USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update
arstechnica.comMy upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago.
I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Apple deleted all files and directories in / that they didn't recognize, including my system backup. I had to recover that from Backblaze. Can't say I'm a fan of recent MacOS. If you think you are in control of your Apple machine, think again.
The root (/) is a disk image/APFS snapshot. Apple didn't delete anything... their update replaced that image that you are booting from, which is supposed to be read-only.
Stuff that is located on /System/Volumes/Data is on a non-readonly disk and will not be touched by any updates. You can see folders in /System/Volumes/Data that are also in / and there is some magic overlay that maps certain folders to /System/Volumes/Data automatically. So that files in /usr/local/ are actually stored in /System/Volumes/Data/usr/local./dev/disk3s3s1 on / (apfs, sealed, local, read-only, journaled) devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse) /dev/disk3s6 on /System/Volumes/VM (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse) /dev/disk3s4 on /System/Volumes/Preboot (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse) /dev/disk3s2 on /System/Volumes/Update (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse) /dev/disk1s2 on /System/Volumes/xarts (apfs, local, noexec, journaled, noatime, nobrowse) /dev/disk1s1 on /System/Volumes/iSCPreboot (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse) /dev/disk1s3 on /System/Volumes/Hardware (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse) /dev/disk3s1 on /System/Volumes/Data (apfs, local, journaled, nobrowse, protect, root data) map auto_home on /System/Volumes/Data/home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)Thanks very much! I had no idea about this, but doing a find command as root did indeed find my backup. It was at:
/System/Volumes/Data/Users/Shared/Previously Relocated Items/Security/hbbackup
I don't know how people are supposed to know this. Plus it is taking up 50GB of space!
IIRC, it should create an alias on your Desktop called Relocated Items or something similar to them after the upgrade that pointed at it.
Thanks! I never look at my Desktop and so never noticed it. I deleted the original, moved backup today, and there is nothing on my Desktop about Relocated Items. That could be because I removed it, like an Apple smart link thing, or maybe it was never there - dunno.
IMO, if they're going to do something this drastic, they should at least have a one-time large pop-up box after the upgrade explaining that they moved things that were formerly in root, and wait for a user to confirm that they read the notice.
That would be unnecessary for almost every single last macOS user, you are an outlier.
If you go against the grain or the way the OS is built and explicitly disable SIP and do things the OS would normally not allow, you are expected to understand the OS enough to know where things have disappeared to when they disappear.
I don't think Apple should protect the very small minority from themselves.
Sounds like Canon is really bad in supporting driver changes in subsequent OS releases. I recall diagnosing the same issue with a colleagues Mac over 10 years ago. She updated the OS and the printer she bought with the computer 3 OS'es ago stopped working. Turns out something with how Printers were handled changed and Canon refused to release updated drivers for a discontinued machine. I recall that some third party hobbyist had developed a method to make the printer work but it took hours to try and get it working until we just gave up....also her dog accidentally yanked on the printer cord and it went flying off the table. That was also motivation to stop trying. I am more inclined to blame Canon than Apple here.
Why? Windows has been the one updating itself making sure to not break backwards printer support, not the other way around.
You can still use printers from the 90's on modern Windows, meanwhile MacOS seems to break support for recent printers between minor updates.
It's not like they're a cash-strapped start-up, if Microsoft can afford to invest in maintaining backwards compatibility, so can Apple.
Sounds like Apple is just lazy and doesn't care what it breaks treating their desktop OS like their mobile OS where app devs need to keep pace with them, and fans will die on the hill defending them.
Windows definitely does break backwards-compatibility of printer drivers. My parents had to use a Windows XP VM to print on their Canon printer for a long time before giving in and buying a new printer.
It seems like Apple just prefers that companies release software that they will actually maintain, instead of relying on Apple/Microsoft to bend over backwards to maintain backwards compatibility from now until the end of time.
>It seems like Apple just prefers that companies release software that they will actually maintain
Maybe companies prefer their way, instead of what Apple imposes on them. After all, not all companies are tech companies, who can afford large teams of expensive devs to keep updating their SW. For non-tech companies, the less dev work they have to invest in SW, the better, as that frees up resources for their main business activity.
I for one if I'm the customer and the one spending the money I definitely want to be in charge, not be at the mercy of the manufacturer of product I spend money on to dictate how I should run my business, that I should invest more effort in keeping up with them.
Move fast and break things at the pace of their vendor, is not what most users and companies expect from their products and services.
They shouldn't advertise Mac support then. Canon specifically put a Mac logo on their boxes and uses that in their advertisements.
These printer companies could also open source their drivers after a number of years. The amount of landfill printers due to driver support is kinda sad. Just tossed my old cannon that had a perfectly good scanner due to driver support and the “need” for ink for the scanner to work. Booo!
100%. Require that software be released at the end of the support lifecycle for all licensed customers to continue their use-case, and watch support lifecycles magically telescope outwards.
