Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2019-03-22

Apple flooded us with new releases this week. We got a new iPad Air and new iPad mini, a long-awaited update to the iMac, new Airpods, changes to the BTO pricing for iMac Pro and MacBook Pro, Apple School Manager Federated authentication, and some software updates. As Steven Troughton-Smith pointed out, there have been keynotes for less news.

Not everyone is happy about the “new” iMacs, though: No T2 System Controller and 1TB 5400rpm spinning disks in the base models. I will have some thoughts about the “new” iMacs in my presentation at MacADUK next week! (See you there, if you are going, there may be a few tickets left.)

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Headlines

News and Opinion

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • Zachary Cutlip: “Illustrated: talking to a VMware Fusion guest’s serial port… ”
  • Anthony Reimer: “The surprising thing about today’s iMac update: the bottom, non-Retina 21.5″ model was left completely untouched. Budget model, I guess.”
  • Alex: “The T2 cannot interface with Fusion Drives and Apple doesn’t seem to want to spend the time to make it work. My guess is that next year we will see the end of HDD. I was hoping maybe a redesign would have made it happen this year but no luck.”
  • Steve Troughton-Smith: “iPad Air, iPad mini, iMacs, iMac Pro BTO bump, iPod touch, AirPods, AirPower and Watch bands as press releases — we’ve had full-blown keynotes for less”
  • Charles S Edge: “The contracts are signed and about half the pages are written, so pleased to announce that @rtrouton and I will be turning in the first draft of a new book called “A Unified Theory of Apple Device Management” to @Apress in July of 2019! Rich, you’ve been awesome to work with!!!”
  • Fraser Speirs: “Apple is continuing to cede the K–12 identity, data and workflow space to Microsoft. Maybe the right call but puts them at enormous weakness and disadvantage in the sector.”
  • Laura Rösler: “We finally reached the 20k Mac clients at @SAP. Let‘s open a bottle of #champagne”

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