Thursday, July 2, 2020

Boot and Recovery Mode on Apple Silicon Macs

Jason Snell (also: MacRumors):

With the advent of Macs running Apple-designed processors, things will get a whole lot simpler. As described Wednesday in the WWDC session Explore the New System Architecture of Apple Silicon Macs, these new Macs will only require you to remember a single button: Power.

[…]

On these new Macs, Target Disk Mode will be retired in favor of Mac Sharing Mode. Rather than turning your Mac into a disk, the new Mac Sharing Mode will turn your Mac into an SMB file server.

[…]

In reduced security mode, you can boot any supported version of macOS, even if Apple’s no longer signing it. And if an app or accessory you rely on uses a third-party kernel extension to enable functionality, you’ll need to use this mode.

Previously:

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Target Disk Mode will be retired in favor of Mac Sharing Mode. Rather than turning your Mac into a disk, the new Mac Sharing Mode will turn your Mac into an SMB file server.

Serving files is not what I used Target Disk Mode for. I used it to rescue Macs that could not boot into Recovery at all.

Target disk mode is one of the coolest things about the Mac. So of course they'd get rid of it. Allowing raw disk access goes against their love of locking users out if things. No doubt the SMB sharing won't allow access to OS files.

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