Both my main Macs are still on Mac OS 10.13.6 High Sierra, and so far I have no plans to upgrade to Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. I’ll probably upgrade the SSD-equipped MacBook Air to Mojave before the end of the year. I could perhaps do the same with my desktop workhorse, a 2017 4K retina iMac, but it came with a 5400 rpm hard drive as its main internal volume, and if Mojave updates the filesystem to APFS, then it’s advisable to upgrade to an SSD first.

But Catalina is a decidedly controversial upgrade, and in my case I didn’t even have to debate too much whether I should upgrade or not. The answer is no. The reasoning behind it is quite simple, actually, and it boils down to this: what Catalina takes away from me is more than what it gives me.

If you look at Catalina’s list of features, there is a lot of new stuff indeed. But as I scroll down that page, I find entire sections whose improvements are of no use to me, because they improve certain features or areas of the Apple ecosystem I don’t use. Examples include (but are not limited to) Apple Music, TV, Podcasts, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Screen Time, and Apple Watch.

In other cases, like Security and Mail, what Apple considers an ‘improvement’, it’s more of a hindrance for me. (I know some will see this as a small thing, but really, Apple, why mess with Mail’s classic layout? It’s been my preferred layout since Mac OS X 10.0, and that type of layout has basically been the one I have used since I started using email more than twenty years ago).

What I want from a new version of an operating system, especially one as mature as Mac OS, is that it fixes or improves what was not working well in previous versions, and that it leaves tried-and-true features and functionalities as untouched as technically possible. I don’t need and I don’t want disruption for disruption’s sake on a yearly basis. While I understand that today’s tech motto is The show must go on, that also doesn’t have to mean that the show should get painful to watch.

Instead, Catalina has so far proven to be quite the disruptive experience. If you want examples, there’s no better collector and curator than Michael Tsai (and if you still don’t follow his blog, you’re definitely missing out):

• Mail Data Loss in Mac OS 10.15
• Apps Lost With Catalina
• Catalina App Issues
• Catalina System Issues
• Catalina Vista

As usual, when I’m vocal about something on Twitter, and voice what may be considered unpopular opinions, I promptly receive feedback via email. So when I repeatedly manifested my disappointment about Mac OS 10.15 and my unwillingness to upgrade, I got the most varied responses. Some agreed with me, some said the same things they say when they see me ‘resist change’ (their words) — that I can’t keep on ‘living in the past’, that I should approach these things with a more ‘adaptive mindset’, because I can’t expect technology and software to progress while maintaining the status quo at the same time. While I may agree with this latter point to a somewhat remote degree, I don’t see why I should change the way I work on/with my Mac at the drop of a hat— I mean, Mac OS release.

One thing is ‘resisting change’; another thing is not wanting to mindlessly embrace something just because it’s new. I don’t know why it’s so hard for tech people to understand that not everything new is necessarily, inherently good, or better than what came before.

I remember enthusiastically upgrading to the next version of Mac OS from Mac OS X’s early days until Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Then 10.10 Yosemite gave me pause: apart from the many bugs and increased unreliability, I literally couldn’t look at it. I was mostly okay with the revamped visual design, but found the choice of Helvetica as the new system font to be extremely problematic because it didn’t seem optimised for non-retina displays. When I saw Yosemite installed on a MacBook Air at the local Apple Store, there were parts of the system’s UI I had trouble reading. So I decided to wait until things improved. And thankfully things did improve, but I had to wait until Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan was released a year later.

It was the first time I skipped an entire Mac OS release, and… nothing broke. I stayed one year more with Mavericks and everything was fine, everything kept working. Mavericks, especially with its last minor release, was very stable on my MacBook Pro. I didn’t feel I was missing out.

Then came Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. My MacBook Pro (2009) wasn’t officially supported — and I didn’t feel like installing Sierra unofficially. Looking at what Sierra offered over El Capitan, there wasn’t anything in particular I wanted at all costs. El Capitan was, again, pretty stable on my Mac, so I stuck with it one more year. And again, I didn’t feel I was missing out or running behind. Everything I needed kept working just fine. Of course now it was time to upgrade the hardware, and last year I did just that. Both my brand-new 21.5″ 4K retina iMac, and my second-hand 11″ MacBook Air came with Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra preinstalled, and I’ve had no issues whatsoever on either machine so far.

You realise when an operating system has reached maturity, for example, when the next version doesn’t feel all that compelling and it’s just a refinement over the one you’re using. For me that realisation came first when I stayed on Mavericks until El Capitan shipped (thus skipping Yosemite entirely), and then when I stayed on El Capitan until High Sierra shipped (thus skipping Sierra entirely). And every day I realise this when using my still-surprisingly-alive 2009 MacBook Pro with El Capitan next to my iMac with High Sierra. The two Mac OS versions — despite the 2‑year gap separating them — look and feel indistinguishable from one another.

