Early impressions of macOS Catalina, which will usher in a new era of cross platform apps, as it enters public beta
Apple's macOS Catalina is another ambitious refinement of the Mac featuring a fundamental rethinking of iTunes and an infusion of fresh ideas from iOS …
Context & Ripple Effects
Three weeks after Apple debuted macOS Catalina at WWDC — announcing Sidecar for using an iPad as a second display and Project Catalyst for bringing iPad apps to the Mac (the June unveiling) — the OS has reached public beta, giving non-developers their first hands-on look. The headline change is structural: iTunes is being dismantled into separate Music, TV, and Podcasts apps, ending an 18-year-old monolith.
What makes the beta worth watching is that it previews the two bets reviewers would later score differently: the iTunes breakup landed well, while Catalyst arrived rough — as the eventual verdicts noted, the iTunes split succeeded but Catalyst disappointed, and Catalyst iPad apps were found lacking at launch.
First-order effects
- Mac users in the public beta immediately get the iTunes replacement apps plus Find My and Screen Time, while developers gain their first shipping-quality toolchain for porting iPad apps to the Mac via Catalyst.
- Sidecar moves from announcement to testable feature, letting beta users validate the iPad-as-display workflow before the fall release.
Second-order effects
- Third-party Mac software vendors face a new competitive channel: if Catalyst lowers the porting cost for iOS developers, Mac categories long dominated by native Mac specialists start absorbing iPad-first entrants.
- Apple Arcade's cross-platform positioning puts Mac gaming in direct comparison with the iOS catalog — a gap reviewers flagged when Arcade shipped fewer games on Mac than iPhone and iPad.
Third-order effects
- If Catalyst matures across successive releases, the Mac and iPad converge toward what MacStories called an unbroken computing continuum — one app ecosystem spanning both platforms, with the Mac App Store reshaped around it.
- The public-beta-as-preview pattern Apple is running here continued as an annual ritual, with Big Sur and Monterey each following the same cycle, making summer betas a standing fixture of how Apple ships macOS.
The trend: Apple is folding the Mac into its iOS-era app ecosystem, with Catalina's Catalyst experiment and the iTunes breakup as the first structural steps in that platform merger.