Music, Podcasts and TV
Eighteen years of accumulation split into three focused apps, with syncing and backups moving into the Finder. Your library and playlists carried across untouched.
At launch
- Announced
- June 3, 2019
- Released
- October 7, 2019
- Follows
- Mojave (10.14)
- Followed by
- Big Sur (11)
- Ends
- 32-bit software
Overview
Two long goodbyes, in the same release.
iTunes had been accumulating responsibilities since January 2001 — music, films, television, podcasts, audiobooks, university lectures, ringtones, iPhone backups, software updates. Catalina broke it into Music, Podcasts and TV, and handed device syncing to the Finder, where it arguably always belonged.
The other farewell was less sentimental and more disruptive. 32-bit applications, which Mojave had merely warned about, stopped launching altogether. Software with no 64-bit successor simply died: old games, plug-ins, installers, and a long tail of small tools whose authors had moved on years earlier.
Sidecar
The iPad, working as a second display.
Wired or wireless, as an extension of the desktop or a mirror of it — and with an Apple Pencil, as a pressure-sensitive tablet for any Mac app that understood one. The sidebar carried the modifier keys the iPad did not have.
MacBook Pro
iPad Pro
An iPad extending the Mac's desktop
Features
What shipped.
A great deal of unbundling, one genuinely new use for an iPad, and a rather firm line under the past.
Sidecar
An iPad as a second display or a graphics tablet, over cable or wirelessly, with Apple Pencil pressure and tilt in any app that supported a tablet.
At launch
Catalyst
The framework behind Mojave's four iOS apps, opened to everyone. Developers could bring an iPad app to the Mac by ticking a box — with results that varied considerably.
At launch
Voice Control
Complete control of the Mac by voice — dictation, navigation, grids for clicking anything — processed on the device. One of the most substantial accessibility releases Apple has shipped.
At launch
Screen Time
Usage reporting, app limits and Downtime came to the Mac and reported alongside your iPhone and iPad, rather than each device counting separately.
At launch
Find My
Find My iPhone and Find My Friends merged, and offline devices became findable through an encrypted Bluetooth relay carried by every other Apple device nearby.
At launch
Read-only system volume
macOS moved onto its own volume, mounted read-only and separated from your data. Big Sur's cryptographically signed system volume is the direct next step.
At launch
32-bit ends
Mojave warned; Catalina enforced. Nothing 32-bit would launch, which retired an enormous amount of software in a single afternoon of upgrading.
At launch
Apple Arcade
A subscription catalogue with no advertising and no purchases inside it, playable across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV with progress carried between them.
At launch
iTunes
Eighteen years of one application doing everything.
iTunes shipped in January 2001 as a way to play MP3s and burn CDs. Then it sold music, then it managed iPods, then films and television, then podcasts, then iPhone backups, then app installation, then university courses. By 2019 it was doing a dozen jobs, none of them especially well.
Catalina retired it on the Mac and divided the work three ways, with the Finder taking device syncing. On Windows it carried on regardless, which is how iTunes outlived its own funeral by several years.
Desktop
An island, two ways round.
Santa Catalina photographed from the air at dusk and again under stars — the second light-and-dark pair Apple made, a year after Mojave established the idea.
Catalina shipped as a Dynamic Desktop, easing between these two through the day using your Mac's clock and location — the mechanic Mojave introduced and every release since has kept.
Lineage
Where it sits.
California landmarks from Mavericks onward. Catalina took the island twenty-two miles off Los Angeles.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
The same machines Mojave ran on. Sidecar was fussier than the release itself, wanting a 2016-or-later Mac and an iPad capable of Apple Pencil.
- iMac
- Late 2012 and later
- iMac Pro
- 2017
- Mac Pro
- Late 2013 and later
- Mac mini
- Late 2012 and later
- MacBook
- Early 2015 and later
- MacBook Air
- Mid 2012 and later
- MacBook Pro
- Mid 2012 and later