Apple clearly sees a future in the billion-dollar play of Apple TV+, while the return of products like long-lamented Mac Pro find it attempting to reassert its core audience.
macOS 10.15 has a lot updates to comb through, but the new stuff largely focuses on two primary categories:
Changes in the way Apple serves up content, with new versions of Apple Music and Podcasts (farewell, iTunes) and TV.
Playing more nicely with iOS and mobile devices. This, of course, has been a longtime push for the company, but the ease of porting iOS/iPadOS apps through Project Catalyst and Sidecar, which brings native second screen support to the iPad, are arguably the two biggest changes to the operating system this time around.
Music for macOS
There’s a new Music app that does pretty much everything you’d expect a Music app born of iTunes to do. And yeah, you heard that right. This isn’t the iOS Music app catalyzed over to the Mac. This is all the Music stuff from iTunes for Mac cut free and finally left to fly in its own Mac-as-in-AppKit app.
Launch it and you’ll find exactly what you’d expect to find: All your Apple Music, if you subscribe, all your iTunes Match music, also if you subscribe, all your music videos, all your existing downloaded and ripped Music, and, of course, the ability to download more from the iTunes Store and rip more from any CD, new or old, convert to AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, or Wav, and even burn a new.
The Apple Music section includes For You, Browse, and Radio, where you can find Beats 1, featured stations, and all the Apple stations. The Library section contains Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, and Music Videos. The Playlist section has all your playlists and the ability to turn on Genius if that floats your machine-learned music boat.
Search also seems to be better, showing you not only suggestions but what items match in which part of your library.
Device Management
All the device backup, update, and restore functionality previously shellacked onto iTunes has now been moved to where it’s always meant to have been — the Finder.
Just plug in and that’s it. No more iTunes popping up all eager on your face or over your desktop. Serenity now and forever more. When and if you want to do something, click the device in the sidebar and get to. The interface looks pretty much the same as it did in iTunes, so there’s no getting lost.
Books for macOS
Books has gotten another makeover in Catalina, this time to better fold in the Audio Books content that used to live in iTunes.
You’ve got a new set of tabs up top, including Library for all your stuff, Book Store where you can buy new pages to read, and Audiobook store where you can buy new pages to listen to.
In the Library, the new Sidebar has a listing just for your Audiobooks. In the Audiobook Store, it has listings for featured, top charts, categories, and top authors.
Podcasts for macOS
Podcasts has come to the Mac. If you’ve used Podcasts on iOS, especially on the iPad, you’ll be right at home. Because Apple catalyzed this app from the iPad expressly for the Mac. But it’s not a proof of concept like News, Stocks, Voice Memo, or Home were last year. This is using the shiny new version of UIKit on the Mac Apple is releasing as a beta for developers this year. And the maturity and consistency shows. The new UIKit-based Podcasts app is almost indistinguishable from the new AppKit-based Music app.
Top of the sidebar is Apple Podcasts, the service. That includes Listen Now, which has Up Next and Recently Played. There’s also Browse, which lets you see the Apple Podcast Editors’ picks as well as the categories. 700,000 shows strong, Apple is still the standard when it comes to podcast directories and it’s all here for you to find, just like it was in iTunes before. Even Top Charts have made the transition over, though I’ve only seen the main chart so far, not any category charts.
Library has Recently Updated, which are the shows that you subscribe to that have pushed out new episodes in the last little while. There’s also Shows, which lists everything you subscribe to in alphabetical order, and Episodes, which does the same but in reverse chronological order. Downloaded contains all the episodes you’ve recently made local.
Then there are any stations you’ve added, Family Fun or Comedy or True Crime. Basically talk radio for podcasts.
TV for macOS
Also new to the Mac is the TV app. Unlike Podcasts but just like Music, it’s a Mac-as-in-AppKit app, but it’s designed to bring you everything iOS and tvOS have been enjoying for a while now, even since the big new version launched last spring. More specific to my interests, the TV app, for the first time, lets you watch 4K HDR Dolby ATMOS movies and TV shows on the Mac. Are you feeling me, Netflix? HDR. ATMOS. Mac?
Like the Apple TV version, you have Watch Now, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Kids, Library, and Search across the top, though in classic Mac toolbar style. The Watch Now tab is supposed to always show you something you’re going to want to see, but without making a fussy infinite scroll list out of it. It doesn’t include all the updated, Apple TV-style options, though. At least not for me, not right now.
Up next is still first, which, front-loaded, has anything you started but haven’t finished. Then, anything new that you typically watch immediately, for example a live sports event or the latest episode of your favorite show or the movie you pre-ordered and has just become available, in reverse chronological order. Because freshness counts here. But there’s no What to Watch from the human editors or For You from the machine learning system, though I’ve seen the first one on some other people’s lists. Either way, it doesn’t feel like a one-on-one copy of the Apple TV version but something purpose-built for the Mac.
Channels are here too. They vary a lot based on region, with the U.S. having a ton of them and other places relatively few, if any. But I hope they grow because I like them a lot. Since there’s no Apple Music for TV, you have to subscribe to a bunch of different services and that creates a lot of overhead.
With Channels, all the subscriptions can be added and managed in one place, all the content seen and viewed in one place, and much of it can even be downloaded for offline viewing, including, for the first time HBO. If only Netflix would smarten and realize that, with frequent price hikes and Disney+ on the horizon, some of our continued subscriptions depend on them learning to play nicely with Channels.
The Movies and TV Shows tabs focus on, surprise surprise, Movies and TV Shows specifically. Everything you’ve already bought on iTunes, along with anything from the iTunes catalog and anything available from your Channels subscriptions.
The Kids tab isolates out everything safe for your children to watch, organized, categorized, and editorialized. And, unlike YouTube, where a video that looks like a kid’s show can end up being something completely different and inappropriate, this is all exactly what it says it is, so you can hit play without that constant sense of panic in the pit of your stomach.
The Library tab, as you probably guessed by now, is where you’ll find all your existing and future iTunes Store purchases. You can see Movies or TV Shows, or a time-based Recently Added view.
About the only thing all these new apps still need is Continuity for media. They do sync your state, so whatever you listened to or watched in TV on iOS or Apple TV will be in the same place, at the same place, on your Mac.
All these new apps are still in beta so I’m going to hold off any judgments on quality or capability, design or implementation until they’re ready for primetime.
Apple ID
iOS has had your Apple ID front and center for a while now in Settings. It makes it super easy, barely an inconvenience to check and manage your account. MacOS Catalina adds the same ease and convenience to System Preferences. It puts your Apple ID right up top, alerts you to anything you need to know, lets you review your information, security settings, payment info, and iCloud account pretty much immediately.
You can also see all your iTunes Store purchases and subscriptions, including Music, Books, News, and app-related subs as well, and manage Family Sharing if you have it. Plus, you get your full device list, so you can manage other Macs, iPhones, iPads, whatever is on your accounts, including Find My status, Apple Pay authorizations, and AppleCare information.
This is huge for me. I have the non-normal problem of having adding too many review units to my account over too many years. Who knew there was a hard limit on Apple Pay devices? 10, if you didn’t. And trying to manage that through iCloud.com had never been easy.
