Got a new MBP 16" and of course it runs Catalina
Its not noticeably faster than my old MBP but then this one is 2.6 Ghz w/6 cores and the old one 2.7 w/ 4 cores. And it has more memory and doesnt over heat driving multiple monitors like my poor old one did
That said I got an email from Thomas Tempelmann that I can read, view and there’s nothing obviously wrong with the email but if I try to Reply, Forward and do just about any other action Mail crashes
Anyone else seeing this sort of weirdness with “some mails” on Catalina ?
Would sure love to diagnose what is up with this email as opposed to all others that I can reply to
Migration assistant is what caused most of the problems I had with my 16" MBP, when I spoke to Apple support, they said they knew it was broken for Catalina and would recommend wiping the SSD, re-installing the OS and then slowly moving over my data.
Media keys on the TouchBar were intermittent.
Machine refused to recognize wired headphones if they were connected to machine on start-up (had to be physically disconnected and reconnected to operate).
Inability to access the Facebook website from the FireFox web browser.
Screen flickering in Apple and 3rd party applications, this included horrible tearing when the machine beeped and was set to Flash the screen on beep.
Edit: I never really got to use Mail to experience the issues with that, because I was so busy trying to get my app to work on this machine (which turned out to be a bug in Catalina), and I’d wiped the SSD within 2 days of owning this disaster.
Yeah I just had no patience with it for the first few tries
Finally did a backup then hooked that drive to the new MBP and just let it run restoring from the backup overnight (it actually took about 4 hours but I didnt start until 10 PM)
Except for a few surprises (apps that were 32 bit I hadnt checked) and mail behaving weird the first time (I reset things and its been good since)
This machine is at least as fast as the other - its a 2.6Ghz 6 core instead of the 8 core which has slower cores but more of them
But with 32 Gb memory and a 1Tb SSD I can now run macOS Linux & WIndows each full screen on a different screen and the machine fans arent cranking
At first I was ready to pack this up and give it back to Apple because migration was such a shit show
As of right now -I’m good - the machines not bad
OMG the speakers are WAYYYYYY better
And now I can drive all the monitors I have (the 43" gets set up this weekend)
That was part of my complaint with this machine. I’d gotten the GeekBench scores for it and compared them with the scores of my current machine.
The CPU is 1.9x faster in single core and 2.4 in multi-core. Those number arn’t exactly incredible, for a 7 year difference, but until Apple uses a different CPU (AMD is currently 1.5x performance per cost increase), I’d take even a 1.9x CPU improvement, along with faster SSD and faster memory, it should be very close to 2.x improvement.
But it wasn’t, startup was only a 25% improvement, navigating the system and launching apps were a little faster, but not nearly 2x faster. Compiling was faster, so was rendering images in my app, but again, they were not 2x faster (in my unscientific tests).
I realize I could have upgraded my work machine to Catalina and that would have been a fairer test, but I also don’t want to break my work machine, and I needed to complete this task, which couldn’t be done on Catalina.
I am glad that it does bring some joy to you, and I hope that one day, with some more care from Apple, your experience will get better.
Apple just doesnt seem to be testing stuff that well
For instance I have 2 external monitors + the new laptop
One external is logically placed to the left of the laptop and one to the right
Mail is on the left most monitor
When I put my mouse over one of the toolbar icons (this is on the left monitor) the help tag shows up … way over on the right. Seriously !
I have never had any issue with macOS mail - ever - until now
The stupid trick I referred to is the ones in my previous post from AppleToolBox
BUT, and this is downright hilarious, I found a “workaround”.
If instead of clicking on a Mail and the clicking reply from the main Mail window I double click the mail so it opens in its own window and then reply it works.
That makes NO sense but …
I am also having trouble with Mail since buying my new iMac which of course came with Catalina. I can be looking at the list of mail in my inbox and an email just disappears before my eyes. I can get it right back by clicking Mailbox:Synchronize menu item.
I’m not expecting a Snow Catalina release, if what people say about Apple operating a tick-tock schedule, Catalina should be a “Snow Mojave”. Maybe their clock is broken.
Personally, I’ve come to the conclusion, that they’re busy building iPadOS to be the replacement for the macOS (for when ARM Macs ship) and therefore are putting in the minimum effort to macOS Intel.
Time Machine seems to not be working for me under Catalina. It appears to start the backup, but after a while it shows a message that says “borrando” (deleting) and it starts deleting something. I try to run it again and a different amount of data is being shown as being preparted to backup. Run it again and the same thing happens, but it shows a different amount of data being backuped.
Seeems I’m not the only one having problems with time machine under Catalina
we’ll see how long this lasts 
