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A warning about Catalina and the 2019 Mac Pro
Yes, I did it. I bought a new Mac Pro. It arrived last Friday and I figured that by the end of this week I would be posting a glowing review along with a discussion about various upgrades and configurations.
But that is not going to happen.
Tomorrow , after 3 straight days of formatting, installing, re-installing, re-re-re installing and a lot of phone calling and e-mailing, I’m going to be boxing this elegant computer up and sending it back to Cupertino.
The issue is Catalina and my workflow, which is Premiere Pro based, with a whole lot of very specific plug-ins that help speed me on my way. So be advised that those working with FCPX will probably have nothing to fear (but that’s only probably.)
The combination of Catalina, Ppro and my specific plug-ins are apparently explosive. It’s possible I could run Ppro stripped down with Catalina but why would I want to? The whole idea of dropping 10K on a computer is to speed up my work, and the lack of plug-ins would slow me down more than anything the nMac Pro can offer.
I was not quite foolish enough not to consider this possibility; my fallback plan was to take the clone of my 2013 trashcan and make it the startup disk and then clone it’s Mojave OS onto the 2019 Mac Pro. It’s a technique I have used with Mac’s for over ten years. I’d work with Mojave until all the bugs had been ironed out and then upgrade the nMP to Catalina at that point.
However,
It turns out that you can’t start up the 2019 Catalina MP with any external disk that is also not Catalina (and that’s not easy to do either.) There is no way to wipe the drive of the 2019 Mac Pro and install an earlier OSX. None. It has something to do with Catalina and something to do with the security chip in the 2019’s boot drive.
So after 3 days of trying, and 3 nights of crying, it’s box it up and wait for UPS.
This has not been a pleasant few days. Catalina has a unique bifurcated (that’s”2-way” for the rest of us) folder structure that I think is part of the reason it behaves so badly with older software that wasn’t written for it. Even using Finder is a bit of a challenge. I hope it’s worth it for the future because for now it’s a major.
PITA.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf