macOS

The recent macOS 14.4 kerfuffle has worryingly brought back to light the Core Rot theory where users of macOS highlight problems in macOS that should not exist and/or experience degrading issues that lead to a death by 1000 cuts. In this case, it would appear from the outside that QA missed common use cases or was not performed at all as standard uses of macOS broke. Some of these breakages seem to be related to the security patches which are not made available for public testing in the betas (for valid security reasons)....

For many individuals, computers are tools used to accomplish tasks. This could be development work, art generation, media consumption, or simply a portal to the web. Apple’s approach more recently with the underlying unification of its platforms is to enable these tasks and workflows, but in ways Apple wants you to do so. Take, for example, iPadOS. It has a limited multi-tasking and windowing system as well as a limited file system....

Starting with a recent-ish update to Big Sur, sudo commands would fail for users that are remote users (i.e. Active Directory/LDAP bound). The interesting part is that the sudoers file itself is fine and that some commands prefixed with sudo work and then eventually the rejected commands also start working. This seems to be due to the fact that the OS cannot successfully map the remote User ID and Group to the local admin group and local user account....

The few patch updates to macOS Big sur recently have pretty much confirmed that Apple’s promise of faster updates when using macOS Big Sur is not exactly accurate. Apple’s statement was essentially that if you have automatic updates enabled, the process to install the update will be done in the background and you will be prompted to restart once that operation is complete (saving you time). The problem with this is that I don’t have automatic updates enabled as the quality of macOS updates this past year (Catalina) have caused multiple issues and re-releases have been frequent to fix issues caused by the updates....

After 12 years, it was finally time to replace my original 2008 unibody MacBook Pro. With the iPad Pro taking over the role of mobile computing device, I opted for a Mac Mini with the M1 chip. First impressions are that the hardware is really fast, the I/O is a bit sparse, and the Big Sur is buggy. One of the first things I tested was Xcode unarchiving and I was able to use xip to unpack Xcode 12....