not being able to run 32-bit applications is a deal-breaker for many people. The update is a failure for them for this or many other reasons. It might not affect you, and that is fine, but it does affect other people and it is a perfectly valid concern that they could voice.

Why are you so against them voicing their problems with the update? Who are you to be the judge of what warrants and does not warrant any articles? Ultimately your opinion on whether it warrants an article or a comment does not matter, thank goodness.

What if I told you that you being fine with the update does not warrant a comment? Whatever your answer is, please repeat the same thing to yourself because it seems like you have a strong dislike towards the act of voicing valid issues with the update. I would dare to say it reeks of fan personism. it does affect other people and it is a perfectly valid concernIt most certainly does not affect them if they don't choose to update.

That's exactly my issue with this whole thread. You're all straw-manning my response as if my complaint is with the person's desire to write an article about their opinion. That's not my issue. My issue is with the fact that their complaint doesn't line up with the statements they've made in the article and the fact that they're treating an optional update as some kind of requirement that points to a fault in the OS.And, frankly, I think your statement about reeking of 'fanpersonism' is unfair considering that the only time the site in question has ever posted to HN is to complain about Apple and/or their products. That, to me, is fanpersonism.

Technology changes. That's a fact of life.Is it? It's not really clear to me there's any sort of hard technical limit that requires operating systems to abandon components that support older software.There may be an economic argument that every team has a limited amount of attention and resources, and older libraries/apis/layers may compete with newer ones, and that argument may even have some merit if the newer stuff is categorically better.But, OTOH, there's MS's backward's compatibility, so it's clear that some platform owners can bear the cost just fine. Too bad Apple just doesn't make enough money for that, I suppose.:/Perhaps they could think differently and charge users who want to stay on older versions of macOS for the updates.

That'd provide a signal of how valuable it actually is and perhaps even a supporting revenue stream.Unless resources aren't actually the issue. What was wrong with being able to run both old and new software?There's wasn't much wrong with being able to run it but there's a hell of a lot of technical debt that comes with being able to support and maintain it. Every binary that needed to run on 32 and 64 bit OSs had double the code in it, double the dependencies, and literally double of everything.

Developers were all notified about the change more than 3 years ago and 2 OS versions ago. Sims 4 kylo ren. This was not a surprise.I would pick Linux instead.And you have that option.