macOS Catalina 10.15.5

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210642#macos10155

by simjue • 6 years ago

228 376 6 years ago

support.apple.com

sccxy• 6 years ago

Thanks, but I'll wait for some months before update.

diimdeep• 6 years ago

The battery health management feature in macOS 10.15.5 is designed to improve your battery's lifespan by reducing the rate at which it chemically ages. The feature does this by monitoring your battery's temperature history and its charging patterns.
Based on the measurements that it collects, battery health management may reduce your battery's maximum charge when in this mode. This happens as needed to ensure that your battery charges to a level that's optimized for your usage—reducing wear on the battery, and slowing its chemical aging.

Sound great. I hope this means no more swollen batteries. https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/What_to_do_with_a_swollen_batter... https://lepageblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/how-to-fix-a-swo...

irjustin• 6 years ago

Deep discharge & Heat are common accelerators of swelling. Avoiding going to <10% battery and running aggressive heat dissipation will always help prolong the life.

My favorite is Macs Fan Control[0] for removing heat. 40' the fan is spinning mid range speed and by 50' it's full 6500 rpm.

It's the least I can do =/

[0]https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control

dividedbyzero• 6 years ago

I think I'll rather take the battery performance hit than bear with (near-?)constant fan noise.

trevyn• 6 years ago

FWIW, iStat Menus also does fan control quite well, and the paid version is cheaper. (And it does a lot of non-fan-related things quite well, too.)

Reason0774• 6 years ago

Swollen batteries were a result of design/manufacturing defects. It was certainly a common issue 5-10 years ago but should hopefully be a thing of the past by now.

Modern batteries should never swell, but will still wear out over time. Smarter battery management should be able to extend their lifespan.

barkingcat2• 6 years ago

I don't think you can conclusively say "Modern batteries should never swell" since there's always the possibility of manufacturing and design defects in new batteries too.

It's the battery equivalent of the halting problem in software.

No manufacturing and design process is perfect, there will always be errors. If you do find a perfect design and manufacturing process, I think you wouldn't be posting here on hackers news but would be drinking champaign with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

thewebcount• 6 years ago

In some cases (like the AppleWatch), a swollen battery upon failure is an intentional design choice, apparently. At least that's what they told me when my Series 0 battery swelled up and caused the face of the watch to pop off. They claimed they do it intentionally so you know it has to be serviced and can't be used anymore. Probably different for laptops, though.

k3liutZu2• 6 years ago

Modern batteries should never swell, but will still wear out over time.

Unfortunately they still do.

Saw at least 2 Dell's and 2 macbook pro's with swollen batteries in the last 1-2 years, and this just in the colleagues in my immediate vicinity.

It's pretty scary when the touchpad starts to misbehave and you realize the whole macbook starts to bulge.

chooseaname• 6 years ago

Why does everything have to be automated? Why can't I just specify manually that it should not exceed, say, 80%? This is just another process running and ... using battery.

vhbit• 6 years ago

after update status of the battery switched from normal to "service required"

sixothree2• 6 years ago

Considering you can't change the battery (easily) they better offer a solution for maintaining its life.

sroussey• 6 years ago

I just had a MBP fixed (it was quick!) due to it swollen up one day. It would not lie down flat on a table and the trackpad was useless. Obviously could not close the screen either. How common is this?

asdff5• 6 years ago

My old mbp swelled up enough to shatter the trackpad glass. During zoom calls it would overheat and swell and disable keyboard and trackpad function until it cooled off.

somehnguy• 6 years ago

I'm on my second swollen battery in my 2015 15" MBP.

Java dev though so my computer is always near the temperature of the sun's surface which I think has something to do with it. We purchased 5 of these MBPs on the same date and the other Java devs machine is swollen while the testers machines are still fine.

grishka• 6 years ago

I've had this exact thing happen with my 2012 15" retina. Won't lay down flat and clicking the trackpad required pressing really hard. Had the battery replaced, works like new now — on Mojave, I'm not updating to the dumpster fire that is Catalina.

allenbrunson• 6 years ago

pretty common occurrence, in my experience. if you own a macbook, it is just a matter of time until the battery swells up and needs to be replaced. usual first symptoms are that the trackpad can't be clicked anymore.

lisper2• 6 years ago

Very. It has happened to me so many times that now whenever I travel I always take a set of pentalobe screwdrivers with me so I can remove the back plate of my MBP when (not if) this happens to avoid structural damage.

m3nu• 6 years ago

Third battery in my Macbook Pro in 3 years. Very excited about this feature.

randyrand2• 6 years ago

Do you leave your macbook pro plugged in all the time?

irrational• 6 years ago

I do. I rarely need to take it anywhere.

vSanjo• 6 years ago

Has that been proven to be detrimental to the battery? I don't really follow that tech-side, so it would be good to know -how- detrimental it is.

darkteflon2• 6 years ago

Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag. This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003.

As a Mojave user, not happy about this.

hrak• 6 years ago

They did this just to annoy the scores of people who refuse to upgrade to Catalina.

sheinsheish2• 6 years ago

Meaning? Can you elaborate a bit? I’ve just downgraded to Mojave on an iMac (fusion drive) primarily used for Logic Pro. Do you think Mojave is not getting updates anymore ?

frankjr2• 6 years ago

The "ignored" flag caused macOS to NOT offer the update to the new major version every once in a while (a little popup in the top right corner). It also made the Software Update app report that there are no updates available.

After installing this update, the Update app reports the update to Catalina even though I have ignored the update previously on this machine. This does not mean that Mojave is not getting any more updates, it's just that macOS will nag you to update (but you will still be able to dismiss it manually) without the option to tell it to stop.

simonklitj2• 6 years ago

I do not understand why they did this, and I say that as a Catalina user. Jeff Johnson seems to have some thoughts (and a sort-of solution) on it, though: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/software-update.html

throwlaplace• 6 years ago

that solution didn't work for me but this one did

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/system-preferences-soft...

toyg• 6 years ago

This is an admission that their upgrade rates for Catalina are bad. Between the now-customary list of new bugs and the 32bit massacre, the Vista comparison clearly struck a chord.

It would have been so much easier to just keep shipping the 32bit compat layer.

qppo2• 6 years ago

If MS wanted to kick Apple in the shins they should get the Github Actions runner to support Mojave (right now it only supports Catalina). Would help me stave off upgrading myself and users for a few more months.

tempodox3• 6 years ago

I was just about to let the 2020-003 Security Update run on Mojave, but after this warning I will leave that well alone.

Apple had a great OS once, but now they are losing me more with each update. Can't buy new Mac HW either any more, since it will be systematically unable to run the 32-bit SW I need. Apple forcing decades-long users off their platform to Windoze and Linux is just bizarre.

darkteflon2• 6 years ago

When Catalina dropped, it became obvious that while Apple computers and I have had a good run, we’re now going in different directions. I started migrating to Linux late last year.

If your workflow is amenable to it, and you can stay productive during the (inevitably drawn-out) transition, I highly recommend you consider taking the plunge.

orf3• 6 years ago

Not installing security updates with large numbers of pretty critical fixes[1] doesn't sound too smart to me.

1. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170

jneplokh• 6 years ago

Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing

Any info on which specific Mac models this applies to?

dijit• 6 years ago

Probably Skylake and up. As Skylake has very competent h265/HEVC decoding.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

The group FaceTime UI is very strange, why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it? I know it's like this in iOS, but I'm not sure what group video looks like in macOS (though it sounds like it's the same based on the update text here).

It's weird because the easier thing also seems like the obvious thing, and it's clearly better.

szhu• 6 years ago

I typically use video chat apps like Facebook, Google Meet, and Zoom. I think the grid is efficient from a space perspective -- there's less wasted space -- but the grid looks very corporate and boring.

I think there's also a practical advantage of placing tiles haphazardly: it might help spatial memory. It's a lot harder to focus on or find a particular rectangle in a sea of rectangles than it is to follow a shape than looks a little different from the rest. However, I have never used FaceTime group calling (because I don't have most of my friends' phone numbers), so I don't whether this is effective in practice.

Bellyache5• 6 years ago

FWIW, I don't believe FaceTime requires others' phone numbers. I think it can be a phone number or any email address tied to their Apple ID, similar to iMessage.

gonehome3• 6 years ago

I don't buy this - this feels like rationalizing a bad design decision after the fact.

It seems like bad design to waste space on a small screen because it looks 'boring'.

reaperducer3• 6 years ago

why have several overlapping boxes rather than just dividing the screen equally and using all of it

It's good for smaller screens. I was on a Zoom video conference last week, and all I could think about was how so many people who weren't allowed to/going to speak were taking up valuable screen real estate.

psychometry• 6 years ago

There's a setting to toggle gallery view...

gonehome3• 6 years ago

At least when it's a four people conversation this doesn't really ring true.

Then I see three boxes of the other people that are smaller than they would otherwise be if evenly divided. Most of the screen is black empty space.

Minimally I'd prefer a gallery view of all speakers option and it's probably the better option up to at least 6 people.

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

Security content: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211170

72deluxe10• 6 years ago

Thanks, that's quite a lot of fixes.

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

I should note that this list isn't unusually long for a point release.

i2shar• 6 years ago

It's crazy that even dot releases are a full 3.6G download

ajconway• 6 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the amount you download when updating from a previous version is significantly less than a full installer image.

lostmsu• 6 years ago

Still far from Microsoft Visual Studio update, which renamed VSO into Azure DevOps, and required 1.2GB download basically just for that.

TheChaplain• 6 years ago

Binary patching hasn't been a thing for years unfortunately.

Even bigger wreck on consoles these days, where an update can be 50+ gigabytes...

Hamuko2• 6 years ago

Where are you getting 50+ GB console updates?

hawski• 6 years ago

If they would only use something like rsync or ostree at the least. But if the biggest files are archives it would require recompression. If it's more like an uncompressed tar archive then it should be easier, but still it would require either a clever algorithm or the format support by the algorithm.

tomxor2• 6 years ago

Binary patching hasn't been a thing for years unfortunately.

True, and it's fair to say binary diffs aren't worth the complexities they introduce anymore, yet the concept of only pulling updates for individual packages has been a thing for over two decades in the *nix world. It seems like a poor choice for Apple to not bother making updates more discerning while also removing binary diffs... certainly a shitty move for anyone without a 99th percentile internet connection - then again everyone outside of that group probably can't afford Apple products anyway.

For some perspective: 3.6 GiB is significantly larger than the downloads required to install my entire OS from scratch, and 36 times larger than my average weekly run of apt.

From my now outdated experience on Mac OS i'm aware they do divide things into installer packages with some kind of receipt for version info that software update probably probes. So I guess it must be that these packages are not very granular.

ascagnel_• 6 years ago

Xbox 360 patches were handled differently -- only the game binary would be included in the initial patch; any content updates were released as free DLC add-on packs (or, if a game was releasing new paid DLC, they'd require a new add-on pack that included some subset of the new content for free).

PS4 updates are notably bad, since they do a full copy & write (vs write-in-place) on patches. It's good if there's an issue on updating, since you can delete the partially-updated copy and start over, but bad because it requires more than 2x the disk space for the patch.

tibbydudeza3• 6 years ago

Chrome uses binary patching mechanism rather reliably for millions of users.

ttfkam6• 6 years ago

Yes it has, just not for Apple. Chrome/Chromium do Courgette (binary diff) updates to great effect. Those 8GB Xcode minor release monsters could definitely use some binary diff love.

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/softwar...

de_watcher• 6 years ago

Oh boy, you're spoiled by Linux.

MaysonL• 6 years ago

2.98 for me…

frankjr2• 6 years ago

I "asked HN" about this recently but unfortunately it has not received much attention. Maybe now there are people around who know what exactly happens during an update?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688198

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

Not an expert in how the update process works, but the update certainly contains all the changed files, of which there is usually a lot. (I would think this is every project that has had a source code change internally…) There are number of shared- and kext-cache related things that also run afterwards.

tannhaeuser2• 6 years ago

Btw does anyone know how to test-install a newer OS other than with Mac OS' upgrade option burning through 6gb+ downloads supposedly also replacing the OS rather than installing it onto an external disk? I've got an unused old mini that's still on the OS it came with - way out of date. I even went to an Apple dealer to get Mojave onto an SSD drive last year, only to find out that the mini needs a firmware update for APFS that only comes with Mojave/Catalina, but I can't find a download option for only the firmware update so that I could boot from an external AFPS disk.

snazz3• 6 years ago

Can you not just back up the current SSD and repeatedly OTA it to the last supported version? That would be my solution.

caribousoup4• 6 years ago

Right... the earlier point releases were 100-500 MB.

Full history of OS X update sizes: https://robservatory.com/a-full-history-of-macos-os-x-releas...

It seemed to start getting out of hand around Yosemite 2014.

Wowfunhappy9• 6 years ago

Yosemite is where OS X started getting out of hand in general, though it took a while for the papercuts to add up.

dochtman• 6 years ago

Software Update isn't showing me 10.15.5 yet. Others?

On my 2019 16" I've definitely noticed that Zoom calls slow stuff down by a lot. Would be great if that gets fixed here.

rado2• 6 years ago

Press ⌘+R in System Preferences – Software Update (really)

caribousoup4• 6 years ago

Wow, I never realized this.

Make sure the Search field isn't focused, it is by default on launch.

72deluxe10• 6 years ago

Why would a single application's behaviour get "fixed" by an OS update?? Isn't the issue with Zoom?

Have you looked in Activity Monitor or Instruments to see what Zoom is doing to see why the machine gets sluggish?

sibartlett• 6 years ago

Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing

dirtylowprofile2• 6 years ago

Just updated my 2012 MBP. So far still alive.

TMWNN2• 6 years ago

Same, except on Mojave. Keeping fingers crossed that 10.16 will continue supporting 2012.

dirtylowprofile2• 6 years ago

Why are you still on Mojave? If I may ask

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

My daily driver is a maxed-out (for its time) 2012 MBP15r, and I've been on High Sierra for a long time. I like the keyboard, there are maybe 5 dead pixels, and it's fast enough for my purposes. It's newrly always plugged in so the mediocre battery life hasn't been a problem. A new contract gig is about to commence, and I'll be using their hardware. It's strange to be feeling apprehension about degraded DX on a brand new dev machine vs my 8 year old warhorse.