It would require modification to copyright law in certain aspects (requiring “pass-through licensing” so to speak) and there’s utterly no will to tackle this in the US.
But those sorts of issues are already problematic for, eg, music licensing for games/shows/etc. Some of these types of hyper-limited, time-gated, non-product-ownership-following licensing agreements need to just be outlawed as unconscionable when they’re gating hardware that ends up in landfills or cutting off the public’s access to cultural touchstones. Or just shorten copyright significantly in general.
Canon doesn't develop MacOS. They advertise support for the version of MAcOS that existed when they launched the printer. If MacOS decides to break compatibility over time, it's not their fault. If they're not selling the printer today, they can't also provide up to date support for the OS of today. It's up to the OS developer to ensure a stable API for printers.
“Break compatibility” can cover a wide range of things, however, and that’s not always so clear cut. For example, if they were relying on lax permissions or a private interface then it’s a question of how much effort the OS vendor should spend on something they never promised would work.
Imagine the IP camera vendors saying this :skull:
“What can you possibly be complaining about!? It was secure when we released it! Maybe you should just buy a new one with less vulnerabilities!”
EU isn’t wrong that people have an intuitive sense that appliances like printers should have a worthwhile lifecycle and for some classes of devices this lifecycle should be quite long. 10 years really isn’t unreasonable.
Also, just like everyone has to support usb-c charging regardless of whatever other proprietary alternative they design… vendors should have to support a couple generic standards (postscript/Ghostscript and CUPS) that relieve a lot of the ongoing maintenance. There are very few/no valid reasons you couldn’t implement cups/postscript if you really want.
Hang on, let's pump our brakes and take a quick peek at the calendar. The comment thread we're in was talking about the Canon D530 which was released in 2012, which supposedly broke in MacOS Monterey released in 2021. It's a stretch to call 9 years "moving fast and breaking things".
Hold on there buckaroo. Having a 9 year old printer at home is no big deal as consumers don't usually upgrade their printers if they still work and compatible ink cartridges are still available. My parents are still running a 20+ year old Canon, because it's easy to refill cheaply.
And things don't exist in a vacuum but in comparison to others. To wit, does that Canon printer from 2012 work in present day versions of Windows and Linux? If yes, then why is MacOS the odd one out here?
So what's stopping Apple from providing the same level of reliable printer support as Microsoft and Linux? It sure as hell aint lack of money.
I don't work at Apple nor do I have much more insight into their philosophy than you, so I can only refer you to my previous speculation:
> It seems like Apple just prefers that companies release software that they will actually maintain
What has changed since 2012 in the document printing space that would make that perfectly good machine obsolete? Machines don’t grow on trees, they are created at terrible environmental cost.
Probably security vulnerabilities necessitating a change in the driver model.
> What has changed since 2012 in the document printing space that would make that perfectly good machine obsolete?
I couldn't tell you to be honest, I don't even have a printer.
tbf MS is not the "normal" in the aspect. They are pretty much the backwwrds-compatibility kings.
But nobody is expecting 30 years of backwards compatibility. Just keeping old printer drivers working. It's not like printers are devices we need all too much anymore. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that users will have discontinued printers at home.
Kinda similar to Rosetta 1 and 32 bit binaries on x86. I get their motivation but killing Rosetta 1 basically meant that all old games that came out in the PPC era couldn't be played anymore and killing of 32 bit binaries made the Apple logo in Steam useless. It's not like people expect that this works like how early win32 application still work on Windows. They could totally make the user jump through a bunch of hoops to get support for their old applications. But they didn't.
And at a significant cost at that.
Windows has become a hodgepodge of code bases from a variety of time periods and philosophies, some of which leans on some ancient stuff that can’t be touched.
Hell, they had to skip Windows 9, just to prevent breaking 95/98 software from braking.
The average SW engineer here in HN wouldn’t know how fast they’d get to a keyboard to complain if they were to find a codebase like that at their job.
That’s not to say it’s necessarily bad, even if it can be cumbersome, it’s just to highlight the cost of maintaining that compatibility and a difference in philosophy.
How on earth is it Canon's fault when Apple releases a breaking change?
Well for starters Canon installers do strict version checks. And they often stop updating their drivers, especially for older printers. I got very good about editing the installer files to either add newer versions of macOS or to just remove the version checks. The drivers always worked after I did so. Thats just one of the continual issues with them and their software that caused me to finally ditch them. HP drivers may be bloated, but they work!
Regardless of Canon, there is no reason to change drivers between macOSX OS releases. Aren't all releases using cups?
Can confirm - Canon is horrible at updating their drivers; one of the reasons I no longer own, use or recommend any of their printers. Which is a shame since I really liked their laser printers :/
> Turns out something with how Printers were handled changed
What about backwards compatibility?
