Monday, May 13, 2024

macOS 14.5

Juli Clover (release notes, security, developer, enterprise, full installer, IPSW):

macOS Sonoma 14.5 adds a new word game for Apple News+ subscribers and allows for tracking stats and streaks of News+ games.

It’s not clear why this update also causes new FileVault recover keys to be generated.

See also: Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley.

Previously:

Update (2024-05-15): Francisco Tolmasky:

macOS is straight up rotting. It is absolutely nuts that this FileVault key re-generation thing has just gone unaddressed for a year. This isn’t about Apple News being a joke or drag and drop not working anywhere anymore. This is a potentially catastrophic data-loss bug that Apple has just decided is the new normal and just does not give one single shit about.

Update (2024-05-16): Norbert Noerner:

After downloading many gigabytes, macOS got stuck for more than HALF AN HOUR, doing some undisclosed “Preparing”.

This is just BS, I checked what happened, and a secret Apple tool named “UpdateBrainService” was slowly crunching away with a lousy 99% CPU. And that on one of the fastest Macs ever been built.

Really, #Apple, that is the best you can do?

And now, the Mac is crippled by dozens of “mdworker_shared” processes, because for EVERY SINGLE macOS update, as small as it is, Spotlight needs to reindex ALL DATA, slowing down macOS for many more hours.

[…]

And yes, the ugly and buggy “System Settings” in #macOS 14.5 still crash and hang all the time.

Update (2024-05-17): Juri Pakaste:

I’m having a really bad time with macOS 14.5. Apps (both Safari and third-party) and the screenshot tool routinely go into a state where they just beachball and/or refuse to start up. I’ve had to shut it down twice now the power button.

Nothing like this before the OS upgrade.

Simone Manganelli:

The FileVault key regeneration is that thing where it generates a new key but actually still keeps using the old one if you try to verify the new one in the Terminal? I experienced that with the macOS 14.4.1 update.

Howard Oakley:

It can do either, I’m afraid, hence the importance of checking the key.

Update (2024-05-20): Howard Oakley:

If you’ve been delaying updating Sonoma, or upgrading from any earlier version of macOS, version 14.5 looks the most stable and free from bugs.

One broad indicator of its quality is its rate of writing to the log, which determines how long entries in the log can be retained, as macOS thins log entries largely to maintain the size of its log files, rather than thinning purely by age. When running 14.4 and 14.4.1 on this ageing Intel iMac Pro, after a restart the log only retained entries for 8-12 hours, and that steadily fell over time, so that after a few days of constant running only 4-6 hours of entries were kept. This same iMac Pro has been running macOS 14.5 continuously for 6 days now, and still has log entries from nearly 2 days ago, a huge improvement implying a fall in the rate of writing entries to 25% or less.

[…]

One problem that has continued to occur in the Sonoma 14.5 update, just as it did in 14.4 and 14.4.1, is the provision of new FileVault Recovery Keys. This appears to be random, but only seems to affect those who have already opted to create a recovery key and not to use iCloud recovery.

Update (2024-05-23): Vítor:

I previously reported that 14.4 broke searching manual pages.

Happy to report this has been fixed in 14.5 (23F79).

Update (2024-06-14): ednl:

Update on Sequoia: I got word from Pixelmator that a serious help-menu bug has been fixed.

5 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon


I don’t see anything in the linked Howard Oakley about FileVault recovery keys?


@Nigel It was in a comment.


News+ games?


14.5 broke the "Take Screenshot" action in Shortcuts. This broke my shortcut for copying text from UIs that are resistant to selecting and copying text.

Also, https://www.apple.com/feedback/macos.html still doesn't list 14.5 in the popup for indicating what OS version your feedback applies to.


eas, that's because 14.5 has no bugs. :)

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