Mac OS Catalina 10.15.5 is out

Apple released Mac OS Catalina 10.15.5 which came in at 3.37 gigabytes on 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro but it will vary depending on the device you have but expect it to be over three gigabytes now. This particular update adds a few new features as well as bug fixes and a lot of security fixes.

Now the first new feature has to do with MacBook’s or devices that actually have batteries inside of them so MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air for example and if you go into your system preferences and go to energy saver you'll now have battery health down at the bottom. No battery health helps you manage your battery better to extend the life of the battery overall. So basically what Apple has said in the past is if you have a MacBook and maybe you leave it plugged into a monitor most of the time you should drain that battery down at least once a month. Well, now you don't need to do any of that. They'll just simply manage it and take care of the battery so maybe they won't charge it to a hundred per cent or maybe they'll pull it back to 90 but still show you 100%.  

They've added some additions to FaceTime similar to iOS 13.5 so if we go into FaceTime and under FaceTime, if we go up to FaceTime and then preferences under preferences down toward the bottom you'll see that we now have automatic prominence. Now if you've ever used a group FaceTime call you'll know that whoever is speaking kind of comes closer to you like your speaking to them and so it senses whose voice is speaking and then enlarges that photo or that video of them and if you don't want that to happen maybe you have a large FaceTime call with ten people pause and you don't want that to keep zooming in and out.

Now the next update is specific to displays and more specific to Pro display XDR if you have apples a very expensive external monitor the 6k monitor you can adjust colour profiles now to more suit what you're trying to do. so, for example, it gives you the ability to fine-tune the calibration to whatever you want so you could adjust the white point and the luminance to precisely match what you're trying to see or maybe you have a monitor next to it. So as far as new features that's what's in this particular update on top of that there are a ton of bug fixes.

Now the first fix has to do with reminders so if you're using reminders it fixes an issue that may prevent reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders. So if you weren't getting your notification regularly it should now show up for you properly. It also addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen so maybe you're trying to log into the Mac and it's not allowing it which is finally been fixed.

Go to System Preferences and it would have a badge on it like there was an update due to a software update even after you installed that update that has now been fixed and the badge should disappear properly. Now for all of you using zoom or maybe conference calling things like that if you were having an issue where you would close the conference call and then try to go back into it the conference-call wouldn't activate the actual camera properly the internal camera will now activate properly and things will continue to work as they should. Now if you have a Mac that has the t2 security chip in it such as this 2019 MacBook Pro, MacBook Air the new ones and iMac pro anything that has that chip.

Now if you use iCloud photo library and you're in photos and when the Mac is asleep you can upload and download photos to sort of sync with your iPhone that wasn't working properly and they've since resolved it so the stability of that and it uploading and downloading while it's asleep and having all of your photos there should work the next time.

Now they've resolved a stability issue when transferring large amounts of data using raid so if you use raid on a Mac Pro or maybe you have an external raid drive that's basically a bunch of hard drives together that can sort of act as one and be faster they weren't working properly if you were transferring huge amounts of data to them so that has since been resolved.

They've also fixed an issue for reducing motion where it wasn't working properly with FaceTime calls so maybe you were using prominence and FaceTime and it was zooming in and out and reduce motion wasn't working properly on that. If you go into your system preferences and then go to accessibility and then you go to display you have the option to reduce motion similar to what you have on iOS and iPad OS. It wasn't working properly when using FaceTime so it should work properly now.

There are some fixes where they fit them into what was called an enterprise group but they don't necessarily apply only to the enterprise. So the first thing improves performance on certain Mac's when enabling hardware acceleration in the GPU intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing. So if you're using the GPU for video conferencing or you have the GPU enabled for even Final Cut Pro if you have an external GPU or an eg you plugged in you could select that for Final Cut Pro. There was an issue where performance was hindered when you did that with things such as video conferencing so now they've fixed that and performance should be improved.

They've also fixed an issue with Microsoft Exchange accounts if you're using that where you were unable to sign in during account setup when you're using conditional access. Now they've also given more of notification for Apple push notification so says Apple push notification service traffic now uses a web proxy when specified in a pack file via the proxy’s payload and so they've updated that.

It also resolves an issue that prevented some displays connected to 2019 16 inch MacBook Pro from waking up when the Mac wakes up so if you try and wake the Mac up by moving the cursor around and it wasn't working properly. Finally, major new releases of Mac OS are no longer hidden when using the software update command if you have the ignore flag turned on so that should be working properly now and then finally the changes are also affected in Mac OS.