Reason0774• 6 years ago

”Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen”

I’m still on Mojave 10.14.6 and this hits me from time to time, maybe once a month or so. Very annoying bug. Great if they have finally fixed it!

ttfkam6• 6 years ago

But if you update, you'll get nagware on upgrading to Catalina. Damned if you do...

rado2• 6 years ago

Where is the Safari 13.1.1 changelog? Thanks.

css• 6 years ago

As far as I can tell, this is all they publish: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211177

isaikumar• 6 years ago

Did anyone face any issues installing the update? I have been lucky till now as I have never faced issue while updating. But then I read news reports that say people faced issues and macbooks were bricked while updating. So I thought from now on I would wait few days before I update.

m1h4• 6 years ago

Still having a (at least one of the multiple different) kernel panic during sleep:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0xffffff801e29169c): Sleep transition timed out after 180 seconds while calling power state change callbacks. Suspected bundle: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily. Thread 0x2754.

Ever since moving to a brand new 16" MBP there isn't a day that passes wihout me being welcomed by the crash report dialog…

robin_reala• 6 years ago

I had one of those for the first time last night (new Macbook Air) on 10.15.4. Shame that you’re seeing it in 10.15.5 too…

simonklitj2• 6 years ago

Read a user somewhere reporting that leaving his iPhone plugged into his Mac caused this problem to occur almost daily. After charging it with a wall charger, and not having it plugged in, the problem went away. After resetting PRAM and SMC too. Hope the issue gets resolved for you someday!

kjakm2• 6 years ago

Glad to hear I'm not the only one. I've started getting these in the last week. It coincided with a screen replacement but sounds like that might be a coincidence based on your report.

paultopia• 6 years ago

Oh damnit, damnit. I've been having those on 10.15.4 too, was really hoping they'd fixed it on this one. It's really profoundly upsetting to spend $3,500 on a brand new computer by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry and still have daily damn kernel panics.

jfkebwjsbx• 6 years ago

by the most reliable major manufacturer in the industry

You might want to revisit that.

If you are looking for reliability, ThinkPads are way better.

deergomoo• 6 years ago

I managed to eliminate (or at least majorly reduce) kernel panics by disabling Power Nap. I've since re-enabled it to see if this is any more stable.

Kind of a joke really, this isn't a brand new model, nor is it using any cutting edge components. I thought we'd worked out sleep mode a long time ago.

tnorthcutt• 6 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. I get a kernel panic most every night while sleeping. I've just disabled Power Nap and will see if that improves things.

emrikol• 6 years ago

I have the same. Every day. I've done a lot of searching, and some people think that certain external monitors might be "the issue"--which I use. It didn't seem to be an issue before Catalina though.

Wintamute• 6 years ago

Hmm, same for me perhaps. New MBP 16 and Catalina connected to a external monitor via USB-C (a HP Z27 4K UHD).

If I leave it to sleep for a long duration, then it panics when waking from sleep and just black screens for a good few minutes, then turns on the fans full blast for like 2 seconds and reboots.

I've taken to just shutting down completely when finishing work and not letting sleep.

buu700• 6 years ago

Same here on a 2015 MBP, no external monitors. Constantly kernel panics during sleep, occasionally while I'm actively using it.

Meanwhile, my 2013 MBP running Mojave and connected to an external monitor and peripherals has been chugging along with no issues pretty much 24/7.

mthoms• 6 years ago

Anecdote in case it helps someone: My problems went away after switching from a USB-C/HDMI cable, to a USB-C/DisplayPort one.

dewey• 6 years ago

I also had this a lot on a brand new Mac Mini + clean install of Catalina. There's a long thread about the issue on MR:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-...

casperb• 6 years ago

Same here on a 4000 euro MBP 16”. I tried everything, but multiple times a day having kernel panics when starting up from sleep in clamshell mode.

clay10• 6 years ago

I've been getting these too. Extremely frustrating.

bnt• 6 years ago

Are you using an external TB3 dock? That's what's causing KPs for me. If the MBP goes to sleep, it goes into endless reboot cycles. Currently keeping it running 24/7.

misternugget• 6 years ago

FWIW I've ran into this too with a new 16" MBP and what largely fixed it for me (happened once in two weeks vs. every time the computer went to sleep) was to disable "Power Nap while plugged into a power adaptor" in the "Energy Saver" system preferences.

(I'm aware that this might not be applicable to your situation, since you might not even use a power adaptor when the crashes happen, just wanted to point this out in case it helps someone else)

flocial• 6 years ago

Anytime I have sleep-related kernel panic issues I delete the sleep image:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/326807/removing-th...

fastball• 6 years ago

For anyone else having this issue, the fix for most people seems to be disabling Power Nap[1], which is enabled by default when you're on AC power. Can confirm that this worked for me personally. Disappointed to see no mention of fixing this bug in these release notes, however.

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251274321?answerId=2526...

izacus• 6 years ago

Didn't work for me sadly - if I leave my MacBook docked it crashes every night even with PowerNap off :/

jevgeni• 6 years ago

Will this update unbrick my iMac that 10.15.1 bricked?

chris_wot2• 6 years ago

I am constantly gobsmacked by how slow point release upgrades are. On Ubuntu, it takes virtually no time and doesn’t interrupt my workflow.

LeSaucy• 6 years ago

There are plenty of disruptive ubuntu upgrade issues, for example for almost 5 years (through 12.04 to 16.04!) if you installed on LVM volumes your /boot partition never cleaned up old vmlinuz and initrd images, causing dpkg-reconfigure to fail, leaving dpkg completely broken.

Operating systems are hard.

chris_wot2• 6 years ago

Sure, that’s a hard failure, I was talking about the average speed to install an update.

albertzeyer• 6 years ago

I'm still on High Sierra... I wonder if there are really good reasons to upgrade to Mojave? (I only know about disadvantages about upgrading to Catalina.)

72deluxe10• 6 years ago

I'm on High Sierra on one Mac and Mojave on another.

Other than APFS, I cannot see any real differences in usability, other than opening quickview and then pressing shift and up to go to the previous file in a list (so you could look over many photographs and select them so as to choose which ones to delete) is now busted in Mojave and will only show the first file selected, making quickview now useless.

In High Sierra and prior (back to Snow Leopard at least?) this would work and show you the preview of the most recently highlighted item, so in a selection of 20 items, if you shift-up select item 21 you see 21. Now you only see item 1 all the time. It's a great annoyance.

So no I cannot think of a reason to upgrade.

Hates_• 6 years ago

I'm on HS too, but finding that occassionaly apps require 10.14+, which is making me consider upgrading.

infinityplus12• 6 years ago

The new built-in screenshot/recorder feature is nice in Mojave.

Wowfunhappy9• 6 years ago

I have found High Sierra to be subtly faster on older hardware, and subtly less crash-prone (although neither crash often). So I would suggest staying put absent a reason not too.

High Sierra was a very good release.

diebeforei4852• 6 years ago

Dark Mode :)

dthul2• 6 years ago

Since the last Catalina update (10.15.4) Firefox is almost unusable for me, whereas it was buttery smooth before. There are constant multi-second freezes and when I switch tabs I often see a gray loading screen before the content shows up a few seconds later. Never saw that happen before. Maybe it's just a coincidence and has nothing to do with the Catalina update, but I am interested whether other people experience the same.

