macOS Catalina 10.15.5 introduces battery health management in the Energy Saver settings for notebooks, an option to control automatic prominence of video tiles on Group FaceTime calls, and controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR. The update also improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac.
Battery Health Management
• Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks
• Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced
• Option to disable battery health management
For more information, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211094
FaceTime Prominence Preference
• Option to control automatic prominence on Group FaceTime calls so video tiles do not change size when a participant speaks
Calibration Fine-Tuning for Pro Display XDR
• Controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR by adjusting the white point and luminance for a precise match to your own display calibration target
This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements.
• Fixes an issue that may prevent Reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders
• Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen
• Fixes an issue where System Preferences would continue to show a notification badge even after installing an update
• Resolves an issue where the built-in camera may not be detected when trying to use it after using a video conferencing app
• Addresses an issue for Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip where internal speakers may not appear as a sound output device in Sound preferences
• Fixes a stability issue with uploading and downloading media files from iCloud Photo Library while your Mac is asleep
• Resolves a stability issue when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes
• Fixes an issue where the Reduce Motion Accessibility preference did not reduce the speed of animations in a FaceTime group call
Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices.
For more detailed information about this update, please visit: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT210642
A hefty (almost) 3Gb download. That’s quite a bit for a point release.
Apple’s macOS updates have come to a point where they are on par with Microsoft Windows 95. Several restarts. Unreliable times (from 43 minutes immediately to 9 and then it took around 30 minutes). Different screen resolutions. Screens going black and returning to a status bar. I have really no clue what’s going on here.
I must say that the latest Windows 10 updates have been smoother.
And for us Mojave users, the security update apparently has also “depreciated” the nagware to update to Catalina that previously could be toggled off via Terminal.
Catalina took 8 months to get to 10.15.5, probably will take one more to get to x.6. (High Sierra was 10 months to get to that point.) But it came out with two supplemental updates in the first two weeks of release, then x.1 a week after that. Four releases in October - an unprecedentedly difficult release.
Mojave took 20 months to get to 10.14.6. I typically update when a Mac OS gets to x.4 but I’m glad I’ve continued to wait this time. Mojave has been solid and I like still having my 32-bit apps and legacy music plugins.
Unfortunately I bought a 16" MBP to replace my 9 year old 15" MBP. That forced the upgrade to Catalina. All of my 32-bit app issues have been resolved but one, there doesn’t seem to be a replacement for MPEG Streamclip. (I can always run the Windows version in a VM.)
At least you have options. I still have some plugins that won’t make the 64-bit transition, along with some 32-bit apps and utilities with no equivalent. (For example this ‘retired’ editor of text and picture clippings.)
What if I say, your Email ID is all I need to takeover your account on your favorite website or an app. Sounds scary, right? This is what a bug in Sign in with Apple allowed me to do.
In the month of April, I found a zero-day in Sign in with Apple that affected third-party applications which were using it and didn’t implement their own additional security measures. This bug could have resulted in a full account takeover of user accounts on that third party application irrespective of a victim having a valid Apple ID or not.
For this vulnerability, I was paid $100,000 by Apple under their Apple Security Bounty program.
