Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-10-28

Release week! If this were a printed newsletter, it would be quite heavy: lots of links and posts, both from Apple and the MacAdmin community.

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I think it is fair to say that the Ventura beta and release has some challenges for system administrators. On the other hand, the updated Apple Platform Deployment guide and several support articles were ready on day one with lots of great information.

Many MacAdmins were awaiting the release and the end of the NDA and ready with several posts on topics they learned about during the beta. The most posts were on the new “Login and Background Items management” but several other posts on other new features and issues, as well. As always, thanks to everyone who shares their knowledge!

Aside from the major releases for macOS Ventura 13.0 and iPadOS 16.1, we also got iOS 16.1, watchOS 9.1, updates for tvOS, HomePod, the apps formerly known as iWork (Numbers, Keynote, and Pages), a new Xcode 14.1 RC, updates for Apple Business Essentials, Safari, macOS Monterey 12.6.1, Big Sur 11.7.1, and iPadOS and iOS 15.7.1. Also, the next round of updates for all the platforms is available in beta on AppleSeed for IT and for Developers, and we got a beta for the iCloud web interface.

Much to catch up on. I hope this collection of links and posts will help.

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

macOS Ventura 13.0

iPadOS and iOS 16.1

watchOS 9.1

tvOS 16.1

HomePod Software

Services

Applications

User Guides

Apple Support

Reviews

Reactions and Posts

Login Items in Ventura

macOS and iOS Updates

Social Media

  • Mischa vd Bent: “Did you know about this nice feature with GitHub? Visual Studio Code is build into their website.”
  • John C. Welch: “One nice thing about MS (unlike Apple) having such detailed documentation about the powershell/VBA scripting implementation for Office, is that same model is the source for the AppleScript implementation, so you can use the PS/VBA docs to help you with AppleScript.”
  • Rosyna Keller: “In tons of places in macOS, including in Xcode’s log when notarization fails, there’s typically a “?” button in dialogs that if you click it, will bring you either to local or online documentation. In the notarization case, these buttons will take you to specific online docs.”

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-10-21

This is the “Ventura-Eve” edition. On Tuesday, Apple release, a new iPad (no moniker), iPads Pro with M2 chips, AppleTVs and announced the release dates for macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16.1: 24 October. Do you feel ready!?

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While the iPad updates are appreciated, they leave the iPad product in a somewhat confused state. Certain features are only available in certain iPad models, without a discernible pattern. The AppleTV update seems solid, but note that the ethernet port is now exclusive to the higher configuration.

The announcement happened without an “Apple Event.” Also absent were any news regarding the Mac, aside from the Ventura release date. There is still time for more product releases, with or without an event this year and I will be looking forward to them.

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macOS Ventura and iOS 16

Social Media

  • Felix Schwarz: “The Ventura System Settings app includes an AppleScript sdef but so far nothing indicates it’s functional. I only get errors. For my uses, most of this can be compensated by using the x-apple.systempreferences scheme, but opening Keyboard > Shortcuts that way seems impossible.”

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-10-14

Apple’s macOS Ventura Preview page still states “Coming this October.” The rumors, past experience and practicality point to October 24 as the release date for macOS Ventura 13.0 as well as iPadOS 16.1 and the first round of updates for iOS 16, watchOS 9 and all the others.

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On the other hand, Stage Manager still seems to be quite a mess in both iPadOS and macOS. Also, there was no announcement for an Apple Event on October 18, which you would expect if Apple wanted to announce new iPads Pro and/or a new Mac Pro to go with the iPadOS and macOS releases. Apple could very well release new hardware after the system releases, but it would be unusual.

The Mac Pro is the last Mac which has not transitioned to Apple Silicon yet and the two-year transition timeline, ,promised at WWDC 2020 with the Apple Silicon reveal expires in November, two years after the first M1 MacBooks shipped. The Mac mini, which is currently available as M1 and Intel models, also seems due for an upgrade.

We did get a new round of betas this week, which brings macOS 13 to beta 11. As a MacAdmin, you really should log in to AppleSeed for IT and read the beta notes that Apple makes available there, regarding software update deferral.

