MacOS Catalina has arrived, but hold up on that upgrade until you read Ars' 20k+ word review

[View this email in your browser]( [Open Ars Technica in your browser]( [Image] [Catalina, an island off the coast of California and the new MacOS release name.]( This week might as well be a holiday for long time Ars readers. The latest edition of MacOS has arrived, and that means 20,000+ words of Ars' annual MacOS review have, too. Since the [2001 release of MacOS]( 10, Ars has produced short novellas that outline the ins and outs of one of the world's premier operating systems. The tradition started with the [legendary John Siracusa](, and these reviews have only been penned by one other writer since: Ars Editor Emeritus Andrew Cunningham (who's back again for Catalina). This week's Orbital Transmission really couldn't focus on anything else—we're highlighting everything you need to know about MacOS Catalina upon its arrival. And if you want a taste of what awaits you whenever you've got a few hours to read, here's how you can tell Cunningham truly explores every aspect of the operating system—even the naming scheme gets analyzed: "The state of California has 842 miles of coastline, more than 3,000 lakes, dozens of small islands, multiple distinct biomes, and at least one noteworthy estuary. So if you were to decide, say, to name your operating system releases after California locations, you'd have an unbelievably large and diverse group of locations to choose from. So why are the people who name macOS releases so obsessed with rocks? Save for Mavericks, which used beach-y wave iconography, all of the other California-themed macOS releases have been all about rocks. Yosemite is a park known for its hiking and rock climbing, and El Capitan is a reference to a specific rock within that park. Both Sierra and High Sierra are named for the same mountain range (mountains are big rocks). The desert-themed Mojave almost breaks the cycle, but deserts are full of sand, and sand is mostly little tiny rocks. The desktop wallpaper was a mountain of sand, small rocks piled together in imitation of a big rock; in some ways, it is the rockiest of all. And then we come to Catalina, a small, sparsely populated island off of California's southwestern coast. It's only 22 miles long from end to end, and the branding Apple uses appears to be a head-on photo of its western tip. It is, at least, a rock with water around it. But, nevertheless, rocks. Does this rock fixation have something to do with macOS' status as the bedrock of Apple's ecosystem, the small-but-vital chunk of its business from which iPhone and iPad apps spring? Is it a reference to the operating system's rock-solid Unix foundation? It's hard to say. But I challenge the Mac team to come up with a name for next year's release that references a forest or a field or something else green and growing." —[@NathanMattise]( Orbital Transmission 10.08.2019 [(image) ]( [MacOS Catalina has arrived... but maybe give it a few days]( Last year, the betas and the GM build of Mojave felt pretty solid, and it was the rare macOS release where waiting for the 0.1 or 0.2 update didn't feel super necessary. But Cunningham thinks you should probably wait for one or two major bugfix updates to come out before you install Catalina. As he writes: "Apple's software development teams all seem to be a bit overwhelmed this year. Across the board, the release schedule has been uncommonly disruptive and chaotic; iPadOS 13.0 went through eight developer betas alongside iOS 13.0, but it didn't ship to the public until version 13.1 was ready. Version 13.1 itself was [originally announced for September 30]( before unexpectedly being moved up to September 24, and the release ended up being [patched two times in less than a week](." WatchOS 6.0 had similar earlier hiccups, and Apple has release a whopping 11 develop betas of Catalina since the summer. When you add the complicating factor of 32-bit app support being removed, "giving these developers a couple of months to catch up will result in a smoother Catalina upgrade experience for you," Cunningham writes. [(image) ]( [Catalyst is MacOS's biggest change in years, but you won't immediately notice]( "Catalyst” is the official, public name for the collection of technologies that will allow developers to port their iPadOS apps to the Mac (you may also know it as “Marzipan,” which was widely reported as the internal codename for the project). For users, this means theoretically a more robust selection of native apps available on the Mac. The best iPad apps (note: not phone apps) will eventually become available for more users despite less developer effort (as an app developed for one platform should more easily translate to the other in a Catalyst world). Ars talked to devs about this [back in the summer]( and again this fall, and currently they appear to be cautiously optimistic. "As long as an app has a lot of default components, default layout and default interactions on iPad, those will map well into default Mac behaviors and looks," developer Max Seelemann told Ars (Seelman is the Executive Director of Ulysses, a Markdown-based text editor app). "As soon as an app starts to get complex and you customize things, Catalyst will likely become more of a roadblock.” [(image) ]( [You (yes you) can make your own bootable macOS 10.15 Catalina USB install drive]( Apple hasn’t shipped operating systems on physical media in [a full decade](, but there are still good reasons to want a [reliable old USB stick for macOS Catalina](. If you find yourself in this camp, Ars has again produced a guide to creating your own USB installer for MacOS Catalina, and it's pretty simple. All you need is a Mac where you have admin access, a 16GB USB drive, and the MacOS 10.15 Catalina installer from the Mac App Store. [(image) ]( [Soon, you will be able to run MacOS on a shiny new Mac Pro]( What good is a new operating system without some new hardware to run it? Rumors and [reports citing people in the know]( indicate new MacBook Pros may be on the way, but we know for sure a new Mac Pro is coming. Apple announced it at WWDC this summer and [we got to lay eyes on the cheese grater-esque device]( at the time. That grater design is actually driven by function (it boosts the cooling system), and the Mac Pro itself offers some welcome upgrades over previous installments. The new Mac Pro will double the number of PCIe expansion slots over that classic tower (a total of eight), and it will be available in configurations ranging from 8 to 28 cores as well as memory up to 1.5 TB with six memory channels and 12 DIMM slots. [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2019 Condé Nast, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Condé Nast One World Trade Center New York, NY 10007 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences](newsletter=ars) or [unsubscribe from this list](newsletter=ars).