macOS Catalina
macOS Catalina (version 10.15) is the sixteenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop operating system for Macintosh 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 applications and the first to include Activation Lock.[3][1] It is also the last version of macOS to have the major version number of 10; its successor, Big Sur, released on November 12, 2020, is version 11.[4][5] In order to increase web compatibility, Safari, Chromium and Firefox have frozen the OS in the user agent running in subsequent releases of macOS at 10.15.7 Catalina.[6][7][8]
Developer
Closed, with open source components
October 7, 2019[1]
www.apple.com/macos/catalina at the Wayback Machine (archived November 9, 2020)
The power of Mac. Taken further.
The operating system is named after Santa Catalina Island, which is located off the coast of southern California.
macOS Catalina is the final version of macOS that supports the Unibody MacBook Pro, as its successor, macOS Big Sur, drops support for its mid 2012 and final model.
All standard configuration Macs that supported macOS Mojave support macOS Catalina. 2010 to 2012 Mac Pros, which could run Mojave only with a GPU upgrade, are no longer supported.[1] Catalina requires 4 GB of memory, an increase over the 2 GB required by Lion through Mojave.[9][10]
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.[11]
Security[edit]
Ars Technica reported that macOS Catalina contained a critical privilege escalation vulnerability, which resulted in a backdoor being installed if users visited a Hong Kong pro-democracy website. The vulnerability was reported to Apple in August 2021, and patched in a Catalina update in September, but it had already been patched by Apple in macOS Big Sur 11.2, released 234 days earlier on February 1. Security experts have criticized Apple for not patching critical known vulnerabilities in older versions, and for not being transparent about older versions only receiving some, but not all, security patches. The latest major release of Apple's operating systems (macOS, iOS, and others) receive all security updates.[40][41][42]
Reception[edit]
Catalina received favorable reviews on release for some of its features.[43] However, some critics found the OS version distinctly less reliable than earlier versions.[44][45][46][47][48] The broad addition of user-facing security measures (somewhat analogous to the addition of User Account Control dialog boxes with Windows Vista a decade earlier) was criticized as intrusive and annoying.[46][49]