Apple today seeded the fifth beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina for testing purposes, a little over two weeks after seeding the fourth macOS Catalina beta and more than a month after the new Mac operating system update was first unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
The new macOS Catalina beta can be downloaded using the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences. As with all new betas, macOS Catalina should not be installed on a primary machine because it is early release software and has bugs.
macOS Catalina eliminates the iTunes app, splitting it into Music, Podcasts, and TV apps. The Apple Music and Apple Podcasts apps are available now, while the Apple TV app is coming later this year.
The three new apps offer similar functionality to iTunes, but are split up by feature. iOS device management is still available on the Mac, but it's now done through the Finder rather than iTunes.
With a new Sidecar feature, you can turn your iPad into a second display for your Mac with just the click of a button. The Apple Pencil works with Sidecar, so you can turn your iPad into a drawing tablet in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
Your Apple Watch can be used to approve security prompts for passwords and other info in macOS Catalina, and Macs with a T2 chip now support Activation Lock, making them more secure. There's a new Find My that brings the Find My Mac app to the Mac for the first time and even lets you track your devices when they're offline, or, in the case of notebooks, closed.
Screen Time is available on the Mac as well as iOS devices, and Project Catalyst, a new Apple initiative, will let developers easily port their iPad apps over to the Mac to increase the number of Mac apps available.
There's a new Photos interface that surfaces your best photos organized by day, month, or year, there's a new start page in Safari, Mail has new tools for muting email threads and blocking senders, and the Reminders app has been overhauled. 32-bit apps no longer work in macOS Catalina, which is something to be aware of before installing the beta.
For more details on macOS Catalina, make sure to check out our macOS Catalina roundup.
Top Rated Comments
With this latest Beta, the installation got stuck with the Apple logo and the progress bar around 2/3 of the way. It’s been like that for 4 hours.
After forcefully powering off the Mac and powering on again I was prompted with the log in screen with Mojave’s background. Typed in the password, press entered... the progress bar took like 10 min to reach the end and now stuck there for the last 30 or so minutes.
I won’t be updating any other machines from Beta 4, that one gave me a lot of problems but Beta 5 isn’t even loading up.
second of all, I restarted a few times after it was taking more than an hour - reset PRAM, reset SMC, booted into recovery and verified HD, tried recovery install (failed), so went back to it. you can check my post history if you still think i'm a moron who just sat for 40 hours staring at a screen.
anyway, the moral of the story is that NOTHING seems to alleviate this. i sent a ton of logs thru Feedback but haven't heard anything about it, and it's clearly not fixed, so not sure what else to do at this point but wait.
[doublepost=1564677629][/doublepost] thank you.
now get off my damn lawn.
You make a lot of assumptions, you don't know his skills, throwing insults on top of it.
Maybe you should do research before you write such a post, like looking at his posts history.