Apple certainly had a lot more stuff to deliver before the holiday break. This week we got an update for the Airport base stations, a(nother) minor bug fix for iOS 11 (fixing a HomeKit security hole) and, finally, the iMac Pro.
The iMac Pro is of course the new flagship Mac, outshining even the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro, at least for a while. While the price is definitely daunting, remember the “normal,” non-Pro iMacs are still around and you can still buy a decent retina screen iMac starting at around $1500. (I refuse to consider any Mac without an SSD do be “decent.”)
Interestingly for admins, the iMac Pro, comes with the predicted Secure Boot. There is a UI to disable it, though how you manage that setting is yet to be determined. Also, you can “restore” an iMac Pro over a Thunderbolt 3 cable with Apple Configurator 2.6. This is presumably to fix a broken firmware for the T2 processor, which controls (among other things) the Secure Boot process. There will be more interesting discoveries when MacAdmins will actually get their hands on these.
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📰News and Opinion
- iMac Pro debuts custom Apple T2 chip to handle secure boot, password encryption, more
- iMac Pro first impressions: Beauty of a beast – Rene Ritchie, iMore
- iMac Pro: The first shoe drops – Six Colors
- Deployment: We Need To Talk – Anthony Reimer
- RIP 12–15–17: Goodbye AOL Instant Messenger – Charles Edge
🔨Support and HowTos
- Disable FMM in Enterprise – clburlison
- Automator application to run script as root – Eric Hemmeter
- AirPort Base Station Firmware Updates 7.6.9 and 7.7.9 – TidBITS
- Rogue Amoeba InstantOn Driver Installs – Ben Goodstein
- How to manage ONLY FDE Recovery Key Escrow in Jamf Pro 9.101+ – Matthew Warren
- Monitoring /etc/hosts with osquery – Zach Wasserman, Kolide
- Limit access to the Login Window using a script – Daz Wallace
- SHA–1, Smart Cards and CTK – Richard Purves
🍏Apple Support
- About the security content of AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.7.9
- About the security content of AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.6.9
- About iOS 11.2.1
- About the security content of iOS 11.2.1
- About the security content of tvOS 11.2.1
- Restore iMac Pro – Apple Configurator 2 Help
♻️Updates and Releases
- SuperDuper 3.1: More APFS and Snapshot support
- Jamf Pro 10.1.0
🎧To Listen
📚Support
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