72deluxe10• 6 years ago

Have you tried profiling it in Instruments to see what Firefox is doing?

asdff5• 6 years ago

I experience this in a lot of different apps on catalina. just a brief flash of something. Seems to have gone away in 10.15.5, but I've only had the update for an hour.

dthul2• 6 years ago

Follow up: The latest Firefox update seems to have solved the issue. So far.

asplake2• 6 years ago

Last time I tried, it was not at all well documented how to upgrade to Catalina when your iMac's boot drive is 1) an external SSD and 2) not (yet) formatted to APFS. Giving it another try now, but unless it suddenly got a whole lot easier I'll probably be passing again.

Have it on my 2016 and 2019 Airs though, no issues.

asplake2• 6 years ago

Passing once again...

stadeschuldt• 6 years ago

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

azangru• 6 years ago

Anyone using Node.js for work who has updated to Catalina here? How did it go? I heard there were problems with node-gyp, but didn't investigate further. Everything running smoothly now? Any gotchas?

nvahalik• 6 years ago

I helped a junior dev get set up with this a couple of weeks ago. The docs on GitHub worked just fine.

Sayrus• 6 years ago

I had to reinstall xcode cli tools as node-gyp couldn't compile anything after the update. However, this is pretty straightforward and there wasn't any gotchas.

I did not investigate the root cause so reinstalling XCode might be a bit overkill.

holstvoogd2• 6 years ago

yeah, you have to run xcode-select --install after every update/install afaik

jorisw2• 6 years ago

I use Node.js all day, no change here after updating. I use n to manage Node.js versions.

egorfine• 6 years ago

No problem with node.js and native modules development whatsoever.

woutr_be• 6 years ago

I haven’t experienced any issues at both of my machines. I have a couple of different version through nvm, all running smooth from the start.

MperorM2• 6 years ago

Since Catalina I have been getting daily freezes, where the entire operating system locks up. I can still move the cursor around and audio keeps playing as well, but everything else is completely frozen.

Once in a while the freeze lasts so long the computer crashes resulting in a crash report:

Termination Reason: WATCHDOG, [0x1] monitoring timed out for service

Termination Details: WATCHDOG, checkin with service: WindowServer returned not alive with context:

unresponsive work processor(s): WindowServer main thread

I am at my wits end to what can be causing this. Is anyone else experiencing similar freezes?

zerkten• 6 years ago

Sounds like what they were talking about on the atp.fm podcast recently.

logical_proof• 6 years ago

I am! It only happens when I am on multiple monitors (clamshell opened or closed) and usually when I am in a video conference (zoom, hangouts, and G2meeting). Thought it was overheating.

brmcd• 6 years ago

Im seeming to have the same issue. 2019 MBP connecting through USB-C. However, I find the issue is less frequent (to non existent) after I switched to a USB-C to HDMI adapter.

gtCameron• 6 years ago

I had that same issue with multiple monitors a year or two ago. Tried everything, reformatting, different OS versions, etc.

Turns out it was one of my mini displayport -> hdmi adapters, replaced that and everything was fine.

ryanianian• 6 years ago

I had this happening for a while, and I tracked it down to time-machine backups starting. Every hour the backupd cronjob would trigger and I'd get a minute or so of beachball. Similar WATCHDOG termination message. It crashed a couple times and corrupted the backup database. I disabled time-machine and haven't had any freezes since.

derefr4• 6 years ago

Is it a remote time-machine backup, i.e. to a Time Capsule (or a NAS pretending to be one)? Time Machine used to use AFP, but since AFP was deprecated, it now exclusively uses SMB for remote backups. (Specifically, it creates a sparsebundle image on the SMB share, and then locally mounts it.)

Now, Apple has their own implementation of SMB; and it seems to have been seeing frequent updates in Catalina (see https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210803).

Since the Apple SMB stack has some decent amount of kernel integration—and Time Machine doesn’t really have any—I’d guess that recent changes to Apple SMB are also the culprit for any freezes where it’s in the critical path.

And Apple SMB seems likely to blame, because there are already other well-known regressions from the recent changes to Apple SMB. Seemingly, there’s a lot of cowboy coding going on in this part of the system right now. For example, macOS can no longer connect to SMB shares via their mDNS names (e.g. smb://example.local). This means that any SMB server that shows up in the Finder sidebar (through an mDNS announcement configured to achieve AFP or Time Machine serving) now just chokes and kills the Finder process when you try to connect to one of its exposed SMB shares through that sidebar connection (see e.g. https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/3/post/129160). You now have to explicitly connect to the share using its IP (e.g. smb://10.0.0.1) from the Finder ⌘K modal.

Weirdly enough, Time Machine itself isn’t broken for the SMB shares it auto-discovers through its configuration modal, so presumably they realized their error in that specific case and made Time Machine pre-resolve the mDNS name in the smb:// URI to an IP address, before attempting the connection. But they forgot to add this same code to the Finder. :/

2OEH8eoCRo03• 6 years ago

Why do you guys put up with this? Do you like pain?

Edit: I'm not trying to troll, I genuinely want to know why people put up with this. I bounce between Linux and Windows and have no loyalty to either of them. I've settled on Windows with WSL2 on my desktop but I'm tempted again to install the new Fedora on my Thinkpad. Is it the lock in? With my hardware I can run anything I want except for macOS. Once you buy Apple hardware it seems incredibly difficult to go elsewhere.

SamuelAdams• 6 years ago

OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is no longer supported, unfortunately.

AlexandrB• 6 years ago

Personally I'm staying the hell away from Catalina, but it's not like Windows is the land of milk & honey. I've lost overnight testing data multiple times thanks to Windows' hostile "we're rebooting right now, whether you want to or not" upgrade strategy, and their mandatory telemetry bullshit is well-known at this point.

Basically: Catalina sucks, but there's nowhere to go that's unequivocally better.

ebg136• 6 years ago

Because the alternatives are also bad in a bunch of ways and people still prefer these problems to those problems. Let's not pretend like other hardware vendors and operating systems are magical fairy realms of candy and rainbows where nothing goes wrong, everything makes sense, and everyone is happy all the time.

rayiner6• 6 years ago

I've got a brand-new 2019 16" and am dealing with the widespread crashes on wake from sleep. Honestly, it's a harder decision to send it back than you might think, for several reasons:

1) The hardware quality of other OEMs is bad too. Lenovo has really gone downhill. I sold my maxed-out X1 Carbon 7th Gen, which in less than a year: a) came with an LTE card that never worked for more than an hour at a time; b) had the display bezel start peeling off (it's a sticker!); c) developed a bunch of dead pixels; d) started randomly locking up; e) had weird issues with power usage, where some service related to the touchpad would go crazy and start using all the CPU.

2) Other laptop makers make design choices and trade-offs that I find unacceptable. For me, the 16" MBP is the perfect balance of power, weight, and battery life. It compromises by using a 3K screen instead of a 4K screen, and gets 11+ hours of light usage. Alternatives like the XPS 15 or Lenovo X1 Extreme force you to choose between an FHD panel and good battery life, or a 4K panel and substantially shorter battery life. The Surface Laptop 15" uses a 15W ultra-mobile processor in a machine that runs $2,800 when configured with 32GB of RAM, and has a battery half the size of the one in the MBP 16". Many 15" laptop vendors include a numeric keypad, which is a deal-breaker for me because it forces you to type at an angle to keep your hands centered in front of you when in the home position.

