MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I had put off upgrading for a long time because nothing good can come from running the latest stable release. They've never been stable. But Apple sort of forced me to update recently since wanted to back up my phone, which I wanted to do before switching to a new one. I imagined that it would be better after a year. Boy was I wrong, and I regret doing it much. It has been a constant pain ever since, bluetooth is completely broken.

- My external trackpad isn't able to connect, at all. Audio devices require that I kill coreaudiod before connecting, otherwise they just disconnect after a few seconds.

- I can wake the laptop with a bluetooth keyboard, but when it's awake the keyboard stops working. Flipping the switch on the backside of the keyboard lets it reconnect again.

- There are transitions that you cannot disable that makes your laptop feel super slow. In Mojave you could disable them, in Catalina you can't unless you want to run with SIP disabled.

- There's also a super fun bug with mobile hotspot failing to activate, and there's no way for you to just manually connect to your own hotspot, it has to go through this bluetooth activation, even though your mobile hotspot is visible and connectable on all other devices. You end up in situation where you connect to your friends hotspot and they connect to yours, since neither of you are able to connect to your own.

I've given up. The quality control in Apple is down the drain, and have been for quite some time. I'm fixing to downgrade to Mojave this weekend, hopefully that will make it more stable. But I'm not holding my breath. To add injury to insult I'm on my third broken keyboard now. Next time it breaks I might just use the consumer laws and make them refund the laptop so they'll have to take a big loss for creating such a flawed device.

Those all sound like unusual problems. What external hardware and phone are you using?

I've drunk the cool aid. Never drink the cool aid: iPhone 11 Pro, Magic Trackpad and Keyboard, AirPod Pro and Bose QC35. If you search for these issues on the community forums or web in general you'll see that it's quite common, and it all started with Catalina.

Some brave people that were running the public beta reported these issues to Apple, but we're now four point releases in and still no fix. Apple seem to not even want to acknowledge the issue, they just send users to their FAQ which sums up to "have you rebooted?"

The issues seems to start if you have bluetooth devices connected and your laptop becomes memory constrained. And after that it's in a broken or bricked state it seems. You can do tricks like killing coreaudiod to get audio devices to connect, but trackpad is still broken.