Doesn’t Snow Leopard have printer sharing? i.e. you can skip the generate PDF and copy steps, assuming both machines are on your LAN
Snow Leopard has printer sharing. Even better, it has CUPS if you want to get your hands dirty. :)
If the printer it's shared over a wifi network, you can just use netcat:
nc your_printer_ip 9100 < /path/to/your/pdf/fileDoesn't that require your printer to support Postscript? Not many printers for mere mortals support such advanced technology.
It was magical when apple released the LaserWriter printer in 1985 that took postscript files. No need for custom drivers. You would think these days all printers would be driverless.
> Doesn't that require your printer to support Postscript? Not many printers for mere mortals support such advanced technology.
Most networked printers support Postscript, it's not a special feature like it used to be.
Sure, cheap USB inkjets usually don't, but with how cheap entry level networked lasers have been for the last decade or two there's no good reason to buy one of those things. They may be cheaper up front but within a few years the ink alone will make the difference.
PDF support is reasonably widespread these days.
If there's cups running on the remote machine there's a chance it will take care of conversion.
This does not always work for me. Sometimes it makes my printer print out dozens of pages of garbled commands. It varies between sources and tries, so I don't know.
Assuming your printer supports pdf files…
Maybe .ps would be better, but even that isn't universally accepted.
I just saw an update come through on my Ubuntu 22.04 machine for CUPS. I know that Apple is the steward/owner of CUPS now, so I wonder if it's a related update.
Apple hasn't been paying for CUPS for a number of years now.
Apple is not employing Michael R Sweet anymore, that doesn't mean MacOS is not using cups.
I said "paying", not "using".
I don’t think that Apple uses CUPS anymore.
I believe it's still used. Whenever I print anything (Sonoma 14.4) I have to allow connections for 'cupsd'.
Speaking in terms of having “control” over your machine is alarmist and thought-terminating. Your computer didn’t do what you expected it to. Hell, you’re very justified to go beyond that and say that it behaved in a way that it shouldn’t. Removing files from / without notification or backup is bad. Not being able to have files in / is a completely superficial and meaningless indication of “control”. Again, your machine isn’t behaving in a way that you’re expecting it to, or even that you’re used to. macOS is an operating system. Its job is to…be an operating system. It’s going to handle some things for you. That’s why it’s there.
>> Your computer didn’t do what you expected it to. Hell, you’re very justified to go beyond that and say that it behaved in a way that it shouldn’t.
It did exactly what it was programmed to do. It was not a malfunction, it was intentional:
Install little snitch and put it into alert mode and watch as you are overwhelmed with the tens of dozens of outbound connections going out to Apple or iCloud (despite not being signed into iServices) from dozens of system processes.
Why does my MacBook which isn’t enrolled in an mdm ping Apple for mdm config and policies? Why is accountsd phoning home when I’m not signed into an Apple account? Why does the Mac generate absurd amounts of app analytics which you can view in the console app yet can’t delete despite the fact that you turned off all analytics when setting up the machine? Why regardless of if I have WiFi logging enabled or disabled is it still spitting out WiFi velocity reports.
The OS used to be damn near perfect and it’s gone down hill since the first version to introduce iCloud signin. Every new feature they add is something I’ll never be interested in using. Disabling services you don’t want running so they stop phoning home or consuming resources is almost impossible anymore, requiring a dance of booting into recovery mode, disabling every single system protection mechanism, and then booting completely vulnerable into normal mode to then pray that the launchagent gods actually let you turn off mediaanalysisd or if nothing else that sudo has permission (sudo!!) to delete the plist file, and often you get permission denied errors or the process comes back after a reboot. It’s a shit show. The frustrating part is sip and all those things that prevent us from tuning our machines don’t even stop rootkits or the numerous zero days in the wild since it came out
WTF is this nonsense? The OS updated deleted files that it had no business deleting. It's my computer. If I want to put files in the Apple approved locations or if I want to put files in / or even if I wanted to put files in C:\, it's none of Apple's damn business. If placing files in / is a security threat, then I'd suggest your not doing security right.
SIP is Apple's documented way of reserving certain paths to be under OS control. You can disable it to modify reserved paths, but they make no guarantees about such modifications continuing to work across OS updates. If you want files the OS won't touch, keep them out of OS-reserved paths. If you want full control of all files on your machine, a managed OS like MacOS is not for you.
Ok since these types of threads are typically filled with complaints, just to add another data point: I’ve upgraded last week and have not experienced any problems at all.
And yes, I’m using USB hubs, printers and even Java.
Me neither. The thing is that at the scale of an operating system like macOS or iOS is that even if only 1% of its users encounter an issue, it's still a lot of people. Enough to fill many discussion boards with complaints.
Apple doesn't have long tail support in its DNA. Its used to supporting 5 years of devices with just a handful of SKUs per generation. In contrast, Microsoft is used to supporting a huge variety of hardware and keeping it working.