3) Touchpad and high-DPI scaling.

matwood• 6 years ago

I haven't had any problems with Catalina. I'm sure other people do, but is the common experience mine or the people who complain?

js22• 6 years ago

I've been using Macintoshes since 1986. I've used Mac OS X since 10.1. I've used dozens of different models of Apple computer.

There was only a single combination of hardware/OS X release that I ever recall experiencing kernel panics often enough to bother me. It was one of the first generations of Intel iMacs on release 10.4 or 10.5.

I'm currently using 10.5 (Catalina) on a work-provided 2018 13" MBP hooked to an external display via a Thunderbolt 2 dock. I use it for compiling Android and iOS mobile apps, web browsing, accessing work via VPN, Slack, Google Meet, all the normal things you'd expect of a developer machine.

I also have a personal 2017 non-retina MBA running Catalina. My wife has the same laptop running Mojave. Both kids have 11" MBA's running Mojave. There's a 2013 iMac in the house running Mojave.

I can't recall having seen a kernel panic on a single one of these machines ever. I'm not denying they happen to other folks, but if this is so common an issue, I'm surprised I haven't seen it across any of my machines.

Are there other issues with macOS and iOS that occasionally drive me crazy? Sure, let me tell you about iCloud drive syncing issues I've had to deal with. Or the bug in Bootcamp I just experienced yesterday where it doesn't properly account for the SSD portion of a Fusion drive when partitioning the drive for Mac/Windows. Or how screen rotation sometimes just gets stuck on iOS in the wrong orientation or at the wrong aspect ratio.

But having just installed Windows 10 yesterday... OMG, I'll take macOS over Windows any day of the week.

And no, Linux is still not an alternative. (I'm a recovering Sys Admin and used Linux as my desktop for about 5 years.) I want a single OS I can run on all of my devices, and Linux just isn't an acceptable consumer OS for myself and certainly not for my wife and kids. I want an OS that just connects to WiFi, just works with my printer, can sync photos and music with my phone, allows me to rent movies, sleeps and wakes properly, that I don't have to futz with, etc. I want an excellent tablet experience for my artist daughter. As much as possible, I don't want to have to be tech support for my family.

So that's why this guy puts up with Apple, warts and all. It's the best set of tradeoffs for me and my family.

ken• 6 years ago

That question presumes that crashing is the only axis upon which computer users experience pain.

Linux users said the same thing in 1996. It didn’t work then, either.

Anyone working on desktop Linux should know they’ve hit saturation with their current approach. What‘s missing or broken that’s causing Mac users to prefer a system that crashes once a day?

7leafer• 6 years ago

In Russia, we have a wonderful saying: "The mice cried and pricked themselves but still kept eating the cactus"

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

What kind of 90's hardware you have that you can't run MacOS on it? I've been running MacOS in both Hackintosh and virtual machines for over a decade now.

abootstrapper• 6 years ago

Oh right, like I haven’t lived through countless blue screens of death in my time. Before Catalina OSX was the most reliable OS I had ever worked on.

mnemnc• 6 years ago

I’m a dev/creative and need an OS that: - Is not a total nightmare for software development

- Runs Adobe CC

- Does not throw ads at me

I‘m happy to take suggestions for an alternative to macOS.

Also, the seamless integration (call it lock-in) across devices is a nice bonus.

shrimpx2• 6 years ago

No intention to be snarky but stability high ground from someone using windows with wsl2?

jtdev2• 6 years ago

Simple answer: MacOS and Apple hardware are still a much better and more productive experience for many developers and everyday computer users. Windows and Linux both have their own problems.

saagarjha4• 6 years ago

I got a similar question earlier, and I think the answer to that one should apply here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23086849

jasoneckert• 6 years ago

Do macOS users like pain? In a Wired article, Ziff Davis editor Matthew Rothenberg put it plainly:

"It's like a B&D (bondage and dominance) relationship. There needs to a psychosexual analysis of the Mac community."

watermelon0• 6 years ago

I don't like the pain, but I prefer the least amount of pain given, so in my case, macOS fits the bill the best.

I bought XPS 13 laptop about a year ago, in the hopes of finally jumping to the other side.

I have tried to use both, Linux and Windows, and UX just isn't there. Linux is still the most buggy desktop OS (I know, it's not an OS, but a kernel, but in this context I mean every possible combination of drivers, programs, and desktop environments).

If we start with the XPS 13, which is/was regularly recommended as the Linux laptop, the most annoying things are coil whine and fan loudness. I cannot even watch a movie at night, without either of them bothering me. My MBP is fairly quiet, especially when not doing much (doing hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 is something that should produce any noise). Not just the laptop, even the charger has the coil whine (thankfully I can just reuse MBP charger here).

Moving on, let's talk about Linux. There is still no sane way of having multiple screens with different scaling factor (I can't see anything useful on 4k 13" display without the scaling, and external 4k monitor shouldn't need it.) I have tried Wayland, which sort of fixes the issue, but there are other problems there. Last time I checked, GNOME Wayland cannot handle playback of a video, and scrolling in the browser on the same screen. When you scroll the content in the browser, video frames drop, and make video unwatchable. I forgot what the underlying issue was, but it was open for quite a while. Most of the things are broken on KDE wayland, and for the rest you usually need hacks.

Then we have things like bad performance (especially regarding the graphics) of web browsers, which work fine on Windows, on the same machine.

Touchpad issues are well known; I couldn't make it to mimic Windows behaviour (which should be possible since it's the same hardware), so let's just not get started on macOS experience here.

Regarding the Windows, general UX is much much better than Linux, and apart from touchpad, it seems on par with macOS, if we ignore all the telemtry, preinstalled CandyCrush and other unneeded software. Some things are bettern than on macOS, and vice versa.

Regarding the development UX, we do have WSL2, Windows Terminal, and stuff like this, which is great. It's a major improvement from the state we had a year or more ago.

However, WSL2 is far from perfect. I have seen issues such as WSL2 not starting for a single user, but it worked for the rest, which required reboot to solve. Sometimes, Visual Studio Code couldn't connect to the WSL2, and again, occasionally machine would have to be rebooted.

There is no USB support for WSL2, so I had to resort to exposing of USB devices via network on Windows, and using a client to attach those devices in WSL2 VM. There is no support for bridged network, so we cannot easily discover LAN devices, for example when we want to flash ESP8266 devices. Did I mention there is no native USB support, so you cannot flash it this way either?

Running Windows programs from WSL or viceversa has its own problems, and since there is no virtualization support in WSL2 (understandable of course), using Minikube was far from ideal.

macOS is far from perfect, and even if majority of the apps/libraries need fixes, since macOS is not completely compatible with Linux APIs, majority of the libraries have the support for it. I can easily run majority of the software natively, without any VMs. With Windows, some things work natively, but for the rest you have to resort to an VM or WSL(2).

Using libusb is the same as on Linux, and projects using it can be compiled for macOS with minimal changes.

balladeer• 6 years ago

It's years of fantastic painless experience and even now it's relatively good. Before using these laptops I never knew what it meant to just slam the lid, then hours or sometimes days later open it and start from where you began, instantly.

