2019 Mac Pro: Hardware Elegance, macOS Crapalina Belongs in the Toilet

2020-01-02 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: 2019 Mac Pro, Apple, Apple Core Rot, Apple macOS, Apple macOS Catalina, Mac Pro, Other World Computing, security

To my eyes, the 2019 Mac Pro is the most elegant and beautiful Apple product ever designed. I mean that—nothing else compares.

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But the Mac Pro is hardware that comes with turdware (macOS Catalina). Damn, let me run macOS Mojave instead of macOS Catalina because Crapalina shits the bed (a rough translation of a European expression).

What a nightmare from a software perspective, due to macOS Catalina and the Apple contempt for users manifest in removing 32-bit support, and that’s just for starters. I have now spent an entire day unfucking all sorts of problems all instigated by Catalina. More like 20 hours.

• How many security dialogs have I had to do? Maybe 100? For WHAT exactly? And the task NEVER ends. Don’t get me started on synthetic.conf and myriad other side effects of the security changes—and it’s going to get worse, much worse, by mid-year as Apple doubles-down on code notarization. I’d bet there are many IT departments that are very very busy right now, and universities and similar probably have all sorts of custom software that Crapalina effectively destroys. The contempt Apple shows for users knows no bounds. How hard is it to include a VM at least for compatibility?
• How many ordinary users know what to do in response to any of the myriad security dialogs, how to go fix problems deep in System Preferences. Apple is thus training ordinary users to always just click out of desperation the closest thing to “save me please go away I am sick of this hopeless stuff impossible to understand” button. This is not going to turn out well. And that’s setting aside all the stuff that is now broken and just doesn’t work and the huge cost of paying for “upgrades” to some of that.
• SoftRAID requires disabling Secure Boot due to a last-minute Apple clusterfuck anti-design decision. What good is Secure Boot if you cannot even use it? There exists no alternative to disabling it. Most users probably are running SoftRAID version 5.6.8, because macOS Crapalina won’t run the newer version, even if installed unless special steps are taken, e.g., to disable the very feature that is causing the problem—and this is an intimidating process for most.
• My accounting software is dead in the water (32 bit). I will have to use it on the 2019 iMac 5K for now. It is $500 to “upgrade” to a version with unknown issues and with absolutely no new value. That’s like tossing 25 $20 bills over the edge of the Grand Canyon while farting in the wind.
• SpamSieve cost me 5 hours or f'ing around to get it to work (I blame Apple Mail not SpamSieve!)—turns out that the Mail folder (my own#$*#$*#$* data, not Apple’s playground!!!) cannot be stored anywhere but the boot drive, or Mail extensions won’t load. Thanks genius Apple engineers! You all ought to have your pay cut in half for the brain-dead user interface that shows nothing about why things don’t work—you folks with contempt for people who use your crappy software. All you had to do is to put a little message in there like “Extension not loaded because not in the blessed Apple storage location”, or some such—just about anything but nothing. JFK. Kudos to SpamSiever developer for adding a warning in SpamSieve version 2.9.39b2 that warns of this issue.
• I am now forced to use Adobe Dreamweaver CS latest version. Adobe should be ashamed and contrite—it is a manure pile of problems—scattershot reorganized to make for a nightmare transition, useless crapware features, ignores previous settings so everything has to be redone, keyboard shortcuts that don’t properly update if replacing a shortcut, basic features like linking to a file don’t even have a shortcut, features that don’t work right such as opening current file in a web browser, OS incompatibility (cmd-` is assigned to a DW command, but that is a system-wide shortcut), inability to recognize which site is being worked on without manually changing it, the Properties palette is still the same irritating screeen-occupying ultra-wide headache—all for $20.99 per month (versus $0 for version 5.5, which is 32-bit and won’t run). Total SHIT that Adobe is milking for $252/year while doing nothing to fix the obvious problems—and I say this having tried this version 4 years ago! I have to look for some other HTML editor—Dreamweaver always was, always has been total crap, but it’s crap I had been used to in v5.5.
• System won’t wake up out of sleep properly (sometimes it works). I actually have to plug in a wired USB mouse directly to get it to wake up (USB wired mouse or keyboard not connected directly is not working).
• Apple’s tech note on memory installation is just wrong for mixed-size memory modules—the opposite of what works. And Apple’s 8GB modules are 1/3 slower and 3X more expensive than those of OWC.

There is a LOT more, and that’s what I’ve been doing with little sleep for days. But I don’t want to spend my life writing blog posts on crapware when I have real work to do—maybe you dear reader are lucky and can enjoy macOS Catalina. I’ve made (most of) my peace with it, but it has come at great cost.

Thank you, Tim Cook for your staff that shows incredible disrespect for users of your products, going way back to the Final Cut Pro fiasco. This ain’t right—total Apple Core Rot but in a judgment/usability sense.

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Al K writes:

Thanks for your Crapalina diatribe. I’m a geezer, and I take care of a lot of geezer Macs. I’ve universally told my geezer “customers” to avoid Catalina like the plague.

Apple doesn’t sell an upgradable computer for hobbyists like me—or one with a matt display that would cost me less than $7K.

Adobe doesn’t have a software model that works for hobbyists like me.

When I installed High Sierra on a Mid-2010 Mac Pro that I recently bought on craigslist for $50 (it looks and runs like new), it wouldn’t load my Spyder4 Pro display calibration software (Datacolor stopped support at 10.12).

For hobbyists like me, who don’t have unlimited software and hardware budgets, greed is killing the cat. I’m going to stick with what I have.

MPG: lots of used Macs out there at big savings, such as used Macs at OWC (OWC also sells new Macs regularly).