7 ms·

USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

175 points by besus 3y ago

Centigonal 2y ago
Ever since updating last week, one of my two monitors (connected through a CalDigit USB-C dock) won't turn back on after inactivity. I have to open up System Settings, change the resolution for the monitor, and change it back every time I leave my macbook and come back.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Have you tried a KVM switch? I have one in my setup and toggling it off and then back (via button) is a quicker way to solve freak-outs.
  - Centigonal 2y ago
    I have a USB switch for my peripherals, but I haven't needed a KVM until now. That does sound convenient!
  - samstave 2y ago
    Oblig: https://i.imgur.com/ZNsn2PB.gif https://i.imgur.com/ZNsn2PB.gif I've always been amazed that what I think of a dumb switch (wiring) USB hubs, have connectivity problems solved by such... its a protocol handling problem. Not a circuitry issue, and there should be a command to reset USB/Peripherel reboots. Invoking a reconnect via CLI / cmd would be great.
- mleo 2y ago
  If a resolution change fixes the issue, consider a short term fix of using displayplacer. It's a cli tool for updating resolution or placement of displays. I use it in combination with Stream Deck/Keyboard Maestro to toggle the resolution of second monitor during Teams screen sharing to provide a lower resolution for display challenged colleagues.
- acdha 2y ago
  Have you checked for firmware updates on the dock? I had a problem like that years ago where it basically turned out that the dock was doing something dodgy and an updated macOS stopped tolerating it, but fortunately they had a firmware update available which brought it into compliance.
beeboobaa 2y ago
[flagged]
- cma 2y ago
  USB hubs, printers, Java: none of them pay the 30% stamp tax.
  - gregoriol 2y ago
    So you imply apis and requirements for iOS developers are more stable? huh
  - beeboobaa 2y ago
    So? The users paid for a machine that is supposed to "just work"
- smallmancontrov 2y ago
  That's completely unfair! They have invested in stock buybacks too.
- shabble 2y ago
  "People keep saying Macos is better than iOS..." "There are two ways we can fix this problem: we could make iOS better?" "..."
- nickthegreek 2y ago
  tbh, this stuff isn't going to effect 99% of the userbase and their systems will continue to just work. All 3 of my mac laptops continue to work without issue.
  - moondev 2y ago
    One percenters are people too
  - beeboobaa 2y ago
    Plenty of java software is used by regular users. Minecraft is incredibly popular and one of the few games that (used to) run natively on mac.
cjk2 2y ago
Signed up to complain about this one. Totally cursed. I had to dig out an ancient windows laptop because I can’t roll it back and I’m shafted.
- mouse_ 2y ago
  You can't roll back, but you can downgrade. Might need to be a fresh install. I'm still on High Sierra as it's the last version to support proper text rendering on most of my monitors.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > I can’t roll it back Really?! I feel like Windows is very good at rollbacks.
gregoriol 2y ago
I don't know how related it is, but since macOS 14.4, when I try to print a webpage in Safari (and I use this feature to export as PDF a lot!), it just crashes...
dalke 2y ago
I got this from my bank's id authentication app: > BankID on card and macOS > A change was introduced by Apple in macOS 14 where one consequence is that BankID on card stops working for some users. We have reported to Apple and hope they fix the error in an upcoming update. Recommendation: Wait to update to macOS 14 to avoid problems when using BankID on card. Doesn't affect me as I use BankID on file (and I'm on 12.4), but the caution message sure surprised me, in the wrong sort of way.
lupire 2y ago
Reblog of a better article on https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/18/do-not-update-macos-sonoma-14-4/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/18/do-not-update-macos-son...
fnord123 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
stingraycharles 2y ago
Ok since these types of threads are typically filled with complaints, just to add another data point: I’ve upgraded last week and have not experienced any problems at all. And yes, I’m using USB hubs, printers and even Java.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  I feel bad for folks experiencing problems, but the upgrade was uneventful on my Macs as well. Work also rolled out the update company-wide with no apparent ill effects, which is surprising given all of the enterprise-y junk they install.
  - tetris11 2y ago
    I wonder if this is some kind of warped A/B testing with "stable" upgrades from Apple
- samstave 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nameless912 2y ago
    uh...what?
    - samstave 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        Fine, but… USB hubs? I bet they’re more popular now than ever since you can use them as docking stations now.
      - transcriptase 2y ago
