Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica:
You’d never know from the length of these reviews, but no individual macOS release since the yearly update cadence began really feels like a massive leap up from its predecessor. Instead, they’re more impressive when considered two or three years at a time. By itself, Catalina feels mostly like a Second Edition release for Mojave, which fine-tunes a few features and opens the doors to third-party iPad apps as promised. But I see Catalina more as the end of a three-year effort to modernize the Mac.
Future macOS releases will bring us more improvements to both Catalyst and SwiftUI, and a year from now we’ll be able to see whether an influx of UIKit apps has fundamentally changed what it’s like to work on (and develop for) Macs. The modernization work will continue. But Catalina is solid proof that Apple really isn’t looking to make Macs as tightly controlled or as locked down as iDevices. No one knows what the future holds — and if, as some have predicted, Macs begin shipping with Apple’s own A-series ARM processors rather than x86 processors, Apple still could use the architecture switch to get rid of some of the Mac’s underlying flexibility. But it really does seem like the Mac is going to stay the Mac, distinct from the iPhone or the iPad.
reams more in the recommended full review, of course.
MacDailyNews Take: We agree with Andrew that “The Great iTunes Breakup” is beneficial for just about everyone. Although we’ve had no issues yet, for your mission-critical Mac(s), wait until macOS 10.15.1 to upgrade from Mojave.