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

macOS and iOS Updates

Social Media

  • William Smith: “As of Tuesday this week, version 16.66 of Microsoft Office for Mac was released and will be the last version to support macOS Catalina 10.15.”

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

Support

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-10-07

MacAdmin conference season is in full swing with MacSysAdmin Online and Objective-by-the-Sea happening this week.

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That also means we are getting announcements of the dates of conferences for next year. PSU MacAdmins conference has announced the date for their first post-pandemic in-person conference: July 18–21, 2023. JNUC is planned for Austin, TX on September 19–21, 2023 and MacSysAdmin will be back in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 3–6. I have updated my conferences page with the new dates.

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

Social Media

  • John C. Welch: “30 years in IT have taught me this: Being cheap and petty over keyboards and mice is the stupidest thing to do. Someone wants a gaming mouse? Let them have it. The happiness that brings will far outweigh the cost “savings” in making them use the “standard” mouse.” (Thread)

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Watch

To Listen

Support

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-09-30

For me, this week was fully dominated by JamfNation User Conference (JNUC). It has been amazing and quite overwhelming to meet with all of you enthusiastic, smart, and inspiring Mac Admins!

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Jamf has been posting summaries of some sessions on the Jamf Blog. The sessions will be available for registered users (both virtual and in-person) in the conference portal for the next 60 days and then released for everybody on Jamf’s YouTube channel. I have a lot of catching up, and also a lot of re-viewing to do.

To everyone who took the time to talk with me, a huge thank you. All the kind feedback is both humbling and inspiring. To all who I missed or whom I couldn’t spend enough time with, because there was always the next engagement or meeting to run off to: I am terribly sorry! I hope we get a chance to talk at the next conference!

JNUC 2023 was announced for September 19–21 in Austin, Texas, USA.

(This news summary is unusually scheduled because of travel and time zones. I might also have missed some interesting links and posts. If you found something that I didn’t include, please let me know and I will include it next week.)

But the conference fun is not over: next week is MacSysAdmin Online and the speaker list was just released!

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

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!

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Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2022-09-22

As I am preparing to travel to JNUC next week, I don’t really have much insightful, or even witty intro… We got an iOS update and a new round of betas. Even if I am distracted, we got some wonderful posts by wonderful people sharing their knowledge and insights. Go read those and many thanks to authors for sharing.

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uberAgent: application performance monitoring

uberAgent is an innovative user experience monitoring product for macOS and Windows. uberAgent’s highlights include detailed information about application performance, network reliability drill-downs, application usage metering, browser performance, and web app metrics. Try for yourself and get your free 100 user community license at uberagent.com.

If you are also at JNUC, I have some Scripting OS X shebang “#!” stickers for those who know to ask (and as long as the supply lasts).

If you ordered MacSysAdmin T-Shirts last year, you also got a surprise Scripting OS X shebang sticker. If you order a MacSysAdmin T-shirt this year (and you still can), you will get a different Scripting OS X sticker. Many thanks to Mischa van der Bent who turned my idea into a great design. You should order a MacSysAdmin T-shirt whether you want the sticker or not, to support the conference which is online October 4–7.

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 Ventura and iOS 16

macOS and iOS Updates

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 — 2022-09-16

The first of several major Apple OS releases this Fall were iOS 16 and watchOS 9, which were released this week, together with the new tvOS and HomePod software, as well as the new iPhones 14, iPhones 14 Pro, and Apple Watches.

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There is much to like in the new the new iOS 16 and watchOS 9, even for MacAdmins. But the most promising new technologies, such as the improved Declarative Device Management and Managed Device Attestation will take a while to be adopted by the management systems and admins. But I see some really useful applications for deployment with those.

Even though the release of macOS Ventura 13.0 will not be until “October,” we did get updates for macOS Big Sur 11.7, macOS Monterey 12.6, iOS and iPadOS 15.7. (Guess who accidentally upgraded their phone to 15.7 first…) No security update for macOS Catalina, which is not surprising as Apple “retires” updates for major macOS versions after two years. Catalina was the last macOS to use the ’10’ version number that was with us since the early Mac OS X public betas.