        Gear down big rig. Your HN account is 15 years old, you should be familiar with etiquette here by now.
prirun 2y ago
My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago. I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Apple deleted all files and directories in / that they didn't recognize, including my system backup. I had to recover that from Backblaze. Can't say I'm a fan of recent MacOS. If you think you are in control of your Apple machine, think again.
- markneub 2y ago
  Doesn’t Snow Leopard have printer sharing? i.e. you can skip the generate PDF and copy steps, assuming both machines are on your LAN
  - kayodelycaon 2y ago
    Snow Leopard has printer sharing. Even better, it has CUPS if you want to get your hands dirty. :)
- anthk 2y ago
  If the printer it's shared over a wifi network, you can just use netcat: nc your_printer_ip 9100 < /path/to/your/pdf/file
  - guappa 2y ago
    Assuming your printer supports pdf files… Maybe .ps would be better, but even that isn't universally accepted.
  - RedShift1 2y ago
    Doesn't that require your printer to support Postscript? Not many printers for mere mortals support such advanced technology.
    - 2y ago
spurgu 2y ago
The application window switching has been glitching ever since I was forced to upgrade recently[0]. Instead of switching between windows of the same app it (using the keyboard shortcut) sometimes includes windows of all apps. Rebooting helps. Sometimes it starts working again for some unexplained reason after a while. Super annoying. To be clear I'm talking about Keyboard shortcuts -> Keyboard -> Move focus to next window. [0] I was running Big Sur because none of the recent MacOS updates really offered anything of interest to me, since I don't use most Apple software. But Homebrew and Element stopped working so I had to upgrade. I should've just upgraded to a newer, not to the newest version (which I tend to avoid due to issues like these that might come up). Lesson learned.
- freedomben 2y ago
  I know this isn't helpful, but it's genuinely very surprising to me that this is the case with a company like apple that controls tightly the entire stack in part because they want to tightly control the experience, that you would not be comfortable upgrading to the latest version immediately. Particularly given how much of a premium you pay to get into that system. On Fedora Linux, upgrading has gotten remarkably safe, especially if you take advantage of some of the options that use a/b partitions to allow rollbacks.
  - acdha 2y ago
    I’ve been comfortable upgrading on day one for a couple decades, and have never had a problem. The difference in most cases is the areas where Apple doesn’t control – I don’t use a lot of third-party extensions but a lot of apps, even popular ones like Dropbox, used to do pretty invasive things which were prone to breaking. People in industries like audio production where much of the software has DRM systems have decades of scar tissue from that kind of stuff, so I totally understand why they hesitate.
hedora 2y ago
They keep breaking and + unbreaking my old Samsung Laser Printer (PCL compliant) I think 14.4 fixed it, for what it's worth. Since Linux CUPS and Apple use the same underlying open source drivers, Arch is bug-for-bug compatible. I wish they performed some sort of automatic regression testing on stuff like this.
- tgv 2y ago
  I have an old Samsung laser printer, and the only machine that can print to it is a macbook. I've got a Windows PC, and it won't install the driver that is supposedly recommended (weirdly enough by HP?), while another version of that driver can't connect to the printer. It's quite bizarre.
CoastalCoder 2y ago
Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?
- TonyTrapp 2y ago
  I have doubts it's the latter - just a day or two ago there was an article trending on HN that building Hackintoshes is becoming harder and harder because Apple is removing drivers for old hardware only found in Macs that are not supported anymore.
  - joshspankit 2y ago
    Also doubt it’s the latter: Compatibility with old hardware has never been high on Apple’s priority list.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Alternatively, is this evidence of a changing news cycle that is spending more time on the always-present background noise of social media complaints about updates? Do we perceive the rate of failure to be higher because news these days often takes the form of "let's summarize some reddit threads" and outlets realized that warnings about errors when updating software reliably get clicks?
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Yes, I think you have nailed it. I have seen this same phenomenon happen in nearly every niche that I pay attention to. Only thing I would add is that a lot of articles are based on tweets, often from random users where the article author did nothing to verify and just included the tweet as the source
  - alt227 2y ago
    To be fair, the media has been doing this for at least 10 years.
fifteen1506 2y ago
[flagged]
TheCapeGreek 2y ago
