New version of macOS Catalina supplemental update now available
Apple has modified and re-uploaded the macOS Catalina Supplemental Update from October 15, and has reissued it on Monday afternoon for reasons unknown.
Six days after releasing a supplemental update for macOS Catalina, Apple has rolled out a new version of the same Supplemental Update. Release notes haven't changed.
Apple says that beyond fixes for an iCloud Login problem, the update will improve installation reliability on computers with low available space, rectifies a Setup Assistant completion problem that was forcing users to restart their machine during the initial login, resolves an iCloud Terms and Conditions acceptance issue, and improves the reliability of iCloud saves of Apple Arcade data. It does not appear that there are any security updates at all in the update.
Already-updated machines do not need the new version, according to sources inside Apple not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. It isn't presently clear why the new version is needed.
Following months of beta testing, Apple's macOS Catalina was released on October 7. Among the most notable changes are Sidecar allowing an iPad to be used as a second screen, the split of iTunes into several applications, and the death of 32-bit applications.
Six days after releasing a supplemental update for macOS Catalina, Apple has rolled out a new version of the same Supplemental Update. Release notes haven't changed.
Apple says that beyond fixes for an iCloud Login problem, the update will improve installation reliability on computers with low available space, rectifies a Setup Assistant completion problem that was forcing users to restart their machine during the initial login, resolves an iCloud Terms and Conditions acceptance issue, and improves the reliability of iCloud saves of Apple Arcade data. It does not appear that there are any security updates at all in the update.
Already-updated machines do not need the new version, according to sources inside Apple not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. It isn't presently clear why the new version is needed.
Following months of beta testing, Apple's macOS Catalina was released on October 7. Among the most notable changes are Sidecar allowing an iPad to be used as a second screen, the split of iTunes into several applications, and the death of 32-bit applications.
Comments
It was a little bit freaky but a second attempt got It done.
The first couple of weeks with Catalina have been very annoying. I haven't lost any data that I know of but having to log into iCloud and my iTunes AppleID several times, resync my music, resync my photos, re-download album artwork, re-download books, reinstall XCode from scratch, and come up with workarounds to compensate for apps that suddenly no longer work correctly, e.g., Noiseless, has not been fun.
I hate to throw the "s-word" around, but Apple has been downright Sloppy with this release. As a developer, I'm sure that having to push out a patch (or a "supplement" if you want to obfuscate reality behind a sugary term) immediately after the general release is gut wrenching. But now we're talking a patch to the patch. If you live in a rural area with poor road maintenance, which comes down to most of the US, you know how annoying it is when the road maintenance department starts patching the holes that have formed in the previous generation of patches that were put in over the original potholes. Yeah, it's a sloppy mess made even worse by third, fourth, and fifth generation patches all piled on top of one another. Catalina may start to resemble one of those sloppy, multigenerational, patchy roads if they don't clean up their act very soon.
But I agree, when there are multiple such updates in very short succession there are fundamental issues, and primarily a testament to a product release cycle that is too tight for quality work.
Also, I am not entirely sure the public beta cycle is productive, as it will create a lot of noise and distractions for the developers.
s/
From now on, every move Apple do should be scrutinised for pleasing the Communist Party China.
I'm not saying that heads should roll, but at the very least Apple should own the problem and apologize for the annoyances it has knowingly unleashed on its customers. Nobody is perfect but not talking about it or hiding behind legalese and not calling patches and bug fixes what they really are is kind of cowardly. Repairing a broken bone by resetting the bone and applying a cast is a fix. Taking a vitamin is a supplement. Big difference.
I'm not sold on whether the public beta program has a causal relationship with these late breaking bugs. If Apple was running a traditional beta program with a fairly limited number of very intensive and knowledgable beta testers then I would say they were insane to attempt to do it at the scale they are doing public betas. I think Apple's objective with public betas is really to get these public betas out there with instrumentation and reporting fully engaged. If every public beta "tester" left the instrumentation and reporting turned on then the public betas are more akin to automated testing but with random human drivers instead of canned test scripts. This is more like a big data approach feeding analytics rather than individual developers having to reproduce reported bugs and troubleshoot the issues in their debugger. The analytics probably get distilled down into a form like a heat map that identifies the parts of the software architecture that are generating the most issues, and a developer or team of developers takes a closer look at the affected areas to see what's going on and attempt to identify the root cause.
Unlike traditional beta testing where the development, or support team, is heavily focused on fixing bugs reported by the beta testers, a big data based beta testing program is working on issues arising from the analysis of the automatically reported data coming in from the field, whether or not a bug report has been submitted by a beta tester. With the number of resources at Apple's disposal I'd expect they use both approaches for beta testing and probably utilize other approaches as well. But obviously, some things are still slipping through the cracks, which I think is more due to sloppiness and not an inherent weakness in their verification and validation process, which includes the beta programs.