Is that on an M1? Apparently the Java issue only affects Apple silicon for some reason
From 2020 https://www.securemac.com/news/arm-macs-faq
> Write XOR execute (W^X)
> Apple Silicon Macs will enforce a restriction called “write XOR execute” (W^X). This means that chunks of memory will be designated as writable, or as executable, but never as both at the same time. Many macOS apps contain performance optimization programs that require memory to be both writable and executable, but this can lead to serious security issues. By enforcing W^X, Apple will harden Mac security at the memory level. App developers, however, won’t be left out in the cold — if they still need those optimization programs for their apps, they can use a new macOS API that provides a way to switch between write and execute permissions quickly and safely.
And the nature of W^X - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX
> W^X ("write xor execute", pronounced W xor X) is a security feature in operating systems and virtual machines. It is a memory protection policy whereby every page in a process's or kernel's address space may be either writable or executable, but not both. Without such protection, a program can write (as data "W") CPU instructions in an area of memory intended for data and then run (as executable "X"; or read-execute "RX") those instructions. This can be dangerous if the writer of the memory is malicious. W^X is the Unix-like terminology for a strict use of the general concept of executable space protection, controlled via the mprotect system call.
---
See also Porting just-in-time compilers to Apple silicon - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/port...
And W^X now mandatory in OpenBSD (8 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789169 )
The JVM has worked fine on macOS and Apple Silicon for years. It's not violating W^X. The problem is an undocumented/unannounced and probably unintended change in kernel behavior.
Shouldn't this help zero in on where the issue is located? If it did not occur in the last released beta but it now exists in the released update, doesn't that significantly reduce the footprint of where to search for changes?
From a discussion on it previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39741517 by fweimer
> The signal comes from a safe fetch, which is just a read that allows ignoring the fault as if it never happened. Such a signal is deliver synchronously, so the usual restrictions for asynchronous signal handlers do not apply.
> The code in question takes into account that the value read might be garbage. See the big comment here: https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/commit/29397d29baac3b29083b1b...
> On current CPUs and operating systems, this is not an optimization, so the code was removed earlier this year: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8320317
(there's a lot more comments further down that are worth reading)
It is known where this is causing a problem and the code was removed a few months ago in the code for Java 23.
Java has worked great on Apple Silicon since release and it’s still working great now for most users. The linked post explains that Java is already using the W^X modes but there’s an edge case involving page faults while the JIT is updating pages, which to me seems suspiciously like an attempted security improvement which needed better testing:
Most of the time with these update problems it's way more specific than that. It'll be an Apple silicon chip with a very specific system state, creating a low number of high profile errors that are indistinguishable from random.
It's still often a good idea to wait a few days or weeks before updating just in case you're caught by the bugs, but the rates of errors are usually much lower than the mainstream media reporting would lead you to believe.
Using M2 Pro, but mostly using Java through the version installed by MacPorts.
I've also updated my M1 Pro to macOS 14.4 and use Java (versions 21 and 17) daily with IntelliJ IDEA without encountering any issues so far even when using debuggers and profilers. Not sure how to explain it !
Same here on two Apple silicon machines.
In fact, I used to get kernel panics from time to time with USB hubs until a couple of major revisions ago.
What I’m running now, in part via monitor USB hub, is so far beyond the scope of what I expect to be part of QA and intended support that I’m surprised it’s not giving me any issues.
I feel bad for folks experiencing problems, but the upgrade was uneventful on my Macs as well. Work also rolled out the update company-wide with no apparent ill effects, which is surprising given all of the enterprise-y junk they install.
I wonder if this is some kind of warped A/B testing with "stable" upgrades from Apple
I, too, have had no trouble with USB hubs or Java since upgrading to 14.4. (I don't currently use a USB hub—my Thunderbolt dock has been fine, but I doubt it's close enough to count!)
Same for me. On an M1
This seems quite out of character for minor macOS releases. Yes, stuff breaks, but seldomly so broadly in a minor release.
Speculation about why: Apple had to push out a major iOS update before March 6 for the EU DMA deadline. They had almost two years to prepare, but they figured out fairly late that they could not negotiate (most of) their way out of it. So the weeks/months before the release, probably most of the focus of the OS (and infrastructure) teams was on the March 6 deadline.
I imagine that they had all security updates rolled into the macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 branches already. Then when March 6 came around, they released iOS 17.4 and they had to rush out macOS 14.4 as well (macOS 14.4 was already a day later than iOS 17.4, which is untypical for Apple), to avoid that bad actors find macOS vulnerabilities by looking at iOS changes.
Add this to the list of issues:
“macOS Sonoma 14.4 Bug 'Destroys Saved Versions in iCloud Drive'”
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-sav...
I got this from my bank's id authentication app:
> BankID on card and macOS
> A change was introduced by Apple in macOS 14 where one consequence is that BankID on card stops working for some users. We have reported to Apple and hope they fix the error in an upcoming update. Recommendation: Wait to update to macOS 14 to avoid problems when using BankID on card.