Suppose I'm lucky that my only symptom so far is the occasional unexplained crash on PHPStorm.
- blacklion 2y ago
  It is exactly crashes of Java caused by changing (breakage) of POSIX API by Apple.
speak_plainly 2y ago
Add this to the list of issues: “macOS Sonoma 14.4 Bug 'Destroys Saved Versions in iCloud Drive'” https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-saved-versions-icloud-drive/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-sav...
contingencies 2y ago
For me OSX updates have broken, over the past few years, my USB C ethernet dongle and firmware upload connectivity to specific hardware chipsets. This caused me to buy a non-Apple laptop. Now my Apple laptop refuses to update at all (top of line 4 year old laptop with max spec) so the upgrade driven failures problem category has effectively gone away, but OSX is becoming increasingly unusable. As a result I won't be buying more Apple hardware and have moved back to Linux as the primary machine - super fast and stable, with a slight setup tax and occasional annoyances.
- freedomben 2y ago
  What brand and model of laptop hardware do you buy now? I have been extremely happy with framework laptops, although my big complaint is that the trackpad on my 3rd gen is worse than on my first gen, so they might be trending the wrong direction on track pads. But otherwise, my experience with Fedora on framework hardware has been remarkable
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    Not your parent poster. I know libre everything is an important cause to fight for but I didn't want to beta-test new products so I bought a refurbished HP 15s about two years ago. Full AMD configuration (I was specifically looking for that) and the CPU (5500U) is surprisingly fast. I have put 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD with high durability value and just recently provisioned the machine with Manjaro + XFCE. Works amazingly quickly and everything was fine out of the box (used my Airpods Max as well). Apart from me not liking XFCE (and X11 in general) and that I'll re-provision it with KDE instead, I am very happy with the result. This laptop puts my iMac Pro to shame.
  - contingencies 2y ago
    Lenovo. Would have got framework if available at the time.
actualwitch 2y ago
> Scanning Apple's release notes or security update disclosures for the update doesn't reveal any smoking guns Wait what? So 10 screens of bangers like "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges" and "An attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability may be able to bypass kernel memory protections. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited." are not considered smoking guns?
- altairprime 2y ago
  End users typically don’t tolerate security fixes that alter or break existing functionality, so it would be in line with common responses for those ten screens of security concerns to be disregarded. One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice — and also is causing much of the drama everyone’s seeing. Presumably there’s also a new Celebrite attack over USB-C / PCIe / Thunderbolt, and fixing it urgently has uncovered either a USB/TB spec bug, an implementation bug in the OS, or an implementation bug in the devices. It’s usually the devices, but sometimes it’s not.
  - grodriguez100 2y ago
    > One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice The signal raised for page faults should be (and actually was, before 14.4) SIGSEGV, and not SIGKILL. This behaviour is even defined by POSIX. There is no reason why this should change, specially not in the final release instead of in the public betas and early access releases (where the change was not present).
    - altairprime 2y ago
      To clarify so that I’m not responding incompletely, are we seeing all page faults, i.e. process swapped to disk, now raise SIGKILL — or is this behavior reserved only for certain page faults, i.e. out-of-bounds and permission-denied (R^X) accesses? The former would be a catastrophic defect and probably result in the release being pulled from distribution. The latter would be a new classification of certain kinds of page faults as “safe” and “unsafe”, and only the safe ones are allowed to comply with POSIX signal handling. Perhaps they’ll propose an update to POSIX now that the zero day response has shipped.
HumblyTossed 2y ago
I'm really curious what Apple does with all that money they have. To be worth so much and mess up the basics ... I just don't get it. What the heck is going on over there?
tibbydudeza 2y ago
It just works - sorry I could not help it - if my USB hub stopped working with a Windows Update I could not do my work.
microtonal 2y ago
