Category: Weekly News

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-06-09

Wow, what a week!

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WWDC 2023

WWDC 23 is on and started with an amazing keynote. When they introduce three new Mac models, including the new Apple silicon based Mac Pro in the first 20 minutes, then you know it’s going to be in for quite ride. After 80 minutes, there was a moment where it wasn’t quite certain there was going to be a “One more thing…” and I thought I would have been happy if they had stopped there. New Macs, Apple silicon transition completed, many good new features for macOS, iOS, and watchOS.

But they didn’t stop and introduced the ‘Vision Pro,’ which is neither a ‘VR’ nor a ‘AR headset’, but a ‘spatial computer’ with a ‘spatial operating system.’ Whatever Apple calls it, this was the preview, mainly for the developers and it will not be available until next year and even then only in the US, so I will take my time until I make my judgement about this. This opinion is a step up from my former opinion of any VR/AR/spatial computer from Apple (or anyone), which can only be described as ‘indifferent.’

The potential of the Vision Pro and concept of ‘spatial computing’ seems great. The question whether Apple can achieve that potential remains. The price point and limited availability are clear signs that Apple is aware that this platform is maybe ‘not quite ready yet.’ But other platforms, like the Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and back in the day, even the Mac and the first PowerBooks took a few years to really find and define their purpose, too.

Sessions for MacAdmins

Apple has released more than 170 sessions for WWDC. Most of those sessions are focused on developers and not people who manage and deploy Macs and other Apple devices. Here is a list of sessions that I think MacAdmins should watch.

If you haven’t seen either of these, you really should. They give an excellent overview of what Apple thinks is relevant for the upcoming platforms. You might have other priorities, and that is fair, but getting the overview picture and an impression of where Apple is heading is important.

Don’t miss this

Always a great overview of what is will happen for Mac and iOS management. Covers many topics that don’t quite merit their own session.

Business & Education

Apple has a “Business & Education” topic in the developer app. These will be in-depth explanations of some specific new features.

Other interesting sessions

While these sessions will likely be very focused on developer topics, they often contain interesting explanations of how to use and sometimes how to manage these features.

And now, on to the news…

Apple devices

macOS Sonoma and iOS 17

Community

News and Opinion

Social Media

  • mikeymikey: “open 'x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.Software-Update-Settings.extension?action=showBetaUpdates'” (Thread)

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-05-26

Less than two weeks until WWDC. The keynote will be on June 5, as usual at 10am PDT.

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Provide productive AND secure digital employee experiences

uberAgent is an innovative digital employee experience monitoring and endpoint security analytics product for macOS and Windows. uberAgent helps enterprise IT provide fast, reliable, and secure devices & applications that boost employee productivity while strengthening cybersecurity. Try for yourself and get your free 100-user community license at uberagent.com.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

Focus

Running any blog for twenty years is an amazing achievement, let alone one that has had so much positive impact on the MacAdmins community. DerFlounder was one of the inspirations for me to start my own blog, a mere 12.5 years ago. Congratulations, Rich!

News and Opinion

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-05-19

Release week! We got the macOS 13.4, iOS 16.5 updates (and the other platforms, too, of course). It wasn’t released until yesterday, with another round of release candidates earlier this week. As usual, you can find all the relevant links in this summary.

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uberAgent is an innovative digital employee experience monitoring and endpoint security analytics product for macOS and Windows. uberAgent helps enterprise IT provide fast, reliable, and secure devices & applications that boost employee productivity while strengthening cybersecurity. Try for yourself and get your free 100-user community license at uberagent.com.

In the run-up to WWDC, Apple has has published information on future accessibility features, a new concert discovery feature in Music and Maps, and an update on fraud in the AppStore.

WWDC is not the only conference coming up. MacAD.uk in Brighton, UK is next week. MacDevOps YVR will be in Vancouver, Canada, later in June and PSU MacAdmins Conference in July. After the summer we will have JamfNation User Conference in Austin, Texas in September and MacSysAdmin in Göteborg, Sweden in October.

The MacAdmins Foundation has established a new grant for conference attendance for those who cannot otherwise attend. The deadline for applications is May 28. You will find details on their page.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

Focus

macOS Ventura 13.4 and iOS 16.5

macOS

iOS and iPadOS

Other Platforms

Applications

Guides

Community

Social Media

  • Craig Hockenberry: “To disable movie, PDF, and other useless previews, but still maintain the image on the icon, use this from Terminal: $ defaults write com.apple.finder QLInlinePreviewMinimumSupportedSize -int 512 Then relaunch the Finder.”