As a consequence, my attitude towards upgrading to a newer version of Mac OS has changed in recent years. The nerdy “This is going to be great, I can’t wait to update and see the new features” approach has turned into a more cautious costs/benefits evaluation: “Okay, say I upgrade, what’s in it for me?” After Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra, I’ve repeatedly asked myself, “What is really better and improved in this new version of Mac OS? What are the truly useful features and improvements that make this a meaningful upgrade for me?” And apart from security (maybe — I’m not even 100% sure about this), I do struggle to find an answer.

The feeling I have, as of late, is that the more we go on, the more we have to roll up our sleeves as users and thoroughly check what the new OS may break, educate ourselves on the ways things may break, and look for workarounds. This because now more than ever Apple doesn’t seem to care much about the quality of their software. So, on the one hand third-party developers have to work much more than before — unearthing Mac OS bugs, and doing everything in their power to adjust their software so that it plays nice with whatever the new Mac OS version breaks or changes. On the other hand, the final users have to face new headaches when something that used to ‘just work’ in Mac OS, now inexplicably does not. Or does, but with puzzling inconsistency.

You may say I’m stuck in the past, but let me tell you: this doesn’t look like progress to me.

The whole idea of ‘making preparations’ before updating is utterly silly when you bring some common sense into the equation. The only preparation one should carry out today is a full backup of one’s data. Because many factors may lead to data loss, and it’s not necessarily the new OS version’s fault. You shouldn’t lose hours of your time checking for possible compatibility issues with apps and services you’ve been using and relying upon — in some cases for a very long time.

But you know, when you complain about things like this, the standard response is that there are always tradeoffs. Sure, sometimes there may be boring technical reasons behind a change, and sometimes the change comes with a tradeoff that’s worth accepting — you get a tangible improvement that outweighs what you lose in the process.

However, something like the loss of 32-bit apps (completely unsupported in Catalina) infuriates me because I see the sheer computational power of today’s Macs and I wonder in what way it would be a hindrance for them to still run 32-bit apps. Architectural issues? 64-bit Macs have been able to run them since 2006. Incompatibilities with new technologies underlying Mac OS 10.15? You’re telling me that it wouldn’t be possible to implement a Rosetta-like system tool to run 32-bit apps on the fly? Or some sort of native emulation like the Classic Environment that let you run Mac OS 9 in PowerPC Macs until Mac OS X 10.4? I believe solutions like these could be implemented, and without any perceivable loss in performance. The obvious benefit would be to retain a vast catalogue of perfectly working apps and games.

But since Apple can’t be bothered to preserve this bridge with the past, and since their only interest when Mac OS is concerned is apparently to streamline and simplify the system because it’s easier to maintain this way^[1], the burden is on the users (and the developers, of course, but I’m focusing on the users here). You know, the users, who are supposedly “at the centre of everything we do”, as Tim Cook said.

Look, I get it, we can’t expect to be using older applications forever, especially if said applications need to communicate and interface with sensible parts of the system, or if they can be used as attack vectors to compromise the security of the system. But many are still perfectly fine and innocuous. And again, I’m not saying that workflows have to be set in stone and we should follow them inflexibly without ever trying something new or different. But these changes that tend to have a significant and direct impact on users’ habits oughtn’t to be forced by an OS update. Even if the writing was on the wall.

Sometimes you find an application, a tool, that really fits the way you work; that really makes you faster and more productive when carrying out a specific activity. One such application, for me, is Aperture. Before Aperture, I wasn’t using any kind of unified solution to edit and organise my photos. I simply performed the occasional retouch in GraphicConverter and kept my photos manually organised in folders. I had tried giving iPhoto a go, but the experience felt a bit confusing and underwhelming. When I received Aperture as a gift back in 2008, the way the application worked and its overall flow just clicked for me. Adobe Lightroom never did, instead.

When back in 2014 Apple announced Photos as a replacement for both iPhoto and Aperture, and removed Aperture from sale one year later, it was clear where this was going. At that point, I had accumulated a 6‑year photo library with non-destructive edits. I wasn’t particularly thrilled to start looking for alternatives, and Photos was simply a poor replacement. But I tried a few other apps. I even gave Lightroom another chance, in the hope its flow had become more compatible with how I work with photos. I kept returning to Aperture.

Now I hear that Aperture doesn’t even open under Catalina^[2], and the only way to keep using it would be for me to purchase a virtualisation software so that I can run Aperture and other ‘incompatible’ apps under an older version of Mac OS inside a virtual machine. This is the ‘burden on the users’ I was talking about before. In theory, I could do that. I’m expert enough to implement this workaround and hopefully make it work. But what many geeks still don’t get is that a lot of people out there don’t have this knowledge or expertise; they don’t follow tech news as religiously as we do; they’ve just kept using their favourite apps, then updated Mac OS because they heard that keeping the system up-to-date was a good thing to do, and now they’re dearly paying the consequences of Catalina’s disruption.

