Upgrade to Catalina MacOS or Not?

A lot of us like Mac OS for its stability and so, in the usual course of things, its a no brainier to update to the latest and greatest operating system from Apple.

For starters you need to have one of these in terms of hardware to upgrade

According to Apple these machines will support it

• MacBook (2015 and later)
• MacBook Air (2012 and later)
• MacBook Pro (2012 and later)
• Mac mini (2012 and later)
• iMac (2012 and later)
• iMac Pro (2017 and later)
• Mac Pro (2013 and later)

You can download mac OS Catalina now, for free.

Statutory Warning: All the very best. Backup before upgrade. Read the note on third party backups below. I am serious. Can't give up the basics.

As a hands on technologist, for me having my development tools ready and working is too important. That said, Xcode 11 should do well for now (Some great stuff with swift UI). I still have a grouse with Swift for breaking code on upgrade to newer versions of swift. You can still get it on the Mojave OS. If this is the only reason as a developer do not upgrade yet unless you want the sidecare feature for iPad/pen( iPad becomes a mac extension). That said MS Office or similar software like LibreOffice are just as important to most. As you would have already guessed. This time around it gets a bit tricky. Some of us flinch just because of its size. 8.09 GB. Those who do not have high speed internet will needless to say, have this work at night.

For those of us who are dependent on open source tool like Seashore (image editor) Project tracking tool such as OpenProj there could be some bad news. This time around all your apps will need to 64 Bit. Among other things this is going to cost you $$. Finding suitable viable alternatives will more importantly take away your time. The questions do you really have an option.

The answer to that is Yes and No. Let me explain. If your critical tools do not stop you for the next 5 / 6 days then you are in luck! If not hold on and let the research happen and they will be listed out.

Here are some suggestions.

MS Office :

1. Use MS Office cloud based version
2. Use Google Doc and Spreadsheets

Critical Path (project management:

1. Google doc / Spreadsheet or
2. Buy Omni Plan

If you are a techie- Here is a long winded path:

Install Oracle Virtual box / VMWare Fusion and Install MS Windows on it ( I do not recommend this path) .

If you perform a remote work on office network you might be a another victim if you use Open VPN they have some builds out but check out this link :https://tunnelblick.net/cCatalina.html

According to reports some adobe software are also affected. The report says on the support pages for each piece of software, Adobe acknowledged that the most recent versions of both apps "work with Mac OS 10.15 (Catalina) but have these known compatibility issues." This is for Photoshop and Lightroom Classic CC. Check this link on twitter.

https://twitter.com/search?q=adobe%20catalina&src=typed_query

On one more word of caution. All Apps need to be notarized by Apple. Don't worry about the old apps they will run(mostly) if they are 64bit.

Also note the OS partition is now separate read-only. Some system level tools might run into issues. Backups from third party tools may also be incompatible. Use TimeMachine

All the said, this is for the long term good for the user so a little pain now ( if you can take it ) might not be that bad. One relatively newer macs System Report > Software > Applications can tell you what will fail. If you area iOS/MacOS developer your old builds will also be marked as needing upgrade. Only when you ready. Breathe!!