Apple releases iOS 13 macOS Catalina public betas

[olliepop]

If you're interested, please be warned that these betas are extremely buggy. I don't mean 1 or 2 bugs experienced per day, I mean a bug in almost every minute of interaction. You will incur severely reduced battery life and many broken apps, particularly on the iOS beta. On the upside, this is an invaluable preview particularly for an app developer or Apple enthusiast.

At the very least you should back up your device first so that you can roll back if necessary - officially there is no other way other than performing a factory reset.

[cassianoleal]

I have been running the betas on 2 laptops and 1 iPhone since they came out.

I had my main laptop crash exactly once - and I think it was due to a buggy kext trying to force its way into the kernel. It hasn't happened again.

There have been a few aesthetic bugs related to the automatic handling of dark/light mode, which can now be enabled without external help (I used to rely on f.lux to get dark mode in the evening). These are pretty benign and don't cause me trouble.

Other than that, macOS Catalina has been smooth sailing, even at compiling software, installing stuff via homebrew, developer tooling - I do mostly Python and Golang stuff but Ruby has been rock solid too.

iOS 13 also brought me a few visual bugs which don't (gah) bug me too much, and I had a few app crashes but nothing horrible either. My bank apps don't work on it yet so I'm currently relying on desktop browsing or other banks, depending on the situation. Not a huge deal either.

Battery life doesn't seem to be suffering on either platform, differently from my experience with previous betas.

[Someone]

If you are “using macOS High Sierra or later on an APFS-formatted startup disk”, you can create additional APFS volumes on the startup disk and install the beta there.

That way, you can switch between your ‘normal’ OS and the beta, and reverting is a matter of deleting the volume you created for the beta (https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208891)

Of course, that is riskier than installing on a separate disk or even Mac, as the beta PS could easily damage both volumes.

[matwood]

I keep reading and hearing what you're saying, but I have been running iPadOS since beta 1 and iOS since beta 2 without many issues. If these are considered so buggy that we need warnings, then we really have been spoiled with the high quality of production releases.

Bugs I've seen:

- Random graphical artifacts/issues related to dark mode.

- BT sometimes disconnects/reconnects - is this really any different than BT normally? ;) - just hit play again usually works.

- Camera app occasionally crashes.

- Tapping the lock screen with the pencil brings up the last note, but sometimes I still have to FaceId to make the note editable.

Battery life has seemed slightly worse to fine.

It's good to remember this is beta software, but the adjectives used to describe the poor quality of this beta have been a little over the top IME.

[DeusExMachina]

In the case of macOS, you can install it on a separate APFS volume [1] without touching your current installation.

I have been using it to test the new features in Xcode 11/ iOS 13, and it has spared me many headaches.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT208891

[airstrike]

Just want to be the one person to reply corroborating this opinion as my experience with the iOS 11 and 12 betas meant frequent crashes and absolutely terrible battery life.

[madeofpalk]

I skipped iOS 13 beta 1, but I installed beta 2 and I haven’t had any major problems. There was a problem in my banking app, which they fixed, and I get some odd audio things here and there, but otherwise it’s relatively fine.

But that’s just my experience.

[Razengan]

Of course everyone's experience will vary, but I've been using macOS Catalina, iOS 13 and watchOS 6 as my main OSes since WWDC Day 1.

No catastrophic bugs or crashes so far. Everything seems performant, but I feel that battery charge lasts less than it should/did.

One serious bug is that App Store apps cannot seem to update, or even be installed on the Mac.

[sq_]

I've just installed the iOS 13 public beta, and I can confirm that certain things are definitely a bit buggy (especially autocorrect, not sure what's up exactly but it's being annoying).

However, based on my experience with the iOS 11 and 12 betas, I'm confident that most of the issues will be fixed pretty quickly.

[jaegerpicker]

This isn't my experience at all. I've been running iPadOS since WWDC and have had only a few very minor bugs. There are a couple of apps that won't run (one game that hard locks the whole OS is pretty bad) but in terms of the OS itself, very few bugs.

[davidcollantes]

Running iPadOS since it was made publicly available. Very few bugs, nothing like what you describe.

[rado]

Surprised to read this, as they have been very solid here.

[nothis]

For a while, now, I get these warnings that 32bit programs will soon be unsupported in macOS. Is this the release where they drop support?

[arthurfm]

Yes.

https://medium.com/@hammen/significant-changes-in-macos-10-1...