The privacy. The comfort of having two devices (phone and computer) to be in sync in a private and safe manner. Excellent app ecosystem. Timely and long term updates, upgrades, and support.

But as the parent commenter says I am at my wit's end as well, for the first time since I started using Macs a decade ago - crappy recent OSX and iOS releases, iPhones getting bigger and bigger, being trapped in a data/communication silo etc.

So why am I still here? Because there's nowhere else that's better.

culturestate• 6 years ago

Any time I get these they come with a bushel of IOAccelerator errors; I'm fairly sure (in my case, at least) it's a problem buried somewhere in the video decoder stack.

I can reproduce it pretty reliably by previewing a bunch of videos in Messages, and quitting the app usually solves it.

Edit: I use a 13" MBP, so that rules out most popular theories e.g. problems with the discrete GPU or graphics switching.

rayiner6• 6 years ago

Tons of people: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-mbp-gpu-panics.22210...

There's like a dozen threads on MacRumors and the Apple discussion forums on various crashes, mostly related to sleep, but also to the watchdog timing out for WindowServer due to GPU lockups.

ksec3• 6 years ago

One of the reason why I dont like GPU acceleration in general. And this isn't just on macOS, Windows, Firefox, Chrome.

May be it is better on iOS since Apple owns the whole stack from Metal to Drivers to actual GPU.

cordite• 6 years ago

I don't even let my screens turn off anymore; these days I get this weird thing where after waking the monitors up the monitor does not get a signal, but if it is plugged in, the mouse jumps around at like 2fps on the main display as if there's some weird interrupt denial of service going on.

To fix this, I have to restart just to use my monitor again.

js22• 6 years ago

I didn't wade through that entire thread, but the most recent post has a specific set of circumstances:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-...

After waking from sleep and running a process using hardware accelerated video decoding / encoding, the UI will freeze for a couple of seconds, then starts working again, then freezes again, and so on. The mouse can still be moved but the UI is non-responsive. Eventually, after waiting for long enough, a kernel panic occurs and the machine reboots.

How to reproduce:

1. Use any Navi10 or Navi14 graphics card inside a Mac Pro 2019, eGPU case or use a MacBook Pro 16.

2. Open Video Proc or any other app utilizing hardware video acceleration (e.g. Safari playing Youtube, exporting with FCPX / iMovie).

3. Run the video acceleration test in Video Proc, start playing a H.264 / H.265 video in Safari or export a H.264 / H.265 file from FCPX / iMovie.

4. Put the machine to sleep.

5. Wake it again and re-test video acceleration.

6. If machine doesn't freeze, repeat the cycle from step 4.

7. Repeat this until the UI starts freezing / video acceleration stops working.

8. Eventually the machine will kernel panic after several minutes.

hmhrex• 6 years ago

Same here. It was frustrating to not see a fix for this in the changelog. Hopefully they fix this soon.

taf2• 6 years ago

I had similar issues as you but it turned out to be the hardware was bad... I replaced my macbook pro and it's been great... But the other hardware issue on the new macbook pro's is if you charge on any of the USB-c ports other than the one on the right side, you'll likely run the laptop too hot... so charge on the right side not the left side and you should be good... it's crappy i know... but new laptop i've almost and charging on the right side i've nearly forgotten about all of my apple hate...

satysin2• 6 years ago

Have you tried the "nuke from orbit" approach of a full system wipe (T2, SMC and NVRAM reset, delete recovery partitions, Pre-boot volume, etc) and doing a fresh install and setup rather than restoring from backup?

I know it shouldn't be needed but sometimes it is the only option.

It isn't much help to you but my experience with Catalina has been very positive on a 2018 15" MacBook Pro. The initial release and first two point updates had some silly UI bugs but since .4 it has been solid as a rock for me.

I just updated to .5 and noticed I haven't had to restart my laptop since the last update I installed 42 days ago. In those 42 days I haven't had a single issue so I am pretty happy about that.

MperorM2• 6 years ago

Yes, I have reset t2, smc, nvram, even reinstalled the entire operating system. I have the same problem on both 16 inch laptops I've owned (first one was stolen) suggesting it has to do with the software I use.

I am unable to identify a single application as the culprit, unfortunately.

jurip• 6 years ago

I just had that yesterday. Not sure if I've ever seen it before, but yeah.

vardump5• 6 years ago

Same. My freezes seem to be caused only by GPU lockups.

Other scenario only a reboot can fix is sometimes menus don't draw and/or video playback doesn't work in any app.

But at least Bluetooth is nowadays more stable!

vadarvariu3• 6 years ago

I've had the opposite problem: started getting awful freezes on a MBP 2018 running Mojave on the day this latest Catalina version was released. No immediate explanation: cpu/ram/disk load perfectly normal, machine just incredibly slow (think 10 minutes to start up). Exact same behaviour in Safe Mode and nothing obvious after some common diagnoses.

Bit the bullet and finally updated to Catalina, all problems gone. Not sure what to make of this but it definitely resonates with stories of Apple practically forcing updates.

kup0• 6 years ago

I get 'watchdog timeout' kernel panics. For a while it was daily, since reinstalling OS now it's random.

The issue is I use a far different system than most reporting the issue. I see mentions of macbooks, sleep, etc, but I'm running an iMac 2013, a program that keeps it awake 24/7, etc.

No idea yet what the underlying cause is, but the panics started with 10.15.1 and got worse with 10.15.4, they were not an issue prior to 10.15.1

MintelIE• 6 years ago

I had this Watchdog timer issue on OS X and it was causing major slowdowns. My solution was to stop using OS X, Apple support didn't really seem to have any solutions or suggestions other than reinstalling OS X, which I tried, and after a while I ran into the issue again.

If I'm going to be my own Applecare at least with a Free OS, I can access the source code.

fender1959• 6 years ago

I have the same issues !! I have a couple of raid drives and third 10T - a second dell monitor connected to my iMac pro 18 core....If I loop a time line in fcpx, loop audio in Logic, run the Black Magic disk test my system will freeze, still playing audio then give up the cursor then hang fully and crash = in the spin dump we get the watchdog time out !!!! I am on 10.5.5 looks like its some kind of GPU issue

lxgr2• 6 years ago

Battery health management sounds great!

I wish there was a way to customize this, though: Thinkpads have (on Linux) allowed setting thresholds for "charge only when less than" or "charge only up to" for many years now.

Given that such primitives must also exist as part of 10.15.5 now, I hope that somebody will figure out how to modify the default behavior.

mrtksn• 6 years ago

There's an app for that called Aldente[0]. I am sceptical of the benefits though, too much of micromanagement for a device that's supposed to just work.

I mean you can be better off if instead of undercharging the device all the time and have less than optimal charge when you need it today you can have a device that holds just as little charge some time in the feature and fix it by replacing the battery if it turns into an issue.

Live the high life today worry-free and suffer tomorrow instead of suffering today for some possible occasion in the feature where you might need few more hours of juice.

[0] https://github.com/davidwernhart/AlDente

OJFord2• 6 years ago

I'd rather leave it to the OEM to determine the best setting (knowing their batteries and charge circuitry), but have the option in OSs that run on devices whose OEM hasn't done so.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

on a mac those are the same thing

diebeforei4852• 6 years ago

I'm glad that sort of thing doesn't exist on macOS by default, though third-party tools have existed for a while.

