Gourmand Loc: Dallas

One more war story: After installing Catalina, my Epson 7900 stopped printing magenta properly. It took months and several experts several tries to narrow the issue down (no, it was not bad ink, not changed profiles, not this, that or the other thing). As it turned out, we had to uninstall the Epson driver, which had been usurped in the order of the way things flow by Catalina (last in, last out). Then we re-installed the Epson driver which now is the last thing the software sees before going to the printer. And Voila! the colors are correct again.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Good catch!

One thing I always do when upgrading operating systems on the Mac, is to start with a fresh hard drive. I remove the old one from the computer (when possible), put it in an outboard enclosure, then install a new drive (now SSD or NVMe, m.2, etc.). I format the drive and install FRESH versions of the software. Anything that runs from an older version gets installed and updated off the web.

That takes a long time, but is TOTALLY WORTH THE EFFORT. About 18 months ago, I cracked open the case of my old iMac and replaced a 5400 RPM spinning hard drive with a fast SSD drive. While I was in there, I swapped the 8GB RAM for 16GB RAM. Then I installed the latest OS and all fresh software. It was like getting a new computer for just a few hundred bucks! Video rendering was up to seven times faster. Startup was five times faster. Everything just snaps.

I'm totally looking forward to the new Apple Silicon (non-Intel) Mac architecture. It will enable much higher computing speeds with much lower power consumption and less heat. Developers will have it easy, because the same code base will just work — on the watch, the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and the Apple TV. Microsoft and Adobe already have their suites mostly ready to go. All the Apple software is ready to go. All the utilities I have will still run in a compatibility mode until they are re-written for native.

I've lived through two similar transitions, from Motorola 680x0 series, to IBM/Apple/Motorola PowerPC series, to Intel Inside. Apple's always made it work, with a few minor inconveniences. Of course, their philosophy is TOTALLY different from Microsoft's, in that they are never afraid to cannibalize their own history in favor of something better. They don't care about your app written in 1980 that "still has to work." They don't have to. But if it does have to run, heck, there is an emulator for that... (Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion will run DOS, Windows, Linux, and MacOS on Intel hardware Macs. Apple has announced that there will be an emulator for Windows compatibility on Apple Silicon, too, so I can still run WinXP, Win7, and Win10 on the rare occasions I might need to.)