Wednesday, January 24, 2018

macOS 10.13.3

Apple (Hacker News):

The macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 improves the security and stability of your Mac, and is recommended for all users.

This update:

  • Addresses an issue that could cause Messages conversations to temporarily be listed out of order

However, it seems to contain far more than a fix for out-of-order Messages conversations.

cmurf:

After 2 hours I gave up and held down the power button for 5 seconds to force poweroff. Next reboot, I get a boot chime, but still a black screen. Force power off. Cold boot again and zap PRAM, still black screen. This update has fucked my mac over, or it’s one hell of a coincidental hardware fail

I also had to power off my iMac after it got stuck at a black screen while applying the update.

Safari reset my homepage to Apple’s and forgot that I had Develop ‣ Allow JavaScript from Apple Events checked. I continue to have a faded out Safari icon stuck superimposed over the top-middle of my display, presumably some sort of Handoff bug.

Juli Clover:

After installing macOS High Sierra 10.13.4, which is now available in a beta testing capacity, when you open up an app that’s a 32-bit app, you’ll get a warning about its future incompatibility with the macOS operating system.

Stephen Hackett notes that most of the features of macOS Server are now deprecated.

Update (2018-01-24): Zac Hall:

macOS 10.13.4 gives everyone the ‘Ink Cloud’ wallpaper previously exclusive to iMac Pro

Update (2018-01-25): Steve Troughton-Smith:

Protip: ⌘⌥⇧W shows the macOS installer menu bar, so you can turn on the Installer Log and watch what’s going on…

Update (2018-01-26): Regarding 32-bit apps, see also: Samuel Axon (Hacker News).

Felix Schwarz:

In the past, Mac apps could OPT OUT of debugging by calling ptrace(PT_DENY_ATTACH, 0, 0, 0).

In #macOS 10.13.4+, apps need to OPT IN (via an entitlement) for debuggers to be able to attach. That will make it a lot harder to peek under the hood.

Update (2018-01-27): Adam C. Engst:

Because of Apple’s obvious lack of interest in macOS Server in recent years, few people are surprised by Apple’s announcement. However, many are distressed by it because it sends a troubling message to small businesses that have long relied on OS X Server and now macOS Server. Consultants and IT admins who recommended, installed, and maintained those macOS Server setups are concerned about having to research, install, and keep up with the wide variety of apps necessary to replace all the capabilities that macOS Server provided in a single coherent package. And of course, even if the alternatives are better technically, moving to them will require non-trivial investments of time and money.

Update (2018-02-06): Steve Troughton-Smith:

Longer-term High Sierra (10.13.3) check-in: all my major issues are resolved; the OS really needed the extra few months of dev time. Graphics corruption is still very prominent & frequent across various apps, which really isn't good enough. But the OS is liveable now. ★★★☆☆

Stefan Constantine:

It nuked my 2016 MacBook Pro.

Had to reformat my machine.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

For what it’s worth, it sound like that Develop menu item is likely in response to a security hole that Stuart Morgan “discovered” (also comment 29 et seq) when Daniel Jalkut produced an initial implementation of “Do JavaScript” for Camino—and which I filed as a Radar against Safari at some point afterwards. I’m happy to see Apple eventually did something about it :-P

"However, it seems to contain far more than a fix for out-of-order Messages conversations"

No, really, this is just like the iPhone throttling feature, people are not paying attention ;-)

It's also a good demonstration of the "Security through Obscurity" policy at Apple. This update addresses some huge security issues that have been in the news for the last 2 weeks but this is hidden in the Security link that almost nobody will ever click.

Wow, guess I was lucky... this was the first time in a while I upgraded without doing a backup first. The release notes made it seem like this was a minor patch, so I assumed there wasn't much chance of things going south.

[…] end up the way we expected. We already know that macOS 10.14 will contain major changes for 32-bit apps and possibly Marzipan-related framework […]

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