I'd much rather the system figure out the charge threshold dynamically based on all sorts of variables like temperature, battery degradation level, expected imminent usage (learn from my own past usage on-device -- coreduetd) and other variables they can take into account. Which is what it does.

lxgr2• 6 years ago

The cynic in me strongly suspects that planned obsolescence is one of these other variables.

AshamedCaptain4• 6 years ago

Anybody knows what has happened that multiple manufacturers (at least Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, and now Apple) have released _all within this year_ updates to "enhance battery health management"?

Even on devices which were otherwise out of support already.

I ponder what has happened. I didn't hear any recent stories of battery explosions, huge battery recalls, or new regulations, yet all manufacturers are reacting to something.

riscy• 6 years ago

Apple got sued for throttling iPhones with overly aged batteries. My understanding is that for all battery-dependent devices, you either sometimes throttle the CPU so it doesn’t demand more voltage than the battery can reliably deliver, or else you risk sudden power loss at what appears to be 20% life.

After the lawsuit I assume now all manufacturers leaving it up to the consumer to decide which behavior they want.

Reason0774• 6 years ago

There's nothing wrong with throttling in itself. Pretty much anyone will prefer a performance hit to a spontaneous shutdown.

Where Apple got in trouble was that they were doing it secretly. Now days they still do the throttling, but you can go into battery status and it tells you if the battery is delivering peak performance or not.

stu2b50• 6 years ago

This in specific is because so many people have gone from using their laptop battery to keeping their laptop fully charged on the plug all the time due to WFH. That can be unhealthy if the device keeps the battery topped off.

cesarb• 6 years ago

The exact phrasing Dell used is "modified battery algorithm to prolong lifespan and minimize risk of swelling", as seen for instance at https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.dell.uefia86a3f07.firmwar... and several others in that site. I looked at a few of the Lenovo ones, but didn't see anything battery-related in the recent changes.

AshamedCaptain4• 6 years ago

In HP's May P87 BIOS update there is

"Changes the default setting of the HP Battery Health Manager in the BIOS Settings from Maximize My Battery Duration to Let HP Manage My Battery Health. The new default setting dynamically changes how the system charges the battery based on usage conditions over time to provide optimal battery health. "

(The HP Battery Manager itself is also a recent feature)

crazygringo• 6 years ago

Just regular market competition.

One manufacturer announces a feature, other manufacturers think "oh crap, we don't want anyone buying a competitor rather than us because of that" so they implement it too ASAP.

I've been in a lot of product decision meetings. In my experience, there's no quicker or more effective way to justify building a feature than "our competitor has it".

AshamedCaptain4• 6 years ago

I don't think so:

1. this feature does not have a lot of user visibility,

2. in fact many laptops already allowed you to set this (e.g. Lenovo and Dell) but it seemed regular users didn't care at all,

3. Apple does not tend to do that, anyway (for better or worse).

api2• 6 years ago

Looking forward to seeing whether this contains a microcode or OS patch to fix what appears to be an Ice Lake CPU bug:

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310

Read the whole thing. It really appears as if there is a virtualization-escaping CPU-crashing bug in Ice Lake (10th generation) Intel chips that was discovered because it exclusively crashes when used with Jetbrains IDEs.

Sounds unlikely, yes, but seriously read the whole thing.

api2• 6 years ago

Self-reply: no, it apparently does not. Microcode rev is the same and the issue is still there.

TL;DR: Jetbrains IDEs all crash on the 2020 Air, which has a 10th gen Ice Lake CPU in it. Sometimes it brings down the OS. Doesn't happen at all on older Macs. At first I and everyone else thought it was a MacOS or maybe graphics driver bug.

Then the plot thickened...

I tried it in a Parallels Linux VM, and it crashed and brought down the entire host. Not the VM, the host. This should not be possible.

Then someone reported that it also afflicts a Microsoft Surface model with the same generation CPU.

So given that it escapes VM isolation and occurs on multiple OSes and hardware, it really appears as if this is an Intel CPU bug being triggered by some exotic pattern of instructions being generated by the JVM.

I must also add that nothing else crashes on this machine. Nothing. I've run multiple OSes in concurrent VMs, done heavy work, run GPU stress tests, and it's rock solid... unless I fire up CLion or GoLand... then kaboom.

No I'm not the only reporter. No it's not (insert mundane thing here). Read the whole thread I linked above.

therockhead2• 6 years ago

I have Catalina on a iMac Pro, a 16inch and 15 MacBook pro and for what it worth have hit zero issues.

yedpodtrzitko• 6 years ago

"works on my machine"

therockhead2• 6 years ago

"machines" ;)

frereubu• 6 years ago

Most of this thread is anecdata, which tends to skew heavily negative. As a comment above says, it's difficult to tell whether these are issues at scale, and whenever I read these complaint-heavy anecdata threads I always feel like chipping in that I've had very few problems with my Mid-2014 MacBook Pro 15" on all versions of MacOS that have been release since I bought it. I'm not even sure what the purpose of threads like this is, really.

chongli• 6 years ago

This sort of low-effort drive-by dismissal is not in the spirit of the HN community guidelines [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Crontab• 6 years ago

That's been my experience on my mid-2013 Macbook Air - for what it is worth.

hugey010• 6 years ago

Yep late 2013 MacBook Pro: Catalina brought some security annoyances but mostly pain-free. IMO this computer is the epitome of function and form; I'm worried nothing will truly replace it when that time comes.

FideoSpecial2• 6 years ago

I feel the same about my mid 2014 mbp. I'm thinking I'll pull the trigger on a new one when the rumored 14.1 inch version arrives.

kspacewalk2• 6 years ago

I had a mid 2013 MacBook Pro at work and I completely agree - the epitome of function, form and longevity. I used it daily for almost 7 years and just recently passed it on to a non-dev coworker who needed a laptop at home, and got a 2019 MBP instead. I replaced it because I needed more than 500 GB of disk space. Otherwise it still works perfectly. I think that's very impressive for a 7 year old laptop these days.

bt1a• 6 years ago

No problems on my 15" 2017 MBP :) . I'm not much of a power user though

asiachick2• 6 years ago

Your experience of not having had any issues is mostly entirely irrelevant.

I went to a club and didn't get harassed. I went to bar and no one tried to feel me up. I walked down that alley and didn't get mugged.

Why is it that computer fans always say "It worked for me" as if it means something to the victims?

Falell• 6 years ago

The victims are not the only people to whom this comment is addressed.

thebigshane• 6 years ago

Catalina has been fine for me (old macbook and a new iMac), but I do miss some of the old Steam games that no longer work with Catalina (was it a 64-bit thing?).

Is Steam or Apple going to offer some kind of virtualization thing to allow this old apps/games to run? Or did we really just lose these forever without using your own virtualization (VMWare etc)?

(Or is there some news about this that I just missed?)

jacobush• 6 years ago

My 10.15.4 tells me since I installed it there is an update, but when I go into settings to install the update, there is nothing to install.

jorisw2• 6 years ago

Hit Cmd-R from within the preference pane

archived22• 6 years ago

Amid lockdown, I am scared to update.

jedieaston• 6 years ago

It's fairly easy to install multiple versions of macOS on your drive to test [0]. You could create a separate install of Catalina and test your applications with it before making the move (which Apple now thinks is a bit more urgent for some reason).

