Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2018-09-14

We got new iPhones and Apple Watches this week. You can read all about them in all the usual places. More importantly for admins, we also got release dates for iOS 12 (September 17) and macOS 10.14 Mojave (September 24). Are you ready?

The developer releases for the iOS family (iOS, tvOS, watchOS) are now labeled GM. macOS Mojave is beta 11.

Other than the Mojave release date, there was no Mac news at the iPhone event. This shouldn’t surprise or dismay anyone. The September iPhone event has been fully focussed on iPhone and Apple Watch for the last few years. This year, there wasn’t even room for the iPad. There may be some ‘silent’ Mac hardware releases over the next few weeks or Apple may even do a second event. While Apple has had November and December releases in the past, they are rare.

Keep in mind, that any new Macs that are released after the Mojave release date will likely require Mojave. The release window for new Macs that can still run High Sierra is very, very short indeed. Next week should be interesting.

In other news, it was revealed that a number of popular apps in the Mac App Store would exfiltrate the user’s browser history. The apps in question were promptly removed by Apple, but this does cast some doubt on the effectiveness of Apple’s review process.

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News and Opinion

macOS Mojave

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • William Smith: “TOMORROW (Tuesday, September 11) Office for Mac transitions from the 2016 to the 2019 generation. Office 365 customers: Nothing to do. Volume License customers: AutoUpdate will hold apps back until the new Serializer is available September 24. Don’t push 16.17.”
  • Erik Gomez: “Apple: we don’t understand why you built umad, but okay… Me: because there’s so many MDM enrollment bugs!”
  • mikeymikey: “hey fruitco peeps Why isn’t 18A389 released on MAS? SUS feeds were updated and delta updates published – but no full installer app exists via “approved” download methods. MAS is still offering the prior product build. Kind of an important time for testing beta 11”
  • William Smith: “For #MacAdmins using MAUCacheAdmin to cache Microsoft Office for Mac updates to a local server for distribution, be sure to download v2.0 to get support for Office 2019 (16.17+) for Mac. GitHub”
  • Felix Schwarz: “AppleScript support still hasn’t returned to Mojave’s rewritten DVD Player app as of beta 10. It was super-useful for remote apps to determine when a menu is shown, to eject DVDs, etc. Would make me sad if that change was permanent & something I’m working on couldn’t use it.”

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Watch

  • William Smith: “Streamlined Microsoft Office for Mac Activation with Automatic Outlook Setup for Office 365 Thanks to @jeffreykalvass and his team for listening to #MacAdmins and making Outlook for Mac manageable with configuration profiles. Now in Insider Fast v16.18.”

To Listen

Support

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Published by

ab

Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author