So when I hear tech people say “You know this was coming; you know older apps would eventually be treated as incompatible and no longer work; you had plenty of time to prepare any needed change or adjustment”, my response is — Yes, I knew, but you have no idea how many regular folks did not. And I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame them for that.

Today’s culture of waste — where everything is considered short-lived and disposable, and so many things are thoughtlessly made obsolete at an ever-increasing pace — is especially apparent with software, which is already intangible to begin with. The idea is you use whatever’s available for as long as it’s available, and then you move on. You have to move on, because ‘progress’. Adapt or die. (I’m fine with that when discussing human evolution in general, but today’s technology pace is just ridiculous and unsustainable in a truly healthy fashion).

Who cares if you have to drastically change habits and workflows? It’s your fault if you’re not flexible, they say. You have to keep babysitting apps and operating systems, and be constantly aware of changes, bugs, and other disrupting factors. And while, in principle, I agree that today you need to be more aware of what’s going on in tech, 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.

I’m getting carried away and rambling. My point is, I’ve been into technology for more than 30 years, and I feel that Apple’s software culture has become progressively more user-hostile than it used to be. Today at times it seems that the user is the last concern when making software-related decisions. In the pre-Web era, end users were even more on their own when it came to dealing with software applications and OS maintenance, but while they did indeed encounter the occasional bug or issue, applications felt more robust; ‘built to last’, if you like. You felt like a well-treated customer; today it seems we’re all beta testers.

One could argue that, at least in Apple’s case, the software-related agenda has changed. Apple seems to be treating its software as if it were just a pawn in the bigger chess game of platforms and services. There is a detachment, particularly with Mac OS, that’s hard to swallow. At Apple’s executive level, it feels like nobody uses or cares about Mac OS. Whatever care there is, it isn’t directed towards users’ needs, but corporate strategy. Someone decides that it would be a good move to implement a set of technologies so that iPad apps can easily be adapted to work with Mac OS. The plan is swiftly (pun intended) moved forward with total disregard for any possible collateral damage. We have to get to this unification goal, one way or another. For this to happen, Mac OS gets subjected to all kind of pruning and grafting, and almost every other aspect of the system becomes a secondary concern. The Human Interface Guidelines? Eh, that’s an old set of rules. Times change! Usability? Eh, users will figure it out.

Security is treated more or less the same way. As a strategic piece. The way it has been implemented in Mac OS recently feels a bit overkill. I know cybersecurity is hard, today more than ever, and that there are security threats at every corner. But the way Catalina locks things down isn’t fine-grained and user-friendly at all. Why? I keep having the same feeling, and I’ve said it before: that Apple (and I mean Apple management here) can’t be bothered. Quick and dirty measures to get the job done, tout about shipping a secure system that protects the users, and move on.

Apple has more or less always said Jump! and users and developers have always been expected to reply, How high? That attitude, We know what’s best for you, was tolerable — at times even welcome — when it was crystal clear that Apple really knew what was best. Whenever I go back to this lecture about the origins of the Apple human interface, I am reminded that there used to be a lot of key figures at Apple who truly fucking cared about the software they produced and how it was supposed to work. As I noted in my commentary on that lecture:

It’s true that nowadays users are generally more tech-savvy than in the early 1980s, but I don’t think that’s a good reason to demote consistency in user interfaces, system software, third-party applications, in favour of an “anything goes, just make it cool” attitude. If you stop enforcing your own Human Interface Guidelines, if you yourself constantly break your own guidelines, developers will feel free to do the same and will get lazier overall.

Oh, and spare me the apologetic excuse that now things are more complicated than they used to be, because now Apple has many more platforms to take care of. Apple has the means and the money to do better by their users, especially Mac users, but they appear to lack the internal organisation to do so. And it’s also clear it’s not high on their list of priorities anyway.

You can’t keep looking at the future and disregard what came before as if it were all utterly useless. To get back to Catalina, I fail to see how it can be considered an improvement over the status quo, and a compelling upgrade. Is it better to have a Mac that can only run 64-bit apps and the worst of both worlds that are Catalyst apps, or a Mac that can essentially run every Mac Intel binary produced since 2006, plus whatever it’s cooking at the moment?

Do you want Mac OS to become bloated like Windows just to ensure backward compatibility? — you ask.

I don’t really think it would have to come to that. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was able to run all PowerPC applications that came before, and it certainly wasn’t a bloated system. It was probably the last Mac OS version to deliver what Mac users really wanted, by the way.

All right, I have rambled enough.

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.

 

Updates

• Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 2)
• Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 3)
• Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth (Part 4)

 

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