This seems quite out of character for minor macOS releases. Yes, stuff breaks, but seldomly so broadly in a minor release. Speculation about why: Apple had to push out a major iOS update before March 6 for the EU DMA deadline. They had almost two years to prepare, but they figured out fairly late that they could not negotiate (most of) their way out of it. So the weeks/months before the release, probably most of the focus of the OS (and infrastructure) teams was on the March 6 deadline. I imagine that they had all security updates rolled into the macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 branches already. Then when March 6 came around, they released iOS 17.4 and they had to rush out macOS 14.4 as well (macOS 14.4 was already a day later than iOS 17.4, which is untypical for Apple), to avoid that bad actors find macOS vulnerabilities by looking at iOS changes.
dgellow 2y ago
The thing really weird is the different behavior between beta and release versions
porcoda 2y ago
This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(
lm411 2y ago
So far I've had two issues after the update: - JetDrive / SD drive wouldn't mount - Time Machine backups started failing with "Time Machine did not back up because the backup disk was previously encrypted but is no longer encrypted" I've resolved both issues. Still not happy to have to waste two hours of my life on it.
michelb 2y ago
I have zero problems with the listed things, but Safari refuses to keep me logged into sites. It's like cookies are no longer working or something. Extremely annoying.
warvair 2y ago
Strangely enough, at about the time this macOS update came out, the virtual USB hub in my Win7 VM (Fusion 11.5.7), which I run on a Catalina (10.15.7) Mac broke. This is after years of no issues. I didn't update anything except maybe Chrome & Tailscale on the Mac, maybe Firefox & Cisco Anyconnect on the VM. No changes to the VM settings or the devices I normaly plug into the Mac's USB. Now I did update a MBP on the same network to macOS 14.4 when it came out, but how could that affect anything?
flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
Apple updates are a joke. I have a script in my dotfiles to recognize when an apple update overwrites `/etc/zshrc` to run, among other things, a utility that rewrites your path in a nonstandard way (I don't remember the details, I think it was something related to config file load order?) Nothing I've done so far to stop the overwrite in the first place has worked.
- turquoisevar 2y ago
  Is there a particular reason you’re not putting .zshrc in the user’s home folder ~/.zshrc? In any case, / root and /etc (to an extend) are part of the system volume (or rather the system volume snapshot if we want to be pedantic). With some exceptions Apple considers that fair game. There’s a bunch of symlinking and firmlinking done to make it look like one coherent whole but only the stuff on the data volume is safe. That said, if for whatever reason you need to put something in root you can create your own synthetic firmlink[0] with /etc/synthetic.conf. I believe some also reported success by simply making a subdirectory under /etc and use that instead but YMMV. hoakly goes into extensive detail with what changed with volumes on macOS (back in 2019 I believe): https://eclecticlight.co/2021/01/13/big-sur-boot-volume-layout/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/01/13/big-sur-boot-volume-layo... 0: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/creating-root-level-directories-and-symbolic-links-on-macos-catalina/ https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/creating-root-l...
- rgovostes 2y ago
  Some notes on how Apple sets up paths in /etc/zprofile: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-path-set-in-zshenv-is-overridden/432227#432227 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-pa... > The solution is to do path initialization in ~/.zprofile on macOS. This file is loaded after /etc/zprofile and before ~/.zshrc.
  - flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
    Thanks! I prefer to set my path in ~/.zshenv so I don't have to worry about anything misbehaving in non-login shells, but this rabbithole led me to a good option to cover both: https://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2003/msg00600.html https://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2003/msg00600.html
Neikius 2y ago
I moved from m1 MacBook pro to m2 recently. Just like that my monitor's built in KVM stopped working in a reasonable manner. Can use it to drive the web camera which sometimes works normally and sometimes with shitty frame rate. Microphone now appears and then gets evicted (rode USB mic), my headphone preamp will crackle like mad so it is useless... I got this monitor specifically to be able to work with the stupid m1 limitation of 1 external screen and to be able to switch seamlessly to my secondary rig. And it could be connected using one cable as it does power delivery. Now I have an expensive montor that is useless for the purpose I got it for. Not sure whether to blame dell or apple but do not remember many instances of issues like this in my life. Being a PC guy forever and now got forced to use apple for work. Really don't understand why it's being pushed so much in corporate env. lately? Maybe I am just weird.
rectalogic 2y ago
14.4 seems to be breaking Docker desktop for some uses too https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220

