Living with Catalina on MBP 16" and Mojave elsewhere

[madmin]

I was avoiding Catalina and iOS 13 for the time being because I didn't want to deal with the bugs or the loss of iTunes. I ended up installing iOS 13.2 on my iPhone 8+ after buying AirProd Pros. It turned out ok, but I don't use my iPhone for much more than calls, playing music, reading messages and the camera.

Now I'm about to pull the trigger on a 16" MBP which will come with Catalina of course. I intend to stay on Mojave for the foreseeable future on my main machine which is a 2017 iMac. As far as iCloud is concerned, I only enable iCloud drive (not Desktop and Documents folders) and Notes. I have ripped thousands of vinyl records and uploaded them to iTunes match with personalised artwork. I also subscribe to Apple music and have bought quite a few TV series and films in the Apple store. So iTunes is obviously an important application for me.

I'd guess I'm not the only one in this situation of running Mojave on one or more mac while using Catalina on a new MBP, so I'd like to ask how that goes ? Will my Mojave iMac continue to work well with iTunes / iTunes Match despite me using Catalina on the new device ? Can I expect any other issues in this situation ?

 

[mightyjabba]

I have some Macs still on High Sierra, one on Mojave, and the 16” on Catalina, and I haven’t noticed any problems at all in terms of them interacting with each other. I still regularly add photos to my iCloud Photo Library through an old Mac on High Sierra with no apparent issues, and iTunes and the TV/Music apps seem to play nice with each other. I would downgrade the 16” to Mojave if I could though.

 

[madmin]

Thanks for sharing that @mightyjabba. Yeah, I'd love to downgrade the new 16" to Mojave if it was possible. Good to hear iTunes is working ok for you. I really don't want to lose my iTunes playback history due to being forced into Catalina too early.

 

[Donnation]

OP I have the exact same setup that you will have. A 2017 iMac running Mojave and a 16" MacBook Pro running Catalina. I've not encountered a single problem. I don't really care for the TV app in Catalina as it is a completely overstuffed mess so I'm glad I still have regular iTunes on my iMac.

 

[ZMacintosh]

iTunes Match is part of Apple Music, so you won't need two subscriptions to the same thing.
I did notice more of a back-end change where the new Apple Music library folder is concerned, if I upgraded it somewhat breaks up the storage location for them, but if I created a new library and re-imported everything was a little bit more cleaner, if that matters to you.

The whole Apple Music thing is confusing and they're really pushing the Apple Music subscription service by hiding the iTunes Store (which adds to the confusion, id rather just buy my music) – while with iTunes it was much easier as figuring out the difference between the services (Store, Match, App, etc).
Though, the separation of the Apps is not as bad after time, because when I was in the iTunes app and I wanted to search for something in TV, Movies or Podcasts while listening to music it was a little tougher to navigate back, with the separate apps its just a quick app switcher between them.

Mojave was definitely a better OS, Catalina is most likely this growing pain of the next version of macOS.

 

[madmin]

Thanks @Donnation & @ZMacintosh very useful info. Ever since Apple Music started I've preferred paying the 25/year for iTunes Match to taking any risks by turning it off. If Catalina messes things up, I'll stop paying though.