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-05-12

This is the time of the year where Apple makes the announcements that didn’t fit in the WWDC Keynote anymore. This week they announced iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro which will be released next week, probably coinciding with the releases of iOS/iPadOS 16.5 and macOS 13.4.

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Apple also released release candidates for those updates this week (two of them). This will be the last update of iOS 16/macOS 13 before we get the betas of the next major releases at WWDC in June. There usually are two more minor updates before the release of the next major versions in the Fall, but those rarely add major changes.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

📰News and Opinion

🦣Social Media

  • Ricky Mondello: “Passkeys will be importable and exportable, cross-device, and across passkey managers. They aren’t at this time, but they will be. It’s something that’s being defined and designed.”
  • Timothy Perfitt: “Adding in an interesting feature to XCreds 3. When you lock the screen, it will automatically Fast User switch to the login window, keeping the session active but requiring a cloud login. This means that the IdP (like Azure) can log the login and do conditional access on it as well.”

🔐Security and Privacy

🔨Support and HowTos

🤖Scripting and Automation

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

📺To Watch

🎧To Listen

📚Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-05-05

WWDC starts in one month. Do you feel that you and macOS Ventura are ready for the next version of macOS?

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This week Apple published the first Rapid Security Response (RSR) for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Even though RSRs were tested during the beta phase, there were some hiccups. Overall, the actual release seems to have gone as planned by Apple.

The reception in the MacAdmins community was… not enthusiastic.

The support article for the RSR contains no information on which software or CVEs was patched and the Apple security updates page has no entry for the RSR either. It is not unprecedented or even unusual for security documentation to be published or amended after the release of updates. Since the point of RSRs is to be released quickly, there might still be embargoes in place, CVEs might not even exist, or documentation simply takes second priority. We should expect to see documentation with the release of the macOS 13.4 and iOS 16.5 updates, which will include the issues fixed in the RSR. (It would be nice if Apple pointed out which were fixed in the RSR.)

Because they can be removed, RSRs introduce a new “extra” addition to the version number. This one is 13.3.1 (a). Even though RSRs were announced at WWDC and could be tested during the beta phase, not all management systems, security and monitoring tools are ready to gather the information. Even when your tools are ready, most admins have not yet adjusted or even prepared their workflows for this new piece of information.

There are also (of course) some issues with the management of RSRs. Configuration profiles and MDM commands don’t quite work as advertised. Tools that exist to work around the many shortcomings of the software update workflow will need to be adapted to incorporate RSRs

For a change, Apple announced this well ahead of time. But then, why are (some) MacAdmins still reacting with so much frustration?

I believe, there was some expectation that RSRs might be a fix, or at least a bandaid, for macOS software update. It was implied they wouldn’t require reboots, but most will. You cannot update directly from an older version of macOS to the RSR version, so a user may need two successive installations and reboots to get ‘fully patched.’

Instead of replacing (security) updates, it now looks as if RSRs will happen in addition to the traditional update cycle, increasing the number of updates users and admins have to manage.

RSRs do not solve any of the multitude of issues prevalent with software update. Whether that hope was overly optimistic, misguided, or misinformed, MacAdmins were hoping for some relief with managing software updates. Instead, we are now are facing yet another thing to manage; more and new workflows to build, fix, and adapt.

The burden was increased, rather than reduced. The lack of detailed information, even though it has good reasons, obscures their benefit. We can’t even tell why we have to do this, except for a nebulous “trust us, this is important!”

At Apple, the rollout of RSRs might justifiably be considered a success. They solve a problem they had internally that kept them from responding swiftly to security issues. RSRs improve the overall security of the platforms, which is something Apple obviously and correctly cares about. You have to appreciate that.

This mismatch in the requirements and expectations from the MacAdmins community and Apple isn’t new and there will always be friction here. Nevertheless, Apple needs to directly address the issues with software update in a way that does not increase the workload of users and MacAdmins.

Maybe at WWDC? (ever the optimist)

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macOS and iOS Updates and Responses

念Social Media

  • Pepijn Bruienne: “It’s not an industry-first for a patch mechanism like RapidSecurityResponse to fire without having a CVE on hand.”
  • Tom Bridge: “I’m gonna rant for just a minute. As IT Professionals, we have to deal with risk and insufficient information a lot. I need you to understand: you cannot eliminate risk, and you cannot know everything. What you can do, though, is be prepared and be paying attention.”
  • Jason Broccardo: “TIL that passkeys won’t sync across OSes”

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

烙Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-04-28

Another fairly quiet week. I expect more news as WWDC approaches.

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Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates Enhanced MDM, Endpoint Security, Internet Privacy & Security, Single Sign-On, and Application Management on a single Apple-only platform.