175 points by besus 3y ago

Ever since updating last week, one of my two monitors (connected through a CalDigit USB-C dock) won't turn back on after inactivity. I have to open up System Settings, change the resolution for the monitor, and change it back every time I leave my macbook and come back.

ethbr1 2y ago
Have you tried a KVM switch? I have one in my setup and toggling it off and then back (via button) is a quicker way to solve freak-outs.
- Centigonal 2y ago
  I have a USB switch for my peripherals, but I haven't needed a KVM until now. That does sound convenient!
- samstave 2y ago
  Oblig: https://i.imgur.com/ZNsn2PB.gif https://i.imgur.com/ZNsn2PB.gif I've always been amazed that what I think of a dumb switch (wiring) USB hubs, have connectivity problems solved by such... its a protocol handling problem. Not a circuitry issue, and there should be a command to reset USB/Peripherel reboots. Invoking a reconnect via CLI / cmd would be great.
mleo 2y ago
If a resolution change fixes the issue, consider a short term fix of using displayplacer. It's a cli tool for updating resolution or placement of displays. I use it in combination with Stream Deck/Keyboard Maestro to toggle the resolution of second monitor during Teams screen sharing to provide a lower resolution for display challenged colleagues.
acdha 2y ago
Have you checked for firmware updates on the dock? I had a problem like that years ago where it basically turned out that the dock was doing something dodgy and an updated macOS stopped tolerating it, but fortunately they had a firmware update available which brought it into compliance.

beeboobaa 2y ago

[flagged]

cma 2y ago
USB hubs, printers, Java: none of them pay the 30% stamp tax.
- gregoriol 2y ago
  So you imply apis and requirements for iOS developers are more stable? huh
- beeboobaa 2y ago
  So? The users paid for a machine that is supposed to "just work"
smallmancontrov 2y ago
That's completely unfair! They have invested in stock buybacks too.
shabble 2y ago
"People keep saying Macos is better than iOS..." "There are two ways we can fix this problem: we could make iOS better?" "..."
nickthegreek 2y ago
tbh, this stuff isn't going to effect 99% of the userbase and their systems will continue to just work. All 3 of my mac laptops continue to work without issue.
- moondev 2y ago
  One percenters are people too
- beeboobaa 2y ago
  Plenty of java software is used by regular users. Minecraft is incredibly popular and one of the few games that (used to) run natively on mac.

cjk2 2y ago

Signed up to complain about this one. Totally cursed. I had to dig out an ancient windows laptop because I can’t roll it back and I’m shafted.