Doesn't affect me as I use BankID on file (and I'm on 12.4), but the caution message sure surprised me, in the wrong sort of way.
Signed up to complain about this one. Totally cursed. I had to dig out an ancient windows laptop because I can’t roll it back and I’m shafted.
You can't roll back, but you can downgrade. Might need to be a fresh install. I'm still on High Sierra as it's the last version to support proper text rendering on most of my monitors.
> I can’t roll it back
Really?! I feel like Windows is very good at rollbacks.
Reblog of a better article on https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/18/do-not-update-macos-son...
Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware?
E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?
Apple does not accumulate a trail of old hardware. They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years. Their “tail” is always about the same length.
I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days. It “just works”. So, a “long tail” of hardware is no excuse anyway.
Apple is in the middle off a platform transition from Intel to their own silicon. Some of these problems could be a de-emphasis on the Intel experience. Some of it though seems to be lees quality and more philosophy ( such as the claim it actively deleted files from root ).
If you are going to play in the Apple garden, you have to play the way they want you to.
>They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.
And people give Microsoft shit for not supporting Windows 10 more than 10 years when Apple only does 5.
>I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days
That's incredibly brave (or foolish) to have no fear of upgrading Arch, considering Arch does indeed break, it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.
Also had EndeavourOS for a while when I attempted to switch to Linux and, gave up on it when an update left me without sound. It's a great "batteries included" Arch distro, but can't tolerate such risks on a daily driver machine that I need it to work 100% of the time, every time.
For daily driving without update anxiety I'd go for something boring like Ubuntu/Debian based OSs, Fedora if you want more up-date, or even OpenSUSE if you want a sane rolling distro, but I'd stay away from Arch if you want your computer to just-work(TM) and don't wanna be your own part-time sys-admin.
Arch breaks extremely infrequently these days. I run it on >10 machines at work and home, some even in internal prod.
How much are you willing to vouch for Arch? Will you give me $10k next time my Arch breaks at update?
I'm not taking any bets on how you setup and maintain your particular Arch. Partial upgrades are unsupported etc. You can definitely shoot yourself in the foot with Arch, but after a while it becomes easy not to.
i'll bite and take the action.. of course with an additional stipulation that you wield your wallet to all those daily driving osx that gets hit with this :)
To be fair, with Arch, the more often you upgrade the less you have to fear - the migrations around breaking changes are normally pretty good.
> the more often you upgrade the less you have to fear
Why? If an update is broken, then it will break your shit when you update to it no matter from where the starting point was. The destination is still a broken system.
> They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.
It's officially considered "vintage" 5 years after it is last sold, but that doesn't mean it won't receive OS updates. Apple considers hardware to be obsolete 7 years after sale ends, but is still likely to receive security updates for a while longer.
Their phones enjoy an even longer support window than their desktops/laptops if you consider security updates, the iPhone 5s (2013) just received a security update last year.
> Some of these problems could be a de-emphasis on the Intel experience.
Unlikely since several of the issues seem to happen only on Apple Silicon.
There's also cases where (shockingly to some) Apple just doesn't care.
I'm still more than bitter, after buying some nice 27" 4K HDR 144Hz monitors that Apple actively broke (and may still be broken) Display Stream Compression 1.4 for the Pro Display XDR.
When it was released, there were questions about how Apple was managing to drive that display.
Well, the answer is because they absolutely nerfed/bastardized DSC 1.4 from Big Sur to make it happen with some proprietary magic: those same screens could now only be driven at 60Hz in HDR10 or 95Hz in SDR.
Proof in the pudding was that my monitors (LG27GN950-B) actually allowed you to change the advertised/supported DSC version, and when I "downgraded" the monitors to DSC 1.2, performance actually improved, and allowed 120Hz SDR and 95Hz HDR.
This happened with many many users, across many screen types.
And if you downgraded to Catalina? Boom, back to 144 Hz.
Apple studiously ignored it, and may still be. They simply don't care if you're not using an Apple display.
Btw, do you mean you downgraded DP to 1.2? I think there isn’t a DSC 1.4 (only DP 1.4 which has DSC 1.2, and DP1.4a with DSC 1.2a).
Do you have any more info/links about this? I’m curious, since I do have a Pro Display XDR, and I’ve been trying to understand for some time how exactly it’s able to reach its bandwidth, which is definitely a rabbit hole.
Apologies, you're right. DP 1.4 - just looked at the manual (for the LG 27GN750-B, though I know that many other monitors were affected). Has been a couple of years now.
Ironically, I too, moved to the XDR.
Downgrading to DP 1.2 improved the display options from DP 1.4.
Alternatively, is this evidence of a changing news cycle that is spending more time on the always-present background noise of social media complaints about updates? Do we perceive the rate of failure to be higher because news these days often takes the form of "let's summarize some reddit threads" and outlets realized that warnings about errors when updating software reliably get clicks?
