macOS Catalina (version 10.15) is the sixteenth major release of

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

computers. It is the successor to macOS Mojave and was announced at WWDC 2019 on June 3, 2019 and released to the public on October 7, 2019. Catalina is the first version of macOS to support only

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A comp ...

applications and the first to include Activation Lock. It is also the last version of macOS to have the major version number of 10; its successor,

Big Sur Big Sur () is a rugged and mountainous section of the Central Coast of California between Carmel and San Simeon, where the Santa Lucia Mountains rise abruptly from the Pacific Ocean. It is frequently praised for its dramatic scenery. Big S ...

, released on November 12, 2020, is version 11. In order to increase web compatibility,

Safari A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...

Chromium Chromium is a chemical element with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24. It is the first element in group 6. It is a steely-grey, lustrous, hard, and brittle transition metal. Chromium metal is valued for its high corrosion resistance and h ...

and

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

have frozen the OS in the user agent running in subsequent releases of macOS at 10.15.7 Catalina. The operating system is named after Santa Catalina Island, which is located off the coast of

southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most populous urban ...

System requirements

macOS Catalina officially runs on all standard configuration Macs that supported Mojave. 2010–2012 Mac Pros, which could run Mojave only with a GPU upgrade, are no longer supported. Catalina requires 4 GB of memory, an increase over the 2 GB required by

Lion The lion (''Panthera leo'') is a large Felidae, cat of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Africa and India. It has a muscular, broad-chested body; short, rounded head; round ears; and a hairy tuft at the end of its tail. It is sexually dimorphi ...

through Mojave. *

iMac iMac is a family of all-in-one Mac desktop computers designed and built by Apple Inc. It has been the primary part of Apple's consumer desktop offerings since its debut in August 1998, and has evolved through seven distinct forms. In i ...

(Late 2012 or later) * iMac Pro * MacBook (Early 2015 or later) *

MacBook Air The MacBook Air is a line of ultrabook computers developed and manufactured by Apple Inc. It consists of a full-size keyboard, a machined aluminum case, and, in the more modern versions, a thin light structure. The Air was originally positi ...

(Mid 2012 or later) * MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or later) * Mac Mini (Late 2012 or later) * Mac Pro (Late 2013 or later) It is possible to install Catalina on many older Macintosh computers that are not officially supported by Apple. This requires using a patch to modify the install image.

Applications

*AirPort Utility * App Store *Archive Utility *Audio MIDI Setup *Automator *Bluetooth File Exchange *

Books A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physica ...

* Boot Camp Assistant *

Calculator An electronic calculator is typically a portable electronic device used to perform calculations, ranging from basic arithmetic to complex mathematics. The first solid-state electronic calculator was created in the early 1960s. Pocket-size ...

* Calendar *Chess *ColorSync Utility *Console * Contacts * Dictionary * Digital Color Meter *

Disk Utility A disk utility is a utility program that allows a user to perform various functions on a computer disk, such as disk partitioning and logical volume management, as well as multiple smaller tasks such as changing drive letters and other mount p ...

DVD Player A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to ...

* FaceTime * Find My * Font Book * GarageBand (may not be pre-installed) *

Grapher Grapher is a computer program bundled with macOS since version 10.4 that is able to create 2D and 3D graphs from simple and complex equations. It includes a variety of samples ranging from differential equations to 3D-rendered Toroids and Lo ...

Home A home, or domicile, is a space used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for one or many humans, and sometimes various companion animals. It is a fully or semi sheltered space and can have both interior and exterior aspects to it ...

iMovie iMovie (known at times as iMovie HD) is a preinstalled video editing application developed by Apple Inc. for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS devices. It was originally released in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-en ...

(may not be pre-installed) *Image Capture * Keychain Access *

Keynote A keynote in public speaking is a talk that establishes a main underlying theme. In corporate or commercial settings, greater importance is attached to the delivery of a keynote speech or keynote address. The keynote establishes the framework fo ...

(may not be pre-installed) *

Mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...

* Migration Assistant *

Music Music is generally defined as the The arts, art of arranging sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Exact definition of music, definitions of mu ...

