I use Catalina on 3 production machines, including running them to the limits with Apple and other pro level apps and have zero problems. AppleCare staff use Catalina in their machines, including supporting Pro-Apps without issue,
For me with experience going back to the very first Macs, Catalina has been better than some releases, no worse than others. Saying MacOS doesn’t get the care and love is rubbish - sorry.
I don’t want to get into an OS version war with anyone 
Of course your personal experience is entirely valid to you. Having used macOS since 10.3 for scientific computing and general productivity, and as someone who often gets called in to fix other peoples problems, Catalina is a culmination in a downwards slide of quality.
But it is not just me and some random moaners on reddit who have had bad luck, but an increasing number of recognised power users and long-time developers. Leaks from engineers within Apple iterate disfunction from within: management and marketing continue to push a yearly release cycle, and this does not create a healthy environment for rigorous QA.
mjtsai.com/blog/2019/10/16/catalina-vista/
mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/23/anno … -features/
Tsai’s blog isn’t a one-person shop – he collates across a wide breadth of developers with online personas. This isn’t only a Catalina issue, but a slow decline (Mossberg’s 2016 column|Marco Arment in 2015). Of course, it is hard to objectively measure macOS software quality without access to the Apple bug tracker and fair reporting from engineers (you may argue the recent leaks were just from rogue staff with an axe to grind).
I agree with nontroppo, and I think that the culling of the dedicated macOS team (in 2016, or perhaps even earlier) speaks volumes about Apple’s focus.
I think the Intel Mac and macOS have had their day. Apple seems to have been intending to move on for years now.
Wild speculation and not supported by other channels within Apple.
FWIW, Apple announced a new Intel-based Mac Pro in February of this year, and it’s a beast. Not the kind of investment I would expect to see if they were planning to abandon Intel in the short term.
apple.com/mac-pro/pdf/Mac_P … b_2020.pdf
Katherine
Exactly, and the latest Pro Apps releases are designed to take advantage Of that power. The latest i9 16” MacBook Pro outruns most desktop machines.
Not known by most of the Naysayers is that a number of the Intel processors in Macbooks are Apple only versions with thinner die, lower power etc. You only do that for a customer who is committed to large volumes of each sku.
While they may well have integrated iOS/Mac teams, that is more an indicator of the increasing power and capability of iOS, not decreasing power of MacOS.
Those who think Mac and MacOS are no longer a focus at Apple ‘watch this space’ as they say.
Yes, there may well be A series Macs shortly in addition to Intel, and again, that is not an indicator of dumbing down Mac, rather an indicator of the raw power of the latest A series processors.
And also the raw power of the latest Intel chips. I see the A series processors as likely to fill in the lower end of the Mac space for people who need more than a tablet but don’t need (or want to pay for) a “Pro” Mac. It could easily be more cost effective to use a new generation A series rather than an older generation Intel chip in that niche. (Not to mention having a second source keeps Intel on their toes.)
Katherine
Been a very odd wobble at Apple, not updating the Mac Pro and the Air for years and dropping the Time Capsule (gateway for many Mac products) range and the servers but then suddenly bringing the Air and Mac Pro back from the edge of the grave (none of that is speculation). I suspect they planned an earlier move from Intel but then found they needed to delay for some reason.
From Jobs onwards, there have been endless pointers that Apple wants control and comprehensive integration over its devices, and the end point of that would be using Arm across its range. If some think that is in doubt, that’s fair enough. People understand the world differently. What need to call other users’ thoughts “silly” or “wild” … such words are just a form of shouting and suggestive that the writer is unable to engage in an open-minded manner.
Yes, Katherine, the latest updates are powerful. Do you think Apple will keep multiple OSes going for long if it does produce a low-end Arm Mac that satisfies a lot of users? Is the Intel Mac market large enough to command focus? These are genuine questions, not rhetorical attempts to inflame. I don’t know the answer to these things, and I value what you think. I can see a case where the numbers just won’t make sense for Apple to keep the Intel Macs going.
Anecdotally, I know several people who have largely transitioned to using iPads and iPhones: their iMacs and MacBooks sold or boxed up in cupboards. It feels as though change is happening. Do you perhaps see the same from your own non-Scrivener experiences? Do you see a shift in the tech support you offer for Scrivener? You have an insight I don’t have, and that insight is interesting, just as it is interesting to hear tech users like nontroppo talk about their experiences with Catalina. I welcome views shared (not shouted [by others]).
There’s more to an ecosystem than tablets and phones. I believe Apple has said that they don’t expect the high end Macs to be top sellers, but that they are critical tools for the content and software creators that Apple depends on to drive their hardware sales. I suspect there’s also a halo effect: Audi doesn’t sell many R8s, but people come to the showroom to see the supercar and end up buying something else. “Most powerful desktop computer available” is a nice title to have,
Personally, I don’t see myself abandoning Mac OS until iPadOS (or whatever) supports true multitasking. I routinely swap between four or five applications when I’m working on an article. (Mail, multiple browser tabs, DevonThink, Scrivener, Scapple, sometimes others.) Other kinds of content creation have similar requirements. I love my iPad Mini and use it constantly, but only for a very specific list of tasks. It isn’t the general purpose do everything tool that my iMac is. I don’t, for instance, use my iPad when I’m handling support tickets for iOS Scrivener: I’ll have it open to the application, but I’ll actually write my answer to the request on my iMac.