Yes, because Apple can do no wrong.
You ask any long time macOS/OSX user and they will point to Apple software quality worsening well before anything comes up in the news media.
Heck, I'm in the camp that thinks Apple OSX software quality peaked at Snow Leopard and it has been all downhill since then, and this camp is massive.
I doubt we're being influenced by the "media".
Nobody is saying Apple doesn’t make mistakes but you don’t have to be an especially knowledgeable follower of the online media world to know that sites live and die by social media clicks driving ad revenue, and recycling a few tweets and Reddit posts into an article is one way to provide the constant churn of attention-grabbing posts which sites like Twitter demand.
People always assume that anyone defending Apple is a fanboy of some kind or other. I'm not. I personally can't stand their products and wish that I didn't have to use a Mac for work.
What I am is skeptical that subjective pulse checks of social media threads are a good way to measure software quality. They're a decent way to measure public sentiment, not actual error rates.
Yeah, I haven't seen an apple "fanboy" in the classic sense of the word in over a decade. I mean, the daring fireball guy always gives apple the benefit of the doubt, but I've ran into far more people with a borderline irrational hatred of apple to the point where they can't not complain.
I was a total apple advocate between 2004-2014. Now it's become just preferable to windows (although the trackpad on laptops is miles ahead of anything in PC land I've come across). I'm getting more and more annoyed at the iphone, but the alternative is a phone run by an advertising company...
Yes, I think you have nailed it. I have seen this same phenomenon happen in nearly every niche that I pay attention to. Only thing I would add is that a lot of articles are based on tweets, often from random users where the article author did nothing to verify and just included the tweet as the source
To be fair, the media has been doing this for at least 10 years.
I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not hardware getting old or battery problems, it's the OS.
So I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA, but I don't believe they're actually intentionally supported
I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA,
More likely neither. Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.
(My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.)
> Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.
So every major OS update is larger and more complex, so it's to be expected that after ~4 of those my machine lags when doing literally everything? It's not that I'm running tons of background apps, it's a powerful machine lagging on a clean install of a recent macOS version when doing basic operations like opening a webpage.
> My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.
I suppose it's Apple Silicon? Because that would still be in line with Intel-based macs becoming less performant over time
My intel MacBook lags in such a predictable and constant way, as if a process is running constantly at 99% CPU. Makes me a bit suspicious
How much have they /really/ added to the OS (which is enabled on my hardware) and consuming extra resources?
A while ago I went into a rabbit hole looking for something to support my hunch (which I now confirmed by installing old macos) and found some discussions about graphics/OpenGL APIs being deprecated and removed over time. I have a very uneducated guess that new-macos-on-old-hardware runs some translation for all graphics operations/APIs, which causes perceptible lag when doing _anything_, because everything draws on the screen. It does feel as if the OS is constantly struggling with some background tasks
This macOS version only supports models since 2017-19 (depending on product line). Apple don’t really have an excuse compared to Microsoft since they only have a few hardware options.
It’s amusing to compare the comments here to the comments on windows update threads. As nobody else has, let me add the reminder for everyone to switch to <different OS>.
Let’s be clear. 2017 is SEVEN years ago. Things could be far worse.
Seven years is nothing.
Appart from my 2y old corporate laptop the newest machine in my household is a lenovo Yoga X390 from 2019, nearly 5 year old. everything else is between 6 to 15 years old and they are all running a supported OS.
Also release date != purchase date.
Let's be clear. The Apple premium is LARGE. You expect more from them than any other computer company.
I have doubts it's the latter - just a day or two ago there was an article trending on HN that building Hackintoshes is becoming harder and harder because Apple is removing drivers for old hardware only found in Macs that are not supported anymore.
Also doubt it’s the latter: Compatibility with old hardware has never been high on Apple’s priority list.
Windows updates before MS fired their QA department were uneventful, after they fired their QA department, serious issues started popping up every single month. Including server systems not booting anymore.
That doesn't track for me.
One of the reasons MS introduced "patch Tuesday" in 2003 was because Windows updates until then had been notorious for years for causing issues randomly, which their corporate users hated firefighting without warning. By rolling out their updates on a predictable schedule, corporate IT depts could set their calendar to keep a day (or two) per month clear to do post-update firefighting, or (if they were really on the ball) to make time for their own QA before releasing the update to the rest of the org.
So unless the QA firing you're talking about was more than a quarter-century ago, Windows updates have always been issue-laden shitshows.
Any issues were really minor. I worked for an MSP for most of the Windows XP through Windows 8 era and update problems were anomalies, not par for the course. If there were problems, they were newsworthy events.
They keep breaking and + unbreaking my old Samsung Laser Printer (PCL compliant) I think 14.4 fixed it, for what it's worth. Since Linux CUPS and Apple use the same underlying open source drivers, Arch is bug-for-bug compatible.
I wish they performed some sort of automatic regression testing on stuff like this.
