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. The machine arrived completely wiped and reset, with a clean install of OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan. 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). 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. 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. The cost for me would be higher than getting a second-hand Mac mini. As things are now, I absolutely do not want Catalina to mess with my current setups and data. 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.
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. So, to conclude, do I plan to stay on High Sierra or Mojave indefinitely? It’s hard to say and too soon to tell. Finally updating to Catalina: my first impressions
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. Well, that’s simply not the impression I’ve had and continue to have.
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. 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.
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. 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 once again let me stress the fact that I’m not trying to use this data to prove anything - it’s all very anecdotal.Īt the same time, I can’t but remark that it’s all very suggestive, too.
The negative-neutral-positive ratio has essentially remained the same, with 309 negative-feedback emails, 29 neutral, and 32 positive. ‘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.).Īs of this morning, the email count is at 370. 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. Of those, 96 were negative, 7 neutral, and only 4 positive. When I wrote Part 3 back in February, the feedback amounted to 107 emails. 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. 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.