* News (only available for Australia,

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

, and

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

) *

Notes Note, notes, or NOTE may refer to: Music and entertainment * Musical note, a pitched sound (or a symbol for a sound) in music * ''Notes'' (album), a 1987 album by Paul Bley and Paul Motian * ''Notes'', a common (yet unofficial) shortened version ...

Numbers A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers ca ...

(may not be pre-installed) * Pages (may not be pre-installed) * Photo Booth * Podcasts * Preview * QuickTime Player * Reminders *Screenshot (succeeded Grab since Mojave) * Script Editor * Stickies *Stocks * System Information * Terminal * TextEdit * Time Machine * TV *Voice Memos * VoiceOver Utility * X11/XQuartz (may not be pre-installed)

Changes

System

Catalyst

Catalyst is a new software-development tool that allows developers to write apps that can run on macOS, iOS and

iPadOS iPadOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for its iPad line of tablet computers. It is a rebranded variant of iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhones, renamed to reflect the diverging features of the two product ...

. Apple demonstrated several ported apps, including Jira and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

(after the latter discontinued its macOS app in February 2018).

System extensions

An upgrade from Kexts. System extensions avoid the problems of Kexts. There are 3 kinds of System extensions: Network Extensions, Endpoint Security Extensions, and Driver Extensions. System extensions run in userspace, outside of the kernel. Catalina will be the last version of macOS to support legacy system extensions.

DriverKit

A replacement for IOKit device drivers, driver extensions are built using DriverKit. DriverKit is a new SDK with all-new frameworks based on IOKit, but updated and modernized. It is designed for building device drivers in userspace, outside of the kernel.

Gatekeeper

Mac apps, installer packages, and kernel extensions that are signed with a Developer ID must be notarized by Apple to run on macOS Catalina.

Activation Lock

Activation Lock helps prevent the unauthorized use and drive erasure of devices with an

Apple T2 The Apple T2 (Apple's internal name is T8012) security chip is a system on a chip "SoC" tasked with providing security and controller features to Apple's Intel based Macintosh computers. It is a 64-bit ARMv8 chip and runs bridgeOS. T2 has its ...

security chip (2018, 2019, and 2020 MacBook Pro; 2020 5K

; 2018, 2019, and 2020

, iMac Pro; 2018 Mac Mini; 2019 Mac Pro).

Dedicated system volume

The system runs on its own read-only volume, separate from all other data on the Mac.

Voice control

Users can give detailed voice commands to applications. On-device machine processing is used to offer better navigation.

Sidecar

Sidecar allows a Mac to use an

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operati ...

(running

) as a wireless external display. With Apple Pencil, the device can also be used as a

graphics tablet A graphics tablet (also known as a digitizer, digital graphic tablet, pen tablet, drawing tablet, external drawing pad or digital art board) is a computer input device that enables a user to hand-draw images, animations and graphics, with a spec ...

for software running on the computer. Sidecar requires a Mac with Intel

Skylake Skylake or Sky Lake may refer to: * Skylake (microarchitecture), the codename for a processor microarchitecture developed by Intel as the successor to Broadwell * Skylake (Mysia), a town of ancient Mysia, now in Turkey * Sky Lake, Florida Sky La ...

CPUs and newer (such as the fourth-generation MacBook Pro), and an iPad that supports Apple Pencil.

Support for wireless game controllers

The Game Controller framework adds support for two major console game controllers: the

PlayStation 4 The PlayStation 4 (PS4) is a home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Announced as the successor to the PlayStation 3 in February 2013, it was launched on November 15, 2013, in North America, November 29, 2013 in ...

's DualShock 4 and the Xbox One controller.

Time Machine

A number of under-the-hood changes were made to Time Machine, the backup software. For example, the manner in which backup data is stored on network-attached devices was changed, and this change is not backwards-compatible with earlier versions of macOS. Apple declined to document these changes, but some of them have been noted.

Applications

iTunes

iTunes is replaced by separate

, Podcasts, TV and

apps, in line with iOS. iOS device management is now conducted via

Finder Finder may refer to: * Finder (surname) * Finder (software), part of the Apple Macintosh operating system * ''Finder'' (comics), a comic book series by Carla Speed McNeil * ''Finder'' (novel), a 1994 novel by Emma Bull * Finder Wyvernspur, a fi ...

. The TV app on Mac supports

Dolby Atmos Dolby Atmos is a surround sound technology developed by Dolby Laboratories. It expands on existing surround sound systems by adding height channels, allowing sounds to be interpreted as three-dimensional objects with neither horizontal, nor vert ...

Dolby Vision Dolby Vision is a set of technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories for high dynamic range (HDR) video. It covers content creation, distribution, and playback. It includes dynamic metadata that are used to adjust and optimize each frame of the ...

, and

HDR10 HDR10 Media Profile, more commonly known as HDR10, is an open high-dynamic-range video (HDR) standard announced on 27 August 2015 by the Consumer Technology Association. It is the most widespread of the HDR formats. HDR10 is not backward comp ...

on MacBooks released in 2018 or later, while 4K HDR playback is supported on Macs released in 2018 or later when connected to a compatible display.

Find My

Find My Mac and Find My Friends are merged into an application called Find My.

Notes

The

application was enhanced to allow better management of checklists and the ability to share folders with other users. The application version was incremented from 4.6 (in macOS 10.14 Mojave) to 4.7.

Reminders

Among other visual and functional overhauls, attachments can be added to reminders and Siri can intelligently estimate when to remind the user about an event.

Voice Memos

The Voice Memos application, first ported from iOS to the Mac in macOS 10.14 Mojave as version 2.0, was incremented to version 2.1.

Removed or changed components

macOS Catalina exclusively supports 64-bit applications. 32-bit applications no longer run (including all software that utilizes the

Carbon API Carbon was one of two primary C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by Apple for the macOS (formerly Mac OS X and OS X) operating system. Carbon provided a good degree of backward compatibility for programs that ran on Mac ...

as well as QuickTime 7 applications, image, audio and video codecs). Apple has also removed all 32-bit-only apps from the

Mac App Store The App Store (also known as the Mac App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple Inc. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" ...

. Z shell (executable "zsh") is the default login shell and interactive shell in macOS Catalina, replacing Bash, the default shell since

Mac OS X Panther Mac OS X Panther (version 10.3) is the fourth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It followed Mac OS X Jaguar and preceded Mac OS X Tiger. It was released on October 24, 2003. System requirements Panther's s ...

in 2003. Bash continues to be available in macOS Catalina, along with other shells such as csh/ tcsh and ksh. Dashboard has been removed in macOS Catalina. The ability to add Backgrounds in Photo Booth was removed in macOS Catalina. The command-line interface

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a free software text editor. It was created by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU project and a flagship proje ...

application was removed in macOS Catalina. Built-in support for

Perl Perl is a family of two High-level programming language, high-level, General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, Interpreter (computing), interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it ...

, Python 2.7 and

Ruby A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...

are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS will not include scripting language runtimes by default, possibly requiring users to install additional packages. Legacy

AirDrop An airdrop is a type of airlift in which items including weapons, equipment, humanitarian aid or leaflets are delivered by military or civilian aircraft without their landing. Developed during World War II to resupply otherwise inaccessible ...

for connecting with Macs running Mac OS X Lion,

Mountain Lion The cougar (''Puma concolor'') is a large cat native to the Americas. Its range spans from the Canadian Yukon to the southern Andes in South America and is the most widespread of any large wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere. ...

and Mavericks, or 2011 and older Macs has been removed.

Reception

Catalina received favorable reviews on release for some of its features. However, some critics found the OS version distinctly less reliable than earlier versions. The broad addition of user-facing security measures (somewhat analogous to the addition of User Account Control dialog boxes with

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

a decade earlier) was criticized as intrusive and annoying.

Release history

References

External links

* – official site
macOS Catalina
download page at

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ances ...

{{Apple software 2019 software Computer-related introductions in 2019 15 X86-64 operating systems