11. As expected and previously announced, support for 32-bit processes/i386 architectures has been removed.

Printer drivers are also deprecated in Catalina. A future version of macOS will remove support for them completely.

24. “lpadmin: Printer drivers are deprecated and will stop working in a future version of CUPS”. man lpadmin on a macOS Catalina system for more details. It seems that Apple wants admins to move from lpd/smb/socket (JetDirect) to AirPrint.

[cameronbrown]

What's the situation with gaming/Steam? Is this going to be another situation like Ubuntu's where thousands of legacy applications just get dropped? How will Wine function on 32-bit?

[Tinfoilhat666]

Legacy video codecs are also removed. https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT209029

[PascLeRasc]

I'm actually kinda excited by them dropping 32-bit support. There are so many awful applications I've had to use for work, like VPNs or a print application or license server, that just suck battery life, force-open themselves at login with no way to disable, aren't optimized for retina, crash all the time, etc, and they haven't been maintained in years since they still "work". But this will force some maintenance to happen. I realize they could still suck on 64-bit but at least they'll have to be looked at again.

[auggierose]

I am basically very happy with the betas, they have features I really rely on in the app I am currently working on; for example a custom UTI deriving from "com.apple.package" is now properly working on iCloud, although Dropbox on iOS doesn't work with it (yet?) but shows a big red minus sign for those files.

What bugs me with Catalina is that my iMac Pro keeps rebooting when left unattended for an unpredictable but short time. I fixed that for now by using "Owly" which keeps it awake ...

[azinman2]

Try caffinate, it’s built in.

[mark_l_watson]

I updated to all three betas last week. I have been submitting suggestions and bug reports to Apple and one app company, but by and large I am enjoying all three betas. I especially like the desktop mode in iPad 13 beta Safari.

[mosselman]

Based on previous betas, how soon can we expect the final versions? I am pretty excited about some new features

[jpgvm]

Final release normally coincides with sale of new hardware. So likely September to come with new MacBook Pro and Mac Pro models.

[saagarjha]

A week or two after the September iPhone event.

[jmelloy]

September/October

[tyingq]

Title could use a comma or "and" before macOS.

[crb]

Is iPadOS v1 or v13?

[geoffpado]

According to the "software version" field in Settings in the betas, 13.0.

[AgloeDreams]

v13, likely just because it is basically iOS whereas WatchOS differs from iOS in big ways.

[jclardy]

My guess would be 1.0, since WatchOS is now 6.0.

[cudacurious]

Has anyone tried Catalina with an Nvidia eGPU?

[nvrspyx]

Nvidia is still not supported. Probably not anytime soon either.

[saagarjha]

Didn't these come out earlier last week?

[xenospn]

Yeah, a few days ago.

[ing33k]

running catalina since 3 days. Already loving it !

[sys_64738]

Apple should reset the Mac OS X clock back to the Snow Leopard 10.6.8 source tree. Toss everything else away.

[tangue]

This is the last version of OS X I enjoyed. Fast and stable.

[saagarjha]

Congratulations, your OS is now full of security holes.

[wincy]

My iPhone 6 Plus force upgraded itself to iOS 12 several months ago when I had to restore my phone. Unfortunately, my Apple Watch Series 0 or whatever you’ll call it only works with iOS 11. And now I won’t be able to upgrade my 6 Plus. So my two old devices will permanently and unnecessarily be incompatible with one another forever, through no action of my own (there was no way to avoid the iOS 12 “upgrade”).

Both will permanently be in the past, but one major version away from compatibility. It’s pretty frustrating.

[sirn]

Huh, I have Apple Watch Series 0 as a backup watch and I don't have any issues pairing it with my iPhone X, with iOS 12 and even iOS 13 Beta. My Series 0 is running watchOS 4.3.2.

[gls2ro]

I have Apple Watch Series 0 and it works with both XR and 6S both of them upgraded to the latest OS version 12.3.1

[wincy]

Looks like I was wrong, and I’m glad about it. The error was that iOS 12 beta required watchOS 5. But once iOS 12 was officially released it’s compatible with watchOS 4.

[SlowRobotAhead]

How are IOS11 and IOS12 “unnecessarily incompatible”? What major features will no longer work between them?

[phonon]

It should work. Are you using WatchOS 4.3.2?

[lpgauth]

You can downgrade your phone software... quick google should show you how.