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If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

📰News and Opinion

🔐Security and Privacy

🔨Support and HowTos

🤖Scripting and Automation

🍏Apple Support

♻️Updates and Releases

🎧To Listen

📚Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-04-21

For change, this was a week without an update, security or otherwise. MacAdmins have still been busy doing and sharing their research. Thank you all so very much for all the great articles.

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The only Apple Unified Platform for Business

Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates Enhanced MDM, Endpoint Security, Internet Privacy & Security, Single Sign-On, and Application Management on a single Apple-only platform.

Click here to learn why Mosyle is all you need to work with Apple.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

📰News and Opinion

🦣Social Media

  • Graham Gilbert on Mastodon: “This week my team was discussing ways to make it less painful on users to keep our macOS fleet up to date. They’re rightly fed up with the backlash every time we need to enforce an update. But guess what? macOS is our second largest platform. We do not get any complaints from our Chrome OS or Windows users. The update stories on those platforms simply work. This shouldn’t be on IT professionals to solve. Apple is failing its customers in not providing adequate tools to keep them secure.”
  • MacAdmins Conference: “2023 MacAdmins Conference – Workshops announced! Registration is now OPEN!“

🔐Security and Privacy

🔨Support and HowTos

🤖Scripting and Automation

♻️Updates and Releases

📺To Watch

🎧To Listen

🎈Just for Fun

📚Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-04-14

Generally, Friday is a good day for a news summary. But sometimes things happen after. Like last week, where Apple pushed a security update for macOS Ventura and iOS/iPadOS, followed by updates for Big Sur, Ventura, iOS/iPadOS 15, tvOS, Safari, and (maybe?) HomePod, earlier this week.

(Sponsor: Mosyle)

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The only Apple Unified Platform for Business

Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates Enhanced MDM, Endpoint Security, Internet Privacy & Security, Single Sign-On, and Application Management on a single Apple-only platform.

Click here to learn why Mosyle is all you need to work with Apple.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

📰News and Opinion

🌼macOS and iOS Updates

🦣Social Media

🔐Security and Privacy

🔨Support and HowTos

🤖Scripting and Automation

🍏Apple Support

🎧To Listen

🎈Just for Fun

📚Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-04-07

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! Even when you just enjoy eating chocolate eggs.

(Sponsor: Mosyle)

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The only Apple Unified Platform for Business

Mosyle is the only solution that fully integrates Enhanced MDM, Endpoint Security, Internet Privacy & Security, Single Sign-On, and Application Management on a single Apple-only platform.

Click here to learn why Mosyle is all you need to work with Apple.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

News and Opinion

macOS and iOS Updates

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Apple Support

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Just for Fun

Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!

Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2023-03-31

Apple was busy this week. As expected, we got the macOS Ventura 13.3, iOS 16.4, and sibling platform updates. (New emojis!) We also got the long awaited Apple Music Classical app (iOS only), Apple Pay Later (where available, i.e yet another US only service), and updates to several apps. Apple also announced the dates for this year’s WWDC: June 5–9 in a similar format to the past year. All sessions pre-recorded and online with a viewing event at Apple Park for the Keynote.

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A Guide to macOS Threat Hunting and Incident Response

As enterprise Macs become increasingly targeted with cross-platform malware and infostealers, it’s more important than ever to ensure security teams know how to hunt for and respond to macOS compromises.

Continue Reading Here >>

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📸Focus

Jason Snell from SixColors has released the “Apple in the Enterprise” report card with lots of interesting data and even more enlightening comments from many fellow Mac and iOS admins. Now, that this is the third edition, the report includes a graph with the previous two scores for each section, and we can start to see some trends.

🌼macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.4

macOS

iOS and iPadOS

Guides

Other Platforms

Applications

Apple Support

Community

📰News and Opinion

🎤Conferences

More information on upcoming conferences and archives of past conferences on my conferences page.

🦣Social Media

  • John C. Welch: “One thing remote work has screwed is the ability to learn how the people I don’t work with, but support, work. I called it “Support by Walking around” not just for the “it’s too minor for a ticket, but since you’re here” problems that I could see were developing into bigger problems. That was invaluable in and of itself. But it also, over time, gave me a way to see how the people I supported actually worked. How they needed to work, how their actual workflow functioned.” (thread)

🔐Security and Privacy

🔨Support and HowTos

🤖Scripting and Automation

♻️Updates and Releases

📺To Watch

🎧To Listen

🎈Just for Fun

📚Support

If you are enjoying what you are reading here, please spread the word and recommend it to another Mac Admin!

If you want to support me and this website even further, then consider buying one (or all) of my books. It’s like a subscription fee, but you also get a useful book or two extra!