New version of macOS Catalina supplemental update now available

AppleInsider

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.

sergioz

Now that Mac OS in separate partitions, what security update could they make?

lostkiwi

Yeah I had that Setup Assistant completion problem when updating.
It was a little bit freaky but a second attempt got It done. 

dewme

Whew, I just checked Software Update on my main machine and was pleased to find out that I do not have to update again. At least not yet.

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.  

ElCapitan

The saga goes on...

ElCapitan

dewme said:

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. 

It is not the first time around they push a major iOS version and then immediately an update. It has all to do with the logistics of getting millions of new phones into the market, and these obviously have to be produced a bit upfront if they are to be available in major geos at launch. So they inject these with the GM with known issues that they cannot get around to fix unless they stall the entire production pipeline. Which is why they immediately push an update with a batch of fixes that can be applied once the phone is in customer hands. 

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.  

hexclock

Anyone notice how slow Finder windows open now?Select a bunch of folders and open them all. There is a good second or two between each folder opening. 

sweetheart777

Does anyone know if the lost mail issue has been fixed? That's keeping me from upgrading.

ednl

Glad I only upgraded a test drive. Finder windows weren't updating, reported disk free space was completely wrong (out by >10% disk size), downloads corrupted, disk access trouble for all sorts of programs, Safari top sites previews corrupted, general slow down. Horrible.

Spitbath

I was having a problem with the supplemental update last week where when I would restart after downloading the update, system prefs would still say an update was available. I restarted about 5 times before calling Apple support. I was on the phone with them for 3 hours, ran a bunch of tests, including reinstalling the OS from recovery mode which gave us the error message, "PKDownloadError error 8." He said no one has ever received that error before and he wanted me to send him a photo of my screen. We finally figured out it was third party RAM that was preventing the update from installing. We put the RAM that shipped with my machine back in and ran the update with no problems. I have to wonder if this is related to that issue?

baconstang

I can hardly wait to install Catalina.  It'll give me something to do for weeks or months!  And I'll lose Aperture and the countless hours I spent working on those photos.  FUN!


s/

MplsP

A coworker asked me if I’d updated my iMac yet - he got a notice about updating his and was hesitant. I told him to wait. Every day I see new reports like this and I’m glad I waited. I’m sure things will be worked out in a couple months, but in the mean time, there are no features in Catalina that are worth the potential hassle. I’ll stick with Mojave that is stable and works..

ivanh

Check the Apple Maps. Has Tim cooked Taiwan into China?

From now on, every move Apple do should be scrutinised for pleasing the Communist Party China.

dewme

ElCapitan said:

dewme said:

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. 

It is not the first time around they push a major iOS version and then immediately an update. It has all to do with the logistics of getting millions of new phones into the market, and these obviously have to be produced a bit upfront if they are to be available in major geos at launch. So they inject these with the GM with known issues that they cannot get around to fix unless they stall the entire production pipeline. Which is why they immediately push an update with a batch of fixes that can be applied once the phone is in customer hands. 

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.  

I agree in principle of course, because yeah, you do sometimes have to choose between multiple undesirable courses of action and pick the best of the worst. I'm sure that Apple weighs the impact of each of the undesirable choices and goes with the one that's least disruptive ... but to whom? Delaying a product release has serious implications on Apple's bottom line, supply channel, logistics commitments, sales, and so on. So from an Apple centric perspective, pushing a stinky software release out the door is probably the lesser of multiple evils that were available to them at the time. However, from an affected customer perspective it's still a stinky release that incurs losses in time, productivity, and potentially downstream commitments to the customer's own customers.

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.

bigpics

What a mess!

I haven't updated and don't intend to for a good three or four weeks yet. Or whenever readers here issue an "all clear."

This thread reminds me of any number of Windows tech support discussions from years past...

I realize this was an extra ambitious release cycle on both the iOS and the Mac OS sides, but if you're going to stick to a new "version" of your major OSs every year, generally try to make them more "byte-sized" to avoid all this mishegoss....  ... please!

steveau

No compelling reason to upgrade and I don't have weeks of free time to mess around with tweaking my system, tech (modem, router, printer, scanner, hard-drives, etc.), utilities, folders and files (STUFF - is that a new acronym?). I still haven't fixed all of the playlists and album artwork that got lost/messed-up by the last major upgrade. In addition I'll need to replace lots of 32 bit apps - ugh! I think I'll review the situation next year, somewhere around Mac OS 10.15.10.

ElCapitan

dewme said:

ElCapitan said:

dewme said:

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. 

It is not the first time around they push a major iOS version and then immediately an update. It has all to do with the logistics of getting millions of new phones into the market, and these obviously have to be produced a bit upfront if they are to be available in major geos at launch. So they inject these with the GM with known issues that they cannot get around to fix unless they stall the entire production pipeline. Which is why they immediately push an update with a batch of fixes that can be applied once the phone is in customer hands. 

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.  

I'm not sold on whether the public beta program has a causal relationship with these late breaking bugs. 

Because of the way the beta program is run – despite all the instrumentation and automated crash reporting, the betas are commented up and down by just about every publication, blog and forum out there, and you force the developers into the scrum process of hell where they act on the comments (and possibly pressure from marketing and management) fixing what, at that time of the development cycle, are trivia and not fundamentals. 

tryd

I hope they fix Music soon. Finding things in a large library is so much harder in Music than it was in iTunes. I thought Music was supposed to make it easier to manage your music library than iTunes, but they have managed to make it almost unusable.

felix01

Not showing up on my machines yet.

whodiini

Very beta like release.  Lots of problems.  cant burn a dvd from finder.  Itunes split of functions into finder sync, music, movies - lost functionality, lost usability.  Supplemental update killed my mac mini.  About 80% into original update, fans were going full blast and then mac mini died. Its uncharacteristically poor quality.  Sloppy is the right word. Rushed out the door before it was ready.  Stay away until the 15.2 release so they can make it work. Its the worst release since the original os X first version and I have tried them all!

jakespeed

This one installed great. Original - not so good.