| I will preface this by saying that for anyone who does have issues, it sucks. I empathize with you. Data loss is frustrating. Catalina seems to have been an especially large paradigm shift as well, so seems there are edge cases. Having said that, Im curious if these folks went in blindly with no upgrade plan. ANY time you update ANY OS, you should do a bit of recon to know what you can and cannot live without, and take a safety copy of those items. The referenced email shows that maybe the person was a bit careless and over-reliant on the process "just working". Re: barrage of security pop ups? I see the usual suspects (kernel extension needs approval, can the installer access an external drive, etc) but weren't most of these in previous versions of MacOS? Also, do you want Apple to choose for you? Unfortunately, there is an entire industry of shady individuals, companies and nation states dedicated to exploiting software. I dont think any software vendor enjoys worsening the user experience because the world contains @$$holes. I dont see a way around this for any OS. I admit I jumped to Catalina on Day 1 but only after taking a backup of what I needed and ensuring I could wipe and revert to Mojave. Surprisingly, even apps that I had that were not Catalina compatible mostly all worked fine. I did lose a few 32 bit apps, but nothing I couldnt live without or didnt have an equal substitute for. I only use a mail client for work email and that is outlook. I havent used the mail app in 10 years, and it sounds like it was the source of frustration for this user. I do think Apple should do better vetting upgrades. iTunes split- I don't really notice any difference save for the UI. I dont have strong feelings about this app other than when I forget to specify a launch app for an audio file Im working on, iTunes is the default(I should change that...) and it is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW to launch. Im guessing the music library database is the culprit here. Maybe they could async that part and just call the music library offline/verifying so that you can play the single file you clicked quickly... |
The "Part 1" article in the series addresses this: yes, we techies understand that we need to do this, but most people are not techies. Most users of Macs are not techies. They expect upgrades to Just Work, and they expect their machine to always take care of their data. That's a lot of what they think they are buying from Apple, which is not unreasonable given that that is (or at least used to be) one of Apple's main selling points as compared to Windows: they carefully integrate the hardware and software to make sure everything Just Works.
If Apple is no longer making that guarantee, why would you pay all the extra money for a Mac?