The versioning of Big Sur is interesting, as Apple decided this particular security update deserves ‘11.7’ rather than ‘11.6.9,’ even though the build number still starts with ’20G’. I am not complaining, this versioning is a welcome improvement over the previous list of security updates with a year and a number.

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

iOS 16

Note: according to the Security Updates page there seems to an iOS 16.0.1 update which is also mentioned in this support article. It might be for only for the iPhone 14 generation and seems to fix an issue where Messages and FaceTime don’t recognize the phone number.

watchOS 9, tvOS 16 and HomePod

Xcode and Swift

Articles

macOS and iOS Updates

macOS Monterey 12.6 and macOS Big Sur 11.7

iOS and iPadOS 15.7

Safari 16

Articles

Social Media

  • William Smith: “We’ve been excited to share this for a while and it’s finally here Jamf customers can now upgrade their own Standard Jamf Cloud instances ahead of scheduled upgrades by signing in to account.jamf.com, choosing Products > Pro and clicking Upgrade.”
  • William Smith: “For Microsoft Office for Mac customers: Version 16.67 releases in mid-November. It will support macOS Ventura 13.0, but more importantly it will end support for macOS Catalina 10.15 and receive no further updates.”
  • mikeymikey: “I don’t see people talking about/knowing about this command much on macOS: security verify-cert -v https://URLGOESHERE The security manpage has some great extra detail about the verb” (Thread for more detail)

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 — 2022-09-09

The first Apple event this Fall is over. We got new iPhones, AirPods Pro and Apple Watches, including the new Apple Watch Ultra. Even though I don’t do any sports at the extreme level this watch is designed for, (some might argue I don’t do any sport at all which would be only a mild exaggeration) I am very tempted by the Ultra. Maybe it is time to refresh my diver’s license after ~20 years…

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iOS 16, watchOS 9 and tvOS 16 will be released September 12. iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura are now marked as “Coming this October.” We also got release candidates for iOS and iPadOS 15.7 and macOS 12.6, which will probably be released alongside iOS 16.

This was the first event this fall. I expect at least one more, but more likely two events, which will cover the remaining product lines. Most relevant to MacAdmins, Apple said they would transition the entire Mac product line to Apple silicon in two years. This self-imposed deadline runs out this November and the Mac Pro is the remaining Intel Mac on the product line. (You can also still order an Intel Mac mini, but might also just be Apple’s option if someone requires Intel for backwards compatibility.) It should be interesting to see what Apple has in store for the Mac and the iPad, later this year.

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News and Opinion

macOS Ventura and iOS 16

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

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 — 2022-09-02

September! Summer is winding down and we are looking down the season of Apple events. It starts next week Wednesday with an event that Apple labeled “Far Out.”

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We did get a few interesting releases this week, such as TwoCanoes Xcreds 2 and a new Munki 6 beta. But mostly it seems everyone is either just returning from summer vacation or holding their breath for next week.

The Fall conference is getting close with JNUC (hybrid), MacSysAdmin (online) and Objective-by-the-Sea (in-person) coming up and MacAD.UK has opened the registration for their event next spring. You can always see all conferences on my overview page.

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News and Opinion

macOS and iOS Updates

Security and Privacy

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

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 — 2022-08-26

Back from the summer break! Though for travel scheduling, this post is happening at an unsual time of day. It does seem like everyone else kept working, as a lot of interesting posts have accumulated.

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Apple also continued with the beta releases for macOS Ventura and iOS 16. They have already announced an event on September 7. This will presumably be focussed on the iPhone and maybe the Apple Watch. In any way, this means that the releases of the systems currently in beta is closer than you might think. How is your testing going?

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📰News and Opinion

🌼macOS Ventura and iOS 16

⚙️macOS and iOS Updates

🐦Social Media

  • Timothy Perfitt: “you know when you open a profile on macOS in the Finder, it doesn’t open System Preferences and just says “go find it yourself, fancy pants”? Turns out that you can set up a launchdaemon to open it for you. Read on, fancy pants.” (Thread)
  • Zachary Cutlip: “I set up a Raspberry Pi as a Time Machine server, and made it look like an Xserve in Finder (Set fruit:model = Xserve under [global] in smb.conf)”

🔐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!