Apple Seeds Fifth Beta of macOS Catalina to Developers

Wednesday July 31, 2019 10:15 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple today seeded the fifth beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina for testing purposes, a little over two weeks after seeding the fourth macOS Catalina beta and more than 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

Popular Stories

Apple MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display family lineup feature

Apple Announces OLED MacBook Pro With Touch Display

Wednesday October 28, 2026 10:11 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple today announced a new high-end MacBook Pro, which is available in 14-inch and 16-inch sizes. The new device has a PROLED XDR display that supports touch gestures, and a glowing rear Apple logo. Pricing on the MacBook Pro starts at $2,899 for the 14-inch model and $3,399 for the 16-inch model. Apple says the MacBook Pro has the "world's best display in a pro laptop." The PROLED...

• 707 comments

Apple Announces New 14-Inch MacBook Pro With M6 Chip

Tuesday October 27, 2026 6:01 am PDT by Hartley Charlton

Apple today announced a refreshed 14-inch MacBook Pro featuring the M6 chip, upgraded connectivity specifications, and more. The M6 chip in the MacBook Pro features a 12-core CPU with 2 super cores, 4 performance cores, and 6 efficiency cores, paired with a 12-core GPU. This is up from the M5 chip with a 10-core CPU with 4 super cores and 6 efficiency cores, paired with a 10-core GPU. M6...

• 183 comments

Apple Opened Pre-Orders for Five New Products This Week

Wednesday October 28, 2026 2:49 am PDT by Tim Hardwick

Apple opened pre-orders for five new products on Wednesday, October 28, including its first touchscreen MacBook Pro models. Pre-orders opened for the following new products: iPad mini with OLED display and A20 Pro chip iMac with M6 chip 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 chip 14-inch MacBook Pro with OLED touchscreen 16-inch MacBook Pro with OLED touchscreen Pre-orders for the iPad mini,...

• 14 comments

Top Rated Comments

DrJohnnyN

95 months ago

Great salad dressing.

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Aeternum

95 months ago

In the 10 year’s or so that I’ve been testing betas, Catalina’s are the worst.

With this latest Beta, the installation got stuck with the Apple logo and the progress bar around 2/3 of the way. It’s been like that for 4 hours.

After forcefully powering off the Mac and powering on again I was prompted with the log in screen with Mojave’s background. Typed in the password, press entered... the progress bar took like 10 min to reach the end and now stuck there for the last 30 or so minutes.

I won’t be updating any other machines from Beta 4, that one gave me a lot of problems but Beta 5 isn’t even loading up.

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

tethead

95 months ago

You waited 2 days? That's ridiculous.

If your install is stuck after 1hr RESTART THE COMPUTER. If you're afraid to restart its because you haven't done a proper backup or have no computer skills. Some people shouldn't be installing beta software.

first of all, chill, or quit smoking crack. you'll live longer.

second of all, I restarted a few times after it was taking more than an hour - reset PRAM, reset SMC, booted into recovery and verified HD, tried recovery install (failed), so went back to it. you can check my post history if you still think i'm a moron who just sat for 40 hours staring at a screen.

anyway, the moral of the story is that NOTHING seems to alleviate this. i sent a ton of logs thru Feedback but haven't heard anything about it, and it's clearly not fixed, so not sure what else to do at this point but wait.
[doublepost=1564677629][/doublepost]

Just one of his posts

Seems like he's a long time Mac user, he knows his stuff.
Again, you're throwing insults at someone without knowledge of how much he (Or she) knows.

thank you.

now get off my damn lawn.

Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)

tethead

95 months ago

I'm hopeful the extra days before releasing this means they will have fixed the extremely long update times some of us had on b4. As mine took around 40 hours last time (!!), I will hold off until some of you who had issues last time around verify that it's all fine now.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

justperry

95 months ago

You waited 2 days? That's ridiculous.

If your install is stuck after 1hr RESTART THE COMPUTER. If you're afraid to restart its because you haven't done a proper backup or have no computer skills. Some people shouldn't be installing beta software.

Restarting got him back into the installer, a loop.
You make a lot of assumptions, you don't know his skills, throwing insults on top of it.

Maybe you should do research before you write such a post, like looking at his posts history.

Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)