Apple Seeds Fourth Beta of macOS Catalina to Developers

Tuesday July 16, 2019 10:10 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple today seeded the fourth beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina for testing purposes, two weeks after seeding the third macOS Catalina beta and over a month after the new Mac operating system update was first unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

The new macOS Catalina beta can be downloaded using the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences. As with all new betas, macOS Catalina should not be installed on a primary machine because it is early release software and has bugs.

test macOS 10
macOS Catalina eliminates the iTunes app, splitting it into Music, Podcasts, and TV apps. The Apple Music and Apple Podcasts apps are available now, while the Apple TV app is coming later this year.

The three new apps offer similar functionality to iTunes, but are split up by feature. iOS device management is still available on the Mac, but it's now done through the Finder rather than iTunes.

With a new Sidecar feature, you can turn your iPad into a second display for your Mac with just the click of a button. The Apple Pencil works with ‌Sidecar‌, so you can turn your ‌iPad‌ into a drawing tablet in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Your Apple Watch can be used to approve security prompts for passwords and other info in macOS Catalina, and Macs with a T2 chip now support Activation Lock, making them more secure. There's a new Find My that brings the ‌Find My‌ Mac app to the Mac for the first time and even lets you track your devices when they're offline, or, in the case of notebooks, closed.

Screen Time is available on the Mac as well as iOS devices, and Project Catalyst, a new Apple initiative, will let developers easily port their ‌iPad‌ apps over to the Mac to increase the number of Mac apps available.

There's a new Photos interface that surfaces your best photos organized by day, month, or year, there's a new start page in Safari, Mail has new tools for muting email threads and blocking senders, and the Reminders app has been overhauled.

32-bit apps no longer work in macOS Catalina, which is something to be aware of before installing the beta.

For more details on macOS Catalina, make sure to check out our macOS Catalina roundup.

Related Forum: macOS Catalina

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Top Rated Comments

redheeler

95 months ago

Well this is not reassuring at all.

MacOS Catalina occupies two partitions, one for the system software that is mounted as read-only by default and one for user-generated data (users folder, installed apps, etc.) that is mounted as read-write. This message is referring to the system partition, but it really needs to be rephrased to make that more clear. The files on the data partition should be safe.

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ethank

95 months ago

I think it’s a bit ridiculous that Apple don’t provide some kind of support for those undertaking the public beta. Nope, just here you go, download it, ****ed if we care if it works or not.

They literally tell you to not install it.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

PastaPrimav

95 months ago

Well this is not reassuring at all.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

tethead

95 months ago

woke up this morning... and I had a login screen! so, only about 40 hours.

the last time an update took this much time, it was using 20 floppies moving up to 7.5.3 rev 2!

I've submitted a Feedback report with the appropriate log files, so hopefully this can be fixed before the next release.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

NecRosex

95 months ago

Take drugs

Already popped a xanny to take the edge off, defo most painful MacOS install in 10 years.
[doublepost=1563323534][/doublepost]Fun fact;
When I pressed the power button it suddenly changed from 26 minutes to “less than a minute remaining...” and then got stuck there.
There is some poo poo stuff going on with this beta.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)