Both Mac Scrivener and Win Scrivener generate significantly larger support volumes than iOS Scrivener. Some of that may be because the desktop versions have more of the complex features that tend to drive support requests – the desktop versions may get more requests per thousand users – but of course that also means that people are using those complex features.
Katherine
What do they use at work, though?
Tablets and phones have unquestionably captured a large share of personal and recreational computer use, and have helped put software into places where it simply didn’t exist before. But how much of that is an expansion of the overall market, rather than a displacement of existing tools?
Every browser tab and every mobile app has at least one developer (usually more) behind it. What are those people using?
Katherine
Think back to the PowerPC to Intel transition. They managed that (largely) without fuss. That points to Apple being able to run the same OS on two platforms. Microsoft are trying same with ARM Windows machines though with less success using 32 but only emulation and compatibility problems. Expect Apple to do it full 64 bit all the way and pretty much seamlessly.
I’ll break from Katherine in saying I expect (if it happens) the ARM processors to start bottom end but to also cover up to the lower end of Pro.
Thanks, Katherine, for the detailed replies.
I comprehend the need for content-creation tools beyond what iOS-based platforms currently offer, and true multitasking is a must for many people in the way you describe. And I don’t doubt that Apple needs to offer powerhouse devices (though it allowed the Mac Pro to languish for so long), but I believe Apple’s intention is to do that using chips it develops, rather than relying on Intel; with iOS as the core building block, not macOS as we know it.
Safe to deduce from what you have written that if Apple can produce an Arm-based Mac that can run an OS with capabilities similar to those seen in macOS that you would embrace such a device?
My contact field is narrow: people in the arts (writers, actors, singers, directors, etc) who use their devices to plan or plot or produce or communicate, rather than output work. I prefer using MacBooks, but my partner has transitioned over the last year to writing exclusively on an iPad Pro (the Magic Keyboard, Apple Pencil, and cursor input were the final nails in the once-beloved iMac’s coffin). I know my experience is atypical, but the people in my frame of reference who were using towers or desktops or laptops five or ten years ago have all pretty much transitioned away from the larger devices, certainly the towers and desktops, and increasingly away from the laptops as well. It feels as if the tide is running in one direction … as Steve Jobs pointed out, not everyone needs a truck.
Thanks so much for sharing and explaining. WWDC should be an interesting watch this year.
Computers are like cameras. Just because every second “device” out there has one, it doesn’t mean that no one needs a large formate film based box. There will ALWAYS be a marker for mocOS based "power machines. But they will get more expensive and be the realm of specialty users. Kind of like MocOS is today…
Sure. As a user, I care what a system can do, not what chips it has.
Now, I also think it would be foolish to believe that Intel will go quietly. They made some concessions to Apple to get the Mac business in the first place, and will probably be willing to go to significant lengths to keep it. As I said, Apple’s latest “Pro” devices suggest a commitment to Intel for at least the life of this hardware platform.
Katherine
That’s a marketing decision more than a design decision. Given an ARM-based box with X capabilities, what label do you stick on it?
Katherine
Back when coffee shops were a thing – you know, January – most of the people I saw working in coffee shops were using laptops. At conferences, my iPad + external keyboard combination is still rare enough that people ask me about it.
Katherine
Spend time with more “sales” people in the “enterprise” space. They have no idea what the systems do, but they all have iPads with keyboards and can send you email from any place in the planet!
Most of them are actually pretty savvy about the capabilities but nearly all the folks I know that are using tablet style devices are in sales. The medical community WAS looking like the first real adopters of tablets to replace nearly all input but that seems to have fallen off in the last 2 years. I know my wife has transitioned 100% to an iPad for her “stuff” which can be summed as “email, web, media” with no real compute/graphic needs. And I think that’s the key for most tablet users.
That’s largely what I use mine for, too. – Katherine
That’s not true for all users. Intel has pretty thoroughly shot themselves in the foot for quite a while with the corners they’ve cut over the years that are coming back in the form of all of these chip-level security flaws, and the mitigations thereof that sacrifice much of the speed gains Intel chips boast. That, combined with AMD managing to figure their issues out and offer a strong alternative, has the potentially to really change the landscape in the CPU market. I know a lot of users who would have happily bought a Mac who now are staying far away from any Intel processor, even those that aren’t affected by the flaws, because they feel they can no longer trust Intel’s design process. That means no more MacOS devices – it’s either Linux or Windows on AMD Ryzen processors, or lower-power ARM devices.
Getting ARM + iOS to the point where it can do what Intel + MacOS can do today is still a mutli-year investment, and I hope that Apple figured out that just letting product lines lie fallow doesn’t do them or their customers any good, so it makes sense to fill in the gaps for now even as you work on breaking that dependency in the future.