Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 4)

I am the first to wonder whether it makes sense to write yet another part of this little saga, when Catalina is basically entering its last two months of active duty. But Catalina remains, I think, one of the most (if not the most) controversial Mac OS X releases, and now that I have finally had direct experience with it on a new machine I’m using just for testing, I can confirm. But first things first.

Feedback update

When I wrote Part 3 back in February, the feedback amounted to 107 emails. Of those, 96 were negative, 7 neutral, and only 4 positive. As a reminder, by ‘neutral’ I mean emails from people who wrote to tell me that they updated to Catalina and things kept going on in a business-as-usual fashion. ‘Positive’ feedback means emails from people explicitly telling me their experience since updating was better than before, for a reason or another (performance; a new feature of Catalina they found especially useful; etc.).

As of this morning, the email count is at 370. The negative-neutral-positive ratio has essentially remained the same, with 309 negative-feedback emails, 29 neutral, and 32 positive. And once again let me stress the fact that I’m not trying to use this data to prove anything — it’s all very anecdotal.

At the same time, I can’t but remark that it’s all very suggestive, too. Back in October 2019, when I wrote Part 1 of this accidental series of posts, I never expressly solicited readers to send me emails and tell me their tales, whether of woe or joy. And yet, I’ve never received such amount of feedback about any other Mac OS X release, or any other topic I’ve ever written about in the 15 years I’ve kept a tech blog. And while there is the occasional terse email, and the occasional message that goes off-topic and simply criticises my articles (I’ve left these emails outside the Catalina-feedback pile, of course), most emails are detailed accounts of what went wrong since updating to Catalina — or what Catalina does right in the case of positive feedback messages.

When a couple of articles from this series on Catalina reached Hacker News in the past months, a lot of quips I got as response were from people who dismissed the problem altogether with remarks along the lines of These nerds must always find something to complain/whine about. There’s nothing wrong with Catalina. Well, that’s simply not the impression I’ve had and continue to have. And not because I have 309 emails of negative feedback and horror stories to prove it, but because this volume of feedback itself is an indicator, in my private sphere, of a larger discussion that has been going on publicly (in online forums and specialised mailing lists) since Catalina was released last autumn.

Finally updating to Catalina: my first impressions

I closed Part 1 by writing:

So, to conclude, do I plan to stay on High Sierra or Mojave indefinitely? It’s hard to say and too soon to tell. 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. The cost for me would be higher than getting a second-hand Mac mini.

Recently, a very kind soul from the UK gave me the opportunity to acquire such a test machine, but it ended up being a far better deal than a 2014 Mac mini. For a really low price given its specs, I was sent an Early 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of flash storage. The Mac is in overall very good condition, save for a blemish on the display (which can be ignored in normal use, fortunately), and a well-used battery with more than 1,250 cycles (but still working well and giving me plenty of hours of use).

The machine arrived completely wiped and reset, with a clean install of OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan. My plan was to perform a clean install of Catalina, take a look at it for a while, then move on to the Big Sur betas.

What I was eager to test was something I’d been thinking about while reading all the feedback emails on Catalina. My simple hypothesis was that clean installs of Catalina tended to be less problematic than mere updates from High Sierra or Mojave. I know, nothing particularly original or astute. But even in my limited sample I could see a pattern forming:

Many negative emails were from people who were attempting to upgrade, and Catalina gave them trouble both during the update process and afterwards;

Very few negative emails complained about having issues with Catalina after a clean install (currently only 8 emails out of 309);

About half of the positive emails were from people who, after I enquired, told me they had performed a clean install of Catalina.

These points strongly suggested that the less the system was cluttered with preexistent crap, the better Catalina would behave.

And so, after a few days spent on El Capitan to see if everything was working fine on this ‘new’ MacBook Pro — and it was — I downloaded and installed Catalina. Unfortunately, as I wrote on Twitter, I haven’t had much time to tinker with it or to inspect it more closely due to a very high workload I was subjected to for the past three weeks. The only things I’ve noticed so far are these:

After installation, there were a few constantly-running processes that kept the CPU busy all the time. This seriously impacted the MacBook Pro’s battery life, and its general performance. I found a solution to the problem by searching online, and it probably wasn’t something a regular user would know how to apply.

After installation, and recalling other people’s accounts, I expected a barrage of security and permission-related dialog boxes. I haven’t really seen one so far. Probably because it was a fresh install and not an update?

I can’t say anything about data loss because it’s a fresh install on a new machine for me, so I had no data to lose in the first place. But there were things that didn’t download/update after installation (Dictionary app without dictionaries, App Store app without updates, etc.)

Just out of curiosity, I installed the Steam client and took a look at my games’ library. Less than one third of them are Catalina-ready. I know games aren’t critical apps, but I would have been really bummed to discover this if I had rushed to update my main Macs. I’ve been told that, a lot of times, despite the warning that a certain game is not compatible with Catalina, it turns out that it’s not the case, and the game runs fine. But in my case I have verified that most of the games in my library really won’t run in Catalina.

On a slightly less serious note, by installing Catalina on this MacBook Pro, I finally had the opportunity to try Dark Mode for the UI (remember, my main Macs are still on High Sierra, so I hadn’t experienced it yet), and I immediately reverted to Light Mode. Dark Mode feels like possibly the most overhyped feature in the history of Mac OS X. I think the traditional light UI with Night Shift or f.lux is much easier on the eyes when working at night.

Another issue that seems to plague this MacBook Pro since installing Catalina is related to sleep. In a nutshell, sleep has become unreliable. I put the MacBook to sleep either by selecting Apple menu → Sleep, or by just closing the lid, and sometimes the Mac goes to sleep correctly and stays hibernated, but sometimes it does not. You get the bitter surprise the day after you fully charged the MacBook before putting it to sleep, when you wake it up and discover the battery charge has fallen to 65–70%. I have tried several solutions and workarounds but nothing definitive so far. I’ll have to thoroughly check the sleep/wake logs to find which process(es) interfere with the MacBook’s sleep[1].

Finally, Time Machine backups keep failing. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

After these preliminary findings, I can say that even with the cleanest of installs Mac OS Catalina can be problematic. This is disappointing, but a part of me is somewhat not surprised.

All in all, I’m glad I have this new MacBook Pro to use as guinea pig, because I still don’t feel comfortable updating my production Macs. I haven’t even logged into iCloud in this Catalina installation, for fear it might mess things up. But again, as I said, I haven’t had the time to explore Catalina properly yet, and at this point I don’t even know if I will, because as soon as I’ve dealt with this demanding workload, I will install the Big Sur betas.

Previously:

Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth — Part 1

Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth — Part 2

Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth — Part 3

1. The pulsating sleep light was such a nifty visual clue that your Mac was effectively sleeping when you told it to. Now it’s a guessing game. ↩︎