I have an old Samsung laser printer, and the only machine that can print to it is a macbook. I've got a Windows PC, and it won't install the driver that is supposedly recommended (weirdly enough by HP?), while another version of that driver can't connect to the printer. It's quite bizarre.
I moved from m1 MacBook pro to m2 recently.
Just like that my monitor's built in KVM stopped working in a reasonable manner. Can use it to drive the web camera which sometimes works normally and sometimes with shitty frame rate. Microphone now appears and then gets evicted (rode USB mic), my headphone preamp will crackle like mad so it is useless...
I got this monitor specifically to be able to work with the stupid m1 limitation of 1 external screen and to be able to switch seamlessly to my secondary rig. And it could be connected using one cable as it does power delivery.
Now I have an expensive montor that is useless for the purpose I got it for. Not sure whether to blame dell or apple but do not remember many instances of issues like this in my life. Being a PC guy forever and now got forced to use apple for work.
Really don't understand why it's being pushed so much in corporate env. lately? Maybe I am just weird.
Ever since updating last week, one of my two monitors (connected through a CalDigit USB-C dock) won't turn back on after inactivity.
I have to open up System Settings, change the resolution for the monitor, and change it back every time I leave my macbook and come back.
If a resolution change fixes the issue, consider a short term fix of using displayplacer. It's a cli tool for updating resolution or placement of displays.
I use it in combination with Stream Deck/Keyboard Maestro to toggle the resolution of second monitor during Teams screen sharing to provide a lower resolution for display challenged colleagues.
Have you checked for firmware updates on the dock? I had a problem like that years ago where it basically turned out that the dock was doing something dodgy and an updated macOS stopped tolerating it, but fortunately they had a firmware update available which brought it into compliance.
Have you tried a KVM switch?
I have one in my setup and toggling it off and then back (via button) is a quicker way to solve freak-outs.
I have a USB switch for my peripherals, but I haven't needed a KVM until now. That does sound convenient!
Oblig: https://i.imgur.com/ZNsn2PB.gif
I've always been amazed that what I think of a dumb switch (wiring) USB hubs, have connectivity problems solved by such... its a protocol handling problem. Not a circuitry issue, and there should be a command to reset USB/Peripherel reboots.
Invoking a reconnect via CLI / cmd would be great.
For me OSX updates have broken, over the past few years, my USB C ethernet dongle and firmware upload connectivity to specific hardware chipsets. This caused me to buy a non-Apple laptop. Now my Apple laptop refuses to update at all (top of line 4 year old laptop with max spec) so the upgrade driven failures problem category has effectively gone away, but OSX is becoming increasingly unusable. As a result I won't be buying more Apple hardware and have moved back to Linux as the primary machine - super fast and stable, with a slight setup tax and occasional annoyances.
What brand and model of laptop hardware do you buy now? I have been extremely happy with framework laptops, although my big complaint is that the trackpad on my 3rd gen is worse than on my first gen, so they might be trending the wrong direction on track pads. But otherwise, my experience with Fedora on framework hardware has been remarkable
Not your parent poster. I know libre everything is an important cause to fight for but I didn't want to beta-test new products so I bought a refurbished HP 15s about two years ago. Full AMD configuration (I was specifically looking for that) and the CPU (5500U) is surprisingly fast. I have put 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD with high durability value and just recently provisioned the machine with Manjaro + XFCE. Works amazingly quickly and everything was fine out of the box (used my Airpods Max as well).
Apart from me not liking XFCE (and X11 in general) and that I'll re-provision it with KDE instead, I am very happy with the result. This laptop puts my iMac Pro to shame.
Lenovo. Would have got framework if available at the time.
Apple updates are a joke. I have a script in my dotfiles to recognize when an apple update overwrites `/etc/zshrc` to run, among other things, a utility that rewrites your path in a nonstandard way (I don't remember the details, I think it was something related to config file load order?)
Nothing I've done so far to stop the overwrite in the first place has worked.
Is there a particular reason you’re not putting .zshrc in the user’s home folder ~/.zshrc?
In any case, / root and /etc (to an extend) are part of the system volume (or rather the system volume snapshot if we want to be pedantic). With some exceptions Apple considers that fair game.
There’s a bunch of symlinking and firmlinking done to make it look like one coherent whole but only the stuff on the data volume is safe.
That said, if for whatever reason you need to put something in root you can create your own synthetic firmlink[0] with /etc/synthetic.conf.
I believe some also reported success by simply making a subdirectory under /etc and use that instead but YMMV.
hoakly goes into extensive detail with what changed with volumes on macOS (back in 2019 I believe): https://eclecticlight.co/2021/01/13/big-sur-boot-volume-layo...
0: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/creating-root-l...
Some notes on how Apple sets up paths in /etc/zprofile: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-pa...
> The solution is to do path initialization in ~/.zprofile on macOS. This file is loaded after /etc/zprofile and before ~/.zshrc.