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208891

pmarreck2• 6 years ago

I've been an Apple guy since 1984 when I was 12, and Catalina has finally pushed me to Linux for my daily driver. I'll still keep Apples around due to Apple's mostly excellent ecosystem execution, but... something has gone missing lately

holstvoogd2• 6 years ago

Almost there too. Too much crappy deamons, too much cloud integration. And now since a week or two my bluetooth cannot connect to my external speaker. Looks like only a fresh install _might_ fix it...

I've already bought a linux laptop for personal use, but it is just to crappy to use. I might just have to continue my efforts to get a proper linux distro on my mbp.

tibbydudeza3• 6 years ago

Is reset PRAM still a thing ???.

I used to have a Mac Pro (cheesegrater) but switched back about 2 years ago due to having a kid in college and Dell and Windows 10 were not too shabby.

Probably on my 4th Windows 10 release from the original that Dell shipped with and it has been rather stable system.

ksec3• 6 years ago

Sigh. Now every time I use Speech to Text there is a sound before the dictation. Before Catalina you could disable it in setting but now the setting is complete gone.

And Apple wanted Voice Over to replace this dictation. The problem is most Apps doesn't even support this type of input. Example I cant use Voice Over for dictation on WhatsApp, but I could do it with old double Fn Key Dictation.

Not to mention the voice over recognition by default uses Enhance Dictation which is offline, and its results is actually worst and slower than online dictation.

Basically the worst of both worlds. It is super annoying.

bjoli2• 6 years ago

Catalina decided to remap my paragraph key to "ö" this week (using a 3rd party Swedish Dvorak layout). Remaking the layout to the proper symbol works for about an hour. It is my Emacs prefix for functions I don't consider important enough to warrant their own direct key bindings. Annoying doesn't cut it.

I haven't done a factory reset yet, but I started backups today to be able to.

Catalina is a disaster. I got my Mac for free from a relative,but I sure as hell won't buy another.

bjoli2• 6 years ago

So: The error seems to be that the keyboard assistant expects qwerty. It must have run some time, and it wanted me to press the button next to the left shift key, which on svdvorak is "ö". I had to delete the library/preferences/com.keyboardsomethingsomething and redo the keyboard identification and press the "<" key (which on svdvorak is about as far away as you can come from the ö key).

Now it works.

trishankdatadog• 6 years ago

n=2 anecdata: no problems updating two MacBook Pros from 2017 and 2018, which were also already on Catalina.

stuaxo• 6 years ago

Does it have any fixes for the notarization delays ?

spacephysics• 6 years ago

Is there any point in downgrading to Mojave from Catalina? Haven’t looked into it, so I assume it’s a pain. But the semi-daily kernel panic, over heating, kernel tasks taking up 80%+ CPU is rediculous for a $3k+ laptop

asdff5• 6 years ago

Set up a partition and find out! Won't be possible if your mac is newer than mojave, though.

ehsanullahjan• 6 years ago

My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me.

The issue I experienced has been well documented [here](https://mrmacintosh.com/10-15-4-update-wake-from-sleep-kerne...) and elsewhere on the web.

I use my MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) with a CalDigit TS3 Plus Dock and LG 32” 4K monitor. It’s worth noting that using the computer undocked never gave me any problems.

perardi• 6 years ago

Thank you for documenting this. I have been getting exactly this kernel panic dump on my 16-inch MacBook Pro, and it's good to know I'm not sitting on a lemon.

(Another lemon. My first one was absolutely a lemon.)

k3liutZu2• 6 years ago

My MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) was having kernel panics multiple times a day after having been asleep for extend periods. This was extremely annoying, as you can imagine. I’m happy to report that the Catalina 10.15.5 update fixes the kernel panics for me.

Will update ASAP. Thank you for beta-testing this!

naetius• 6 years ago

While I haven't had nearly as many bad experiences with Catalina as some other users, I am indeed starting to feel increasingly uneasy with the overall quality of the platform, both as a user and as a developer.

I've been a Mac user since the late 2000s: the first Mac I could afford at the time was a MacMini G4.

When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform. When I started looking digging into the platform as a developer the feeling was exactly the same: care and refinements were almost omnipresent in every aspect of the platform.

While bugs - and even nasty ones - have never been aliens on Mac OS X/macOS, what I've personally started to experience in the past few years is a feeling of neglect toward the platform.

Yes, Catalyst seems to go against this trend: its intent, though, is to ease the porting effort of iOS applications to Mac. A certainly laudable goal.

What would probably be more laudable for Mac users and developers are: core platform stability and quality, API stability, developer documentation overhaul [1].

Our CI breaks every single time there's a minor macOS update and/or an Xcode update: we're at the point where our macOS UITests (XCTest) require more maintenance to keep working than the application itself. XCTest on macOS has ridiculous bugs. I lost count of the radars we've opened, and the sample apps for reduction we've sent to Apple.

At every single minor macOS upgrade, few users complain that our application "doesn't work anymore" in certain cases. And to be exquisitely blunt: there ain't wrong with the application itself. Rebooting after a macOS upgrade fixes whatever event tap regression we hit in Quartz.

In general, what I'd personally like to see:

* a less "hysterical" approach to the OS would be so. much. appreciated. (eg: focus on the few important core things, keep them working)

* release when it's ready: this whole marketing driven annual release cycle is unsustainable

I do understand that the vast majority of Apple's income is not Mac related at this point, but WTH...

[1] The whole business with documentation is amazingly summarized by this HN post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19966135

[Apologies if this comment sounds a bit complaining in nature, that's not what I meant]

reaperducer3• 6 years ago

When I booted that machine up for the first time I was amazed by the quality and the refinements of the platform.

And the speed of the boot process. I switched to Macs around 2000. One of the things that struck me was how quickly Macs booted compared with Windows machines.

Today, a Macs don't seem to have any advantage when it comes to cold booting. Sleep, yes. But not a real boot.

amaccuish• 6 years ago

And still I lose IPv6 connectivity after a while :(

ryanmccullagh• 6 years ago

It looks like they still haven't fixed the Power on thunderbolt failed issue.

PunksATawnyFill• 6 years ago

I don't see anything about making group FaceTimes actually work.

msie• 6 years ago

Finally! They fixed my Image Capture bug! Now I can import pictures from my iPhone AND they will be deleted from the iPhone. I've only imported 7 movies at one time with no problem. So far, so good...

eatbitseveryday• 6 years ago

Battery health management is on by default when you buy a new Mac notebook with macOS 10.15.5, or after you upgrade to macOS 10.15.5 on a Mac notebook with Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Unfortunately... this update does not help everyone. I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) and these changes in the System Preferences are not visible. This quote was found only when digging further in the "How to control the battery health management feature" instructions.

Tre6662• 6 years ago

I have a 2014 mbpro. It was working fine but when I try to export from final cut it crashed. After restart I tried to export again and it said that my battery was dying (it was at 55%) then powered down

Tre6662• 6 years ago

This is actually the 1st time the mb ever crashed. I've had no issues with it

karmakaze• 6 years ago

Battery Health Management
• Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks
• Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced
• Option to disable battery health management <<<

Apple learned from their iOS update/iPhone slowdown faux pas.

macOS Catalina 10.15.5

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