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
- All-new iPad Air and iPad mini deliver dramatic power and capability
- iMac gets a 2x performance boost
- Stanford Medicine announces results of unprecedented Apple Heart Study
- AirPods, the world’s most popular wireless headphones, are getting even better
News and Opinion
- Apple Responds to Spotify – Michael Tsai
- The 10.5-inch iPad Air and Fifth-Generation iPad mini: The MacStories Overview – Ryan Christoffel, MacStories
- Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015 – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
- macOS 10.14.4 update likely on 25 March, with new iMacs and more? – Howard Oakley
- Apple updates iMac Pro options – Romain Dillet, TechCrunch
- The iMac and spinning-disk disappointment – Jason Snell, Six Colors
- Apple Ships Blindingly Fast New iMacs With Old, Slow Storage – Tom Bridge
- The dwindling number of iOS text editors – Brett Terpstra
- Apple launches federated authentication with Microsoft Azure Active Directory for Apple School Manager – Bradley Chambers, 9to5Mac
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
- Deatch by vmmap – Objective-See
- Middle East Cyber-Espionage – Objective-See
- Announcing Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac – Microsoft Tech Community (via Charles Edge)
Support and HowTos
- Disk Utility can’t resize APFS disk images, but hdiutil can – Howard Oakley
- Changing Listed Printers When Deployed by Profile – Anthony Reimer
- Checking the SSL certificate used by an Active Directory domain controller – Rich Trouton
- The Mac Hardware/Software Obsolescence Chart – Anthony Reimer, University of Calgary
- Fix Trust Relationships for Macs Bound to Active Directory Using Centrify – Garrett Yamada
- Building an installer package for Privileges.app – Rich Trouton
- Grabbing packages out of Jamf Cloud DP – Darren Wallace
- App configuration policies for Outlook mobile – Microsoft Tech Community (via William Smith)
- Deploying Outlook for iOS and Android app configuration settings – Microsoft Docs (via William Smith)
Scripting and Automation
Apple Support
Updates and Releases
To Listen
Support
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