Thanks! I prefer to set my path in ~/.zshenv so I don't have to worry about anything misbehaving in non-login shells, but this rabbithole led me to a good option to cover both: https://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2003/msg00600.html
The application window switching has been glitching ever since I was forced to upgrade recently[0]. Instead of switching between windows of the same app it (using the keyboard shortcut) sometimes includes windows of all apps. Rebooting helps. Sometimes it starts working again for some unexplained reason after a while. Super annoying.
To be clear I'm talking about Keyboard shortcuts -> Keyboard -> Move focus to next window.
[0] I was running Big Sur because none of the recent MacOS updates really offered anything of interest to me, since I don't use most Apple software. But Homebrew and Element stopped working so I had to upgrade. I should've just upgraded to a newer, not to the newest version (which I tend to avoid due to issues like these that might come up). Lesson learned.
I know this isn't helpful, but it's genuinely very surprising to me that this is the case with a company like apple that controls tightly the entire stack in part because they want to tightly control the experience, that you would not be comfortable upgrading to the latest version immediately. Particularly given how much of a premium you pay to get into that system. On Fedora Linux, upgrading has gotten remarkably safe, especially if you take advantage of some of the options that use a/b partitions to allow rollbacks.
I’ve been comfortable upgrading on day one for a couple decades, and have never had a problem. The difference in most cases is the areas where Apple doesn’t control – I don’t use a lot of third-party extensions but a lot of apps, even popular ones like Dropbox, used to do pretty invasive things which were prone to breaking. People in industries like audio production where much of the software has DRM systems have decades of scar tissue from that kind of stuff, so I totally understand why they hesitate.
Strangely enough, at about the time this macOS update came out, the virtual USB hub in my Win7 VM (Fusion 11.5.7), which I run on a Catalina (10.15.7) Mac broke. This is after years of no issues. I didn't update anything except maybe Chrome & Tailscale on the Mac, maybe Firefox & Cisco Anyconnect on the VM. No changes to the VM settings or the devices I normaly plug into the Mac's USB. Now I did update a MBP on the same network to macOS 14.4 when it came out, but how could that affect anything?
I don't know how related it is, but since macOS 14.4, when I try to print a webpage in Safari (and I use this feature to export as PDF a lot!), it just crashes...
So far I've had two issues after the update: - JetDrive / SD drive wouldn't mount - Time Machine backups started failing with "Time Machine did not back up because the backup disk was previously encrypted but is no longer encrypted"
I've resolved both issues. Still not happy to have to waste two hours of my life on it.
This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(
14.4 seems to be breaking Docker desktop for some uses too https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220
> Scanning Apple's release notes or security update disclosures for the update doesn't reveal any smoking guns
Wait what? So 10 screens of bangers like "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges" and "An attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability may be able to bypass kernel memory protections. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited." are not considered smoking guns?
End users typically don’t tolerate security fixes that alter or break existing functionality, so it would be in line with common responses for those ten screens of security concerns to be disregarded. One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice — and also is causing much of the drama everyone’s seeing. Presumably there’s also a new Celebrite attack over USB-C / PCIe / Thunderbolt, and fixing it urgently has uncovered either a USB/TB spec bug, an implementation bug in the OS, or an implementation bug in the devices. It’s usually the devices, but sometimes it’s not.
> One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice
Why is preventing trapping on an illegal memory access a sensible security practice?
Preventing the access, sure, but I'm not seeing what force killing a process does for security, especially given there are perfectly reasonable reasons why one might want to trap the signal.
> One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice
The signal raised for page faults should be (and actually was, before 14.4) SIGSEGV, and not SIGKILL. This behaviour is even defined by POSIX.
There is no reason why this should change, specially not in the final release instead of in the public betas and early access releases (where the change was not present).
To clarify so that I’m not responding incompletely, are we seeing all page faults, i.e. process swapped to disk, now raise SIGKILL — or is this behavior reserved only for certain page faults, i.e. out-of-bounds and permission-denied (R^X) accesses?
The former would be a catastrophic defect and probably result in the release being pulled from distribution.
The latter would be a new classification of certain kinds of page faults as “safe” and “unsafe”, and only the safe ones are allowed to comply with POSIX signal handling. Perhaps they’ll propose an update to POSIX now that the zero day response has shipped.
I have zero problems with the listed things, but Safari refuses to keep me logged into sites. It's like cookies are no longer working or something. Extremely annoying.
I'm really curious what Apple does with all that money they have. To be worth so much and mess up the basics ... I just don't get it. What the heck is going on over there?
It just works - sorry I could not help it - if my USB hub stopped working with a Windows Update I could not do my work.
Suppose I'm lucky that my only symptom so far is the occasional unexplained crash on PHPStorm.
It is exactly crashes of Java caused by changing (breakage) of POSIX API by Apple.
The thing really weird is the different behavior between beta and release versions