The same way it already updates the parts of the OS protected by SIP, it’s read-only to you, not to the installers signed with Apple’s certificate.
This is an improvement I guess…but will require that the installer repartition your drive before actually installing Catalina obviously. I can see both pros and cons to doing it this way.
It’s not a panacea though…and earlier versions of macOS aren’t unprotected from this since changing stuff in the system area requires inputting admin credentials now. In particular…what happens when we get macOS whatever it is 2 versions from now and the read only partition isn’t big enough. At that time it will need resizing.
Nothing to be done about it though…users will be given no choice about having the read only partition or not…if you install Catalina you’ll get it.
For those of us that already have our daily driver account being non-admin…the additional protection is less. That’s a small minority though…the vast majority of folks that I have dealt with have only a single account on their machine…and having no password is also a pretty common occurrence.
I’m just guessing, but most likely it will not. APFS has space sharing, so it lets you set volumes so that they are all sized to take the whole disk and the file system just allocates unused space as each one needs it. I haven’t installed Catalina to check (and probably won’t until it’s released in the fall), but I’d guess that they do something like that.
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AFPS sort of virtualizes the drive as computers have done for memory for decades. So, partitions are no longer “fixed” allocations. You set a max for each “partition” and the system uses “real” blocks as needed. (Which is why this can be
painful on spinning rust. Block location doesn’t really matter on SSDs but matter a LOT on spinning media.)
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You are probably right…I’m not very knowledgeable about APFS and how it works at the drive level.
Why would assume it would not preserve your ratings?
I think it would still be a good idea to make a clone before you update. It’s relatively painless to do.
I won’t consider that Apple is taking usability seriously as long as they maintain the goth gray interface. I’m visually impaired and I used color and custom icons in the Finder sidebar as navigation aids. Now that they’re gone, using the sidebar is much harder than it was. Epic fail.
Why would assume it would not preserve your ratings?
Because Apple has been on a steady course of deprecating star ratings for years, first by breaking many of my smart playlists when they started automatically assigning ratings to unrated tracks, and then by not making a ratings interface available in non-Mac operating systems, which usually point to future changes in Mac OS.
Andrew, have you looked at iCompta or iFinance? MY preferred “Quicken for Mac 2007 Lion Compatible” has been PocketMoney Desktop. However the developer, Hardy Macia, passed away in 2013 so I’ve been running those two applications in tandem with PMD and Q4MacLC.
Dennis, thanks! I’ll have to check those out.
Will the Music app support playing shared music libraries from other Macs that remain on older OSX versions?
I have a MacMini 2010 (Sierra) that shares its Music library with my iMac in my study.
I use this Music library quite a lot.
Howdy all
Just wondering if anyone running Catalina Beta has tried installing iTunes to see if and how it works