I tried installing Catalina on a spare 2013 MacBook Pro 13" Retina. It failed. Just to be safe I tried installing Catalina on a totally clean VMWare Fusion (ver 11.1) virtual Mac machine. It too failed. But you know what? No surprises. This is exactly how early betas are expected to behave, especially on 6 year old hardware which most Apple devs and testers probably haven't touched in approximately 6 years or so.
The point here is that there is a huge difference between taking on the role and responsibilities of being a true Beta Tester versus simply being an enthusiast, hobbyist, or someone who can't wait for Christmas and can't help but peek into the closet where Mom and Dad are hiding the Christmas presents. If you are truly a beta tester you kind of expect the early betas to puke all over themselves and are somewhat disappointed if they don't at least huck up a few big chunks so you can blast out some juicy bug reports to the dev team, those folks you absolutely know are lounging around in their fancy ergonomic chairs in their polished ivory towers. As the beta matures to RC and the worst bugs are excised the whole thing will calm down to a boring level for you and your excitement for the current round of beta testing will tail off. Before long you'll be itching to take on the next round of beta testing with fresh new opportunities to inflict pain and suffering on the dev team. Anything that gets destroyed during a beta campaign, including hardware, data, time, careers, and human sanity is simply collateral damage in pursuit of the cause.
So the only real question is: do you really want to be a Beta Tester?
Longtime AppleSeed participant for OS X from Panther to Mountain Lion, or maybe Mavericks, I don't remember. From the days when they used to send you builds of install DVDs in the mail. My focus was testing Chinese and Japanese language features: fonts, input methods, and the like.
I always used SuperDuper! to clone onto a partition on a second drive to test updating (as opposed to clean installs), and also to back up everything in general. This was before Time Machine, or rather during its development, and things could be pretty iffy. You had to be careful.
I see they are still in business. The software was basically developed to serve people testing OS X -- developers, mostly, but also regional specialists like myself and more. Carbon Copy Cloner was another option but I always felt more confident with SuperDuper!
The public beta plus the 32 bit restriction is going to make the internet explode. The Apple Discussion Forums are already rife with “how do I downgrade” cries on a daily basis even without the public beta out there. Computer illiterates doing things that screw up their installations are a major component of the forums. And they ALWAYS, ALWAYS blame Apple.
Betas are betas and I'm staying away from them, but the 32 bit lockout is going to piss off everyone who plays games on their mac. Apps may get updated, but old games don't. Civilization IV will die, for example. And who knows how many indies.
Just when one could think there's a regular supply of games (and I mean games, not the licensed microtransaction crap that Apple seems to promote on iOS) for mac users, Apple has to come and screw it up.
The public beta plus the 32 bit restriction is going to make the internet explode. The Apple Discussion Forums are already rife with “how do I downgrade” cries on a daily basis even without the public beta out there. Computer illiterates doing things that screw up their installations are a major component of the forums. And they ALWAYS, ALWAYS blame Apple.
Betas are betas and I'm staying away from them, but the 32 bit lockout is going to piss off everyone who plays games on their mac. Apps may get updated, but old games don't. Civilization IV will die, for example. And who knows how many indies.
Just when one could think there's a regular supply of games (and I mean games, not the licensed microtransaction crap that Apple seems to promote on iOS) for mac users, Apple has to come and screw it up.
Just to clear the air here, Developers have had around 10 years to make their applications 64-bit. Now that it's down to the end and apps are still not supported, people think it's always Apple's fault. It's the developer who chose not to support 64-bit for whatever reason.
The public beta plus the 32 bit restriction is going to make the internet explode. The Apple Discussion Forums are already rife with “how do I downgrade” cries on a daily basis even without the public beta out there. Computer illiterates doing things that screw up their installations are a major component of the forums. And they ALWAYS, ALWAYS blame Apple.
Betas are betas and I'm staying away from them, but the 32 bit lockout is going to piss off everyone who plays games on their mac. Apps may get updated, but old games don't. Civilization IV will die, for example. And who knows how many indies.
Just when one could think there's a regular supply of games (and I mean games, not the licensed microtransaction crap that Apple seems to promote on iOS) for mac users, Apple has to come and screw it up.
Just to clear the air here, Developers have had around 10 years to make their applications 64-bit. Now that it's down to the end and apps are still not supported, people think it's always Apple's fault. It's the developer who chose not to support 64-bit for whatever reason.
Not into games are you? Games don't get updated 10 years after launch...
The public beta plus the 32 bit restriction is going to make the internet explode. The Apple Discussion Forums are already rife with “how do I downgrade” cries on a daily basis even without the public beta out there. Computer illiterates doing things that screw up their installations are a major component of the forums. And they ALWAYS, ALWAYS blame Apple.
Betas are betas and I'm staying away from them, but the 32 bit lockout is going to piss off everyone who plays games on their mac. Apps may get updated, but old games don't. Civilization IV will die, for example. And who knows how many indies.
Just when one could think there's a regular supply of games (and I mean games, not the licensed microtransaction crap that Apple seems to promote on iOS) for mac users, Apple has to come and screw it up.
Just to clear the air here, Developers have had around 10 years to make their applications 64-bit. Now that it's down to the end and apps are still not supported, people think it's always Apple's fault. It's the developer who chose not to support 64-bit for whatever reason.
Not into games are you? Games don't get updated 10 years after launch…
Comments
The point here is that there is a huge difference between taking on the role and responsibilities of being a true Beta Tester versus simply being an enthusiast, hobbyist, or someone who can't wait for Christmas and can't help but peek into the closet where Mom and Dad are hiding the Christmas presents. If you are truly a beta tester you kind of expect the early betas to puke all over themselves and are somewhat disappointed if they don't at least huck up a few big chunks so you can blast out some juicy bug reports to the dev team, those folks you absolutely know are lounging around in their fancy ergonomic chairs in their polished ivory towers. As the beta matures to RC and the worst bugs are excised the whole thing will calm down to a boring level for you and your excitement for the current round of beta testing will tail off. Before long you'll be itching to take on the next round of beta testing with fresh new opportunities to inflict pain and suffering on the dev team. Anything that gets destroyed during a beta campaign, including hardware, data, time, careers, and human sanity is simply collateral damage in pursuit of the cause.
So the only real question is: do you really want to be a Beta Tester?
I always used SuperDuper! to clone onto a partition on a second drive to test updating (as opposed to clean installs), and also to back up everything in general. This was before Time Machine, or rather during its development, and things could be pretty iffy. You had to be careful.
I see they are still in business. The software was basically developed to serve people testing OS X -- developers, mostly, but also regional specialists like myself and more. Carbon Copy Cloner was another option but I always felt more confident with SuperDuper!
Don't risk your Mac or its data just to try out the macOS Catalina beta
“Stop that rhyming, and I mean it!”