macOS 15.4
Juli Clover (release notes, security, enterprise, developer, full installer, IPSW):
With macOS 15.4, Apple is bringing Mail Categorization to the Mac. The Mail app features dedicated categories like transactions, updates, and promotions, with important emails organized into a primary section.
Apple News+ subscribers now have access to an Apple News Food section with recipes, food articles, and more. There’s a new Sketch style for Image Playground, Memory Movie support in the Photos app for custom slideshows, and new emoji characters.
See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley.
FSKit is now available, enabling delivery of user space file systems as Application Extensions. These file systems support integration with DiskArbitration.
[…]
To enable the new HTTP loading mode, set
usesClassicLoadingModeto false onURLSessionConfiguration. The new loading mode will become the default in a future release.[…]
Fixed: M4 Macs are unable to launch virtual machine, and attempts result in a system restart.
FSKit on macOS 15.4 doesn’t seem to work without manually writing some files to a place where we shouldn’t… Did anyone at Apple tested this before shipping it 🫠
TIL they put this toggle under “General -> Login Items & Extensions -> File System Extensions”… macOS settings is a mess 😛
Historically the boundary was at the transport layer. When you enable the new loader,
URLSessionuses Network framework’s HTTP implementation.
Incidentally, before updating my Mac mini, I got an “Upgrade to macOS Sequoia” notification even though the Mac was already running Sequoia (15.3.2).
[…]
After the updates, both my Mac mini and my iPad showed one of the most confusing “welcome” screens that I’ve ever seen. Indeed, they confused even me!
[…]
The two options given were “Continue” and “Only Download Automatically”. Which of those two did I want? Confused, I selected Continue.
I turns out that I wanted neither.
It looks like a dark pattern to encourage people to auto-update.
I have not found a way to suppress this screen using a defaults command, but it is possible to suppress the Update Your Mac Automatically screen on macOS Sequoia using a configuration profile.
Our long Apple Intelligence nightmare is over, I upgraded to 15.4 on two machines and neither turned that stuff back on! Still wasting several GB of storage, but it’s progress.
The release of macOS 15.4 builds is different from that of RC2. YET my computer does not update.
Apple has added new management options for Apple Intelligence as part of the release of macOS Sequoia 15.4.
PSA: don’t upgrade macOS to 15.4 if you need to use Xcode 16.2 - the lldb debugger is crashing on start.
Previously:
- macOS 15.4 Adds TCC Events to Endpoint Security
- macOS 15.3.2
- Apple Intelligence Enabled Automatically
- M4 Macs Can’t Virtualize Older macOS
- Apple Intelligence in macOS 15.2 and iOS 18.2
- Beta for Apple Intelligence in Apple Mail
- WWDC 2024 Links
Update (2025-04-01): Ric Ford:
Apple apparently has no interest in fixing its recurring bugs with home folder relocation, forcing security compromises in unacceptable workarounds. Lee Mendoza emailed us about his latest tests of the longstanding problem.
The issue with System Integrity Protection (SIP) preventing users whose home directories are not on the boot volume has not been resolved in the macOS Sequoia 15.4 release. This is a recurring issue that most recently started with macOS Sequoia 15.3 and has persisted in the 15.3.1, 15.3.2, and 15.4 releases.
damn it, the macOS 15.4 and iOS 18.4 may be the worst release for app developers so far. It is “just” a minor update, but it feels like if some major changed in the platform.
this time broken URLSession
Things are super broken for me and users are seeing it too.
Anyone else encountering the problem with that Seqouia 15.4 update simply not installing?
For me it downloaded (I think, at least it was busy for a while), reboots as if applying the update (but that goes too quick) and then comes back as 15.3.2 with an update available.
[…]
It was insufficient disk space. No warning, no message. Just fails.
[…]
And why was there insufficient disk space? 100s of GBs of Xcode simulator detritus.
Update (2025-04-02): Paul Kafasis:
Though MacOS 15.3 didn’t include any known audio fixes, today’s update includes a key audio-related bug fix to the operating system.
