Upgrading to Catalina

I have waited a few months before upgrading to Catalina, as I do every single release. It used to be that Apple software would just work, unfortunately this has not been the case for many years.

For now I’ll just upgrade the mac I use at work since I want to use Swift UI live preview. If it was not for that I doubt I would upgrade for a while longer. This year’s release doesn’t really add any worthwhile user facing feature. We are not using them at work yet and I doubt that will happen for a few years since we still need to support old OS versions, but it is nice to have them ready and being able to test them out and play around with them.

Installation

The installation process took its usual hour, but that’s the same story with every single OS release of the last few years. Fortunately I did not run though any major hiccups as I usually do, just a minor annoyance: Xcode refused to work. I had to completely delete it and download it again (same version) from the developer website. Once downloaded and installed it opened and worked without issues.

Personal Mac

I can’t upgrate to Catalina on my personal mac. So many apps that I rely to get work done or for entartainment simply do not work on Catalina and will never work on it since they’re 32 bits applications.

I still own the old non subscription versions of Photoshop and Premiere and I do not want to upgrade to a subscription since they do all I need them to do and I only use them once every two months.

A coworker upgraded and his mac was unusable: Xcode kept crashing, so he had to reinstall the older version. This was an Xcode problem and not Catalina, but it is pretty telling of the state of the whole Apple Ecosystem at the moment. Even iOS 13 had version .1 and .2 released in a super short timespan, sometimes with new releases every day to fix major issues.

Conclusion

If you are an iOS Developer like me you need to upgrade, the changes in the latest Xcode available only on Catalina are too good to pass. That’s why I’m upgrading my work mac now. Still I waited a few months since the release.

I do not know how long I’ll wait before upgrading my personal mac, but it is going to be at least another 6 months and it will heavily depend on how many apps that I rely on get a 64 bit version or not.