Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-08-31

Things are heating up in the iOS 12 and macOS Mojave beta cycle. Apple has announced an event on September 12, which will presumably present the new iPhones and Apple Watch. There may or may not be new Macs at that event, though in the past Apple would often have a second event later in the fall.

From the September 12 date and the schedule of past years, you can extrapolate the release dates and you will realize that we merely have weeks and not months left.

Even more concerning is that Apple has just recently released working versions of the profile payload to control the new privacy settings, especially for Apple Events. You can learn the details in this excellent post by Felix Schwarz. I need to highlight this piece from his summary:

I feel, though, that the most responsible way for Apple to handle this situation would follow the playbooks for Group FaceTime and 32 Bit deprecation: postpone the feature until it has matured – and make it available to developers behind a feature toggle until then.

Also, minor milestone: this newsletter has passed 300 subscribers! Thank you all for reading and recommending! (and don’t stop spreading the news!)

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News and Opinion

macOS Mojave

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Aron Griffis: “Working on a new Bash book. So far: Intro: You chose the wrong tool. Ch 1: Have you considered Python? Ch 2: Try calling Python from your Bash script. Ch 3: If you’re still here, try adding quotes.”
  • Jason Broccardo: “Tea leave reading: Once Apple is shipping Macs with their own A-series ARM chips, VMware Fusion will still works”
  • MacDevOpsYVR: “The next MacDevOps:YVR conference will be in Vancouver, Canada, June 12–14, 2019”
  • Zack McCauley: “Per @Contains_ENG recommendation to post this #MacAdmins please @Apple give us documentation, give us feedback, and for the love all that is left please don’t give us a feature that makes this so much worse on users” (Video)
  • mikeymikey: “! HEY #MACADMINS HEADS UP ! 2017 iPhone event: Sept 12 (T) iOS 11: Sept 19 (T) macOS 10.13: Sept 25 (M) ’16: 7 (W) iOS 10: 13 (T) mac 10.12: 20 (T) ’15: 9 (W) iOS 9: 16 (W) mac 10.11: 30 (W) NOW: 2018: 12 (Wed) iOS 12: 19 (Wed)? macOS 10.14: 26 (Wed)?”
  • Jason Broccardo: “Sys Admin’s idea of winning the lotto: You automatically get elevated past tier 1 on any support call because you’ve already covered all those steps in your troubleshooting before you filed a ticket.”
  • Patrick Gallagher Jr: “Firefox 63 for Mac will add support for using keychain certs.” (but with limitations, read this thread)
  • Carl Ashley: “Remember when we all though SIP was the worst thing?”
  • Kyle Crawford: “Our Apple SE said last year that they regretted how they handled Kext restrictions. Yet here we are again with #AEpocalyse.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

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Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author