When EndNote offered its 20.3 version in July 2022, it created lots of problems for Mac users, such as the ability to go to a surname in the author list simply by typing, say, “Smith,” and having the list drop down to the Smith entries. Other users on this website detailed additional problems for Mac users. EndNote 20.4 did not solve the Mac problems.
It’s now January of 2023. EndNote is still in the 20.4 version with no solution to the Mac problems. It’s sad, not least because EndNote began as a Mac program, which I’ve been using since EndNote 2.1 was released about 1995.
I’ve been using EndNote on the Mac since EndNote Plus, the first, and Mac-only, version. Every time there was a new version, I’ve had to very carefully decide if it was worth/necessary to upgrade. For some years (Endnote 4 to Endnote X7) they put out a new version every year with few point updates in between. For most of these yearly releases, the changes were very minor and not worth an upgrade, or were a step backwards in terms of usability. I usually skipped a version or two between upgrades. Usually macOS requirements finally caused me to upgrade, with sometimes difficult periods. E.g. early X9 would slow to a crawl for me and was totally unusable after a few minutes of use without restarting. I’m still on X9.3.3, and happy that I haven’t upgraded to 20 due to loss of relied-on functions, and all the other stuff mentioned by others on this forum. Over these 32 years of using EndNote, I have reassessed switching to another reference manager several times. All software has their different issues, or may not be around for long. I don’t think EndNote is the best at everything, and it is becoming very bloated for my use case. However, I hope it continues to support the Mac users, and does a better job in the future of making things work properly the first time and consistently across versions. If not, ReadCube Papers, originally Papers from the makers of EnzymeX, is a less-popular alternative that started Mac only. For paid software, this one always seems to be a viable alternative if I were to switch.