So, macOS Sequoia 15.4 arbitrarily turned on automatic installation of operating system and security updates. These are things that are enabled by default on a new install—which I think is understandable. However, I had previously deliberately disabled automatic updates, and Apple decided to override my explicit actions.
[…]
I don’t have automatic software updates enabled because I’ve had Apple’s operating system updates effectively brick my machine. I do a lot of music/audio work, and there’s basically no telling when Apple is going to do something that will make the drivers for your music/audio hardware unusable.
I updated my Mac to macOS 15.4 last night and after the reboot, my desktop was white. Pure white.
[…]
I opened System Settings, chose Wallpaper from the list along the right edge, and saw that although my custom color was displaying properly in the little box on the right, the miniature desktop on the left was white.
We encountered desktop background corruption and new crashes with third-party software after installing macOS 15.4.
[…]
Meanwhile, we and others see macOS 15.4 continuing to steal gigabytes of disk space for “Apple Intelligence” even if it is turned off.
The Music app now pinwheels for about 5 seconds every launch on macOS 15.4.
It doesn’t happen if my internet is disconnected.
It’s probably trying to load an ad for Apple Music.
Update (2025-04-03): Jeff Johnson:
Using Little Snitch, I discovered why Music app was pinwheeling for about 5 seconds every launch on macOS 15.4:
For some reason, it was waiting—on the main thread, naturally—for mobileactivationd to connect to humb.apple.com, which I was blocking in Little Snitch.
I allowed the connection once, and the problem is now solved, seemingly permanently.
According to Apple, humb.apple.com is used for “Device setup”.
Update (2025-04-07): Nicholas Riley:
Wow, macOS 15.4 is rough. Lost secondary click settings on my Magic Mouse, issues with App Store apps not recognizing prior purchases…
Adding one more problem to the list of issues with Apple’s latest software updates (with their critical security patches), Howard Oakley reports that the macOS 15.4 update fails when attempted in a virtual machine.
Used to be if you were running an x.4 release (or later) instead of the y.0, you could be confident you were running a stable OS even if you were missing out on new features. But there is no longer that stability plateau. The OS never matures.
Update (2025-04-08): Ric Ford:
A MacInTouch reader emailed us about a neat trick for disabling Apple Intelligence (which he also posted in an online forum), and we confirmed that it works on a Mac running macOS 15.4.
There is another ‘feature’ regarding Apple Intelligence: If the languages used for your Mac and Siri are not the same, there is no Apple Intelligence.
Although the 15.4 update wasn’t quite as large as 11.3, at 6.2 GB for Apple silicon, it has comfortably surpassed it in the number of vulnerabilities fixed, 131 in all, and came close to the size of the 15.0 upgrade at 6.6 GB. What’s most disappointing is that, while the first release of Sequoia merited long and detailed accounts of much of what had changed, for 15.4 there’s precious little information beyond its lengthy security release notes.
More or less forever—I’ve tested all the way back to macOS High Sierra—the return value of the method
[NSURLComponents string]washttps://example.org/in this case. However, unfortunately, the return value is nowhttps%3A//example.org/in macOS 15.4. For some reason, the:character has been percent-encoded. The new return value is not a valid URL, and thus Link Unshortener could not open it.
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> FSKit is now available
Is there any official sample code for this API (that was not worth presenting officially during WWDC)? Or is it just the online documentation at this time?
Used the search feature on the Developer site and did not see a hit for sample code.
Guys, get it through your heads: the "current" versions of macOS are public betas. Stay on X - 1 if you have real work to do.
@bob Totally agree! I don't get the techies who keep their Macs completely up-to-date. (I don't blame anyone who's not a techie. They shouldn't have to know esoteric information like this.) Anyone who's skilled with computers and has been using a mac for longer than a few years now should realize what a bad idea it is. And it's not like the latest major releases of macOS have offered anything new of substance that makes upgrading worth it. You were living without that feature just fine for years. If you value your time and sanity, you can wait a little longer to get it!
That said, the X - 1 rule doesn't really seem to work any longer. Each new release of macOS just gets buggier and buggier, so the final minor release of version X is still going to be buggier than the final minor release of X - 1.
