MacOS 10.15.5

macOS 10.15.5 is an update to macOS 10.15 (Catalina) that was released on May 26, 2020 by Apple Inc.

New features
This update adds the following features:

Battery Health Management: FaceTime Prominence Preference: Calibration Fine-Tuning for Pro Display XDR:
 * Battery Health Management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks.
 * Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced.
 * Option to disable battery health management.
 * New option to control automatic prominence on Group FaceTime calls, so video tiles do not change size when a participant speaks.
 * Controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR by adjusting the white point and luminance for a precise match to your own display-calibration target.

Bug fixes and improvements

 * Fixes an issue that may prevent Reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders.
 * Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen.
 * Fixes an issue where System Preferences would continue to show a notification badge even after installing an update.
 * Resolves an issue where the built-in camera may not be detected when trying to use it after using a video conferencing app.
 * Addresses an issue for Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip where internal speakers may not appear as a sound output device in Sound preferences.
 * Fixes a stability issue with uploading and downloading media files from iCloud Photo Library while your Mac is asleep.
 * Resolves a stability issue when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes.
 * Fixes an issue where the Reduced Motion Accessibility preference did not reduce the speed of animations in a Group FaceTime call.

Enterprise content

 * Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing.
 * Addresses an issue where Microsoft Exchange accounts were unable to sign in during account setup when using Conditional Access.
 * Apple Push Notification Service traffic now uses a web proxy when specified in a PAC file via the Proxies payload.
 * Resolves an issue that prevented some displays connected to MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) from waking from sleep when the Mac wakes.
 * Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the  command with the   flag. This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003.

Other issues
Former Apple employee Mike Bombich found that macOS 10.15.5 will incorrectly report success in creating a bootable backup of an APFS volume to third party backup applications when actually failing. This issue was first identified during beta testing and was not addressed in the public release. Apple has not yet confirmed whether this is a bug or an intentional change as Apple had previously suggested at WWDC 2019 that developers should use Apple's own Apple Software Restore (ASR) utility.

Articles

 * Apple MacOS 10.15.5 Release: MacBook’s Powerful Surprise by Ewan Spence at Forbes (2020-05-27)
 * New macOS 10.15.5 feature reduces your battery life to save your battery’s life by Samuel Axon at Ars Technica (2020-05-28)