I apologize in advance for these ignorant questions. I am very behind on updating Mac OS on my Mac. Due to some different health stuff that has been going on, I kind of just missed different times to upgrade. I am currently running 10.14.6, which I have discovered is a version that is no longer supported. If I recall correctly, iTunes is removed with 10.15 moving forward. Since I use iTunes heavily, I wanted to ask if there is anything I should look out for when I upgrade. Are there any problems I should watch for in iTunes or any other applications when upgrading to 10.15 or newer? Thanks in advance.
Yes, iTunes was split into separate Music, Podcasts and TV apps. Together they seem to be functionally identical to the old iTunes app.
By the way, I have recently upgraded my main Mac from 10.4.6 to Big Sur (since Monterey is still pretty much beta quality) and to be honest, I’m not impressed. The updated UI is inconsistent, jarring and gets a lot of small details wrong (for example, keyboard shortcuts in the menus are very low contrast, window title bars are not correctly centered vertically, and new dialog windows and notifications are a disaster).
They have also broken one of the best features of Preview – the ability to merge PDF files. It works OK for small documents but consistently hangs when trying to merge files more than 25-30 pages in length: Preview crashes while combining PDFs | MacRumors Forums I have also found that it sometimes freezes when annotating large PDF files.
Such is the price of progress, I guess.
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This is important to understand. No functionality has been lost since the demise of iTunes.
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Thank you both for your feedback!
It’s probably a good idea to make a backup of your music library beforehand, one that’s separate from the rest of your backups and that you’ll keep for a longish time.
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I would add that some functionality (related to syncing, restoring and updating devices) was moved to Finder. Still the very same. Some functionality has arguably changed too – in my opinion iTunes did that a little bit better.
I fully agree on Big Sur/Monterey design. A lot of very weird decisions like very wide spacing between menu bar programs centred text in alert or dialog boxes. It doesn’t even look attractive. Monterey only marginally improves on Big Sur in that regard.
For PDF mergers, have you tried using Automator instead? I remember this did the trick for me when I had trouble with merging large PDFs. As a side note, Monterey broke down the video encode action in Automator (it can’t now convert videos into audio files).
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For PDF mergers, have you tried using Automator instead? I remember this did the trick for me when I had trouble with merging large PDFs.
Yes, in fact I came out with a quick and easy workflow to merge PDFs using Automator. Unfortunately, it seems this workflow would no longer work in future versions of macOS: My workflow for merging PDFs in Big Sur / Monterey
As a side note, Monterey broke down the video encode action in Automator (it can’t now convert videos into audio files).
I really wish Apple stopped the yearly release madness. They are breaking things at a great pace without ever slowing down to fix them.
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Overall things seem like they are working well. I upgraded to 10.15.7. Things even seem a little snappier. However, now iWork does not work. Really pushing me into MS Office or LibreOffice. LOL!