Playing with OS Betas

As I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago, I wanted to experiment with Apple’s 2019 public OS betas, and in the past week, I’ve started to dip my toes in the water.

During a rain delay during last Saturday’s IndyCar race, I figured that of my iPhone, MacBook Pro, and iPad Pro, the iPad was the one I could live without the most, so I sacrificed it to the beta gods. Granted, I haven’t used my iPad a ton this week, but I would have a hard time going back to iOS 12 after seeing iPadOS 13 on my machine. My home screen is what I’ve wanted from my iPad since day one ¹. Having a widget full of Shortcuts immediately available from the home screen is a fantastic addition. In terms of bugs, I haven’t had much, though I have had intermittent issues with Apple Music crashing and text slipping off the screen in Slack.

In a fit of poor planning, I decided to clear off an external drive to install the macOS Catalina beta just thirty minutes before I typically go to bed on Thursday night. Two hours later, I booted my Mac into Catalina from my external SSD. Other than the discomfort that is a Mac without all of my personal bells and whistles, it seemed fine, though I noticed a few glitches with text wrapping not changing when I resized a window.

So far, my summation of the betas is this: they have bugs, but as someone who isn’t using the betas for a majority of my work, it isn’t a dealbreaker. I can simply switch to my MacBook Pro running Mojave if things get too hairy, but for people who are trying to live the iPad lifestyle or are eager to run Catalina, there are going to be headaches. I’m not quite ready to install the beta on my phone, which I plan to do for the first time ever this year, but so far, running the new hotness is worth the sacrifice.