mouse_ 2y ago
You can't roll back, but you can downgrade. Might need to be a fresh install. I'm still on High Sierra as it's the last version to support proper text rendering on most of my monitors.
dehrmann 2y ago
> I can’t roll it back Really?! I feel like Windows is very good at rollbacks.

gregoriol 2y ago

I don't know how related it is, but since macOS 14.4, when I try to print a webpage in Safari (and I use this feature to export as PDF a lot!), it just crashes...

dalke 2y ago

I got this from my bank's id authentication app: > BankID on card and macOS > A change was introduced by Apple in macOS 14 where one consequence is that BankID on card stops working for some users. We have reported to Apple and hope they fix the error in an upcoming update. Recommendation: Wait to update to macOS 14 to avoid problems when using BankID on card. Doesn't affect me as I use BankID on file (and I'm on 12.4), but the caution message sure surprised me, in the wrong sort of way.

lupire 2y ago

Reblog of a better article on https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/18/do-not-update-macos-sonoma-14-4/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/18/do-not-update-macos-son...

fnord123 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

stingraycharles 2y ago

Ok since these types of threads are typically filled with complaints, just to add another data point: I’ve upgraded last week and have not experienced any problems at all. And yes, I’m using USB hubs, printers and even Java.

CharlesW 2y ago
I feel bad for folks experiencing problems, but the upgrade was uneventful on my Macs as well. Work also rolled out the update company-wide with no apparent ill effects, which is surprising given all of the enterprise-y junk they install.
- tetris11 2y ago
  I wonder if this is some kind of warped A/B testing with "stable" upgrades from Apple
samstave 2y ago
[flagged]
- nameless912 2y ago
  uh...what?
  - samstave 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Fine, but… USB hubs? I bet they’re more popular now than ever since you can use them as docking stations now.
    - transcriptase 2y ago
      Gear down big rig. Your HN account is 15 years old, you should be familiar with etiquette here by now.

prirun 2y ago

My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago. I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Apple deleted all files and directories in / that they didn't recognize, including my system backup. I had to recover that from Backblaze. Can't say I'm a fan of recent MacOS. If you think you are in control of your Apple machine, think again.

markneub 2y ago
Doesn’t Snow Leopard have printer sharing? i.e. you can skip the generate PDF and copy steps, assuming both machines are on your LAN
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  Snow Leopard has printer sharing. Even better, it has CUPS if you want to get your hands dirty. :)
anthk 2y ago
If the printer it's shared over a wifi network, you can just use netcat: nc your_printer_ip 9100 < /path/to/your/pdf/file
- guappa 2y ago
  Assuming your printer supports pdf files… Maybe .ps would be better, but even that isn't universally accepted.
- RedShift1 2y ago
  Doesn't that require your printer to support Postscript? Not many printers for mere mortals support such advanced technology.
  - 2y ago

spurgu 2y ago

The application window switching has been glitching ever since I was forced to upgrade recently[0]. Instead of switching between windows of the same app it (using the keyboard shortcut) sometimes includes windows of all apps. Rebooting helps. Sometimes it starts working again for some unexplained reason after a while. Super annoying. To be clear I'm talking about Keyboard shortcuts -> Keyboard -> Move focus to next window. [0] I was running Big Sur because none of the recent MacOS updates really offered anything of interest to me, since I don't use most Apple software. But Homebrew and Element stopped working so I had to upgrade. I should've just upgraded to a newer, not to the newest version (which I tend to avoid due to issues like these that might come up). Lesson learned.

freedomben 2y ago
I know this isn't helpful, but it's genuinely very surprising to me that this is the case with a company like apple that controls tightly the entire stack in part because they want to tightly control the experience, that you would not be comfortable upgrading to the latest version immediately. Particularly given how much of a premium you pay to get into that system. On Fedora Linux, upgrading has gotten remarkably safe, especially if you take advantage of some of the options that use a/b partitions to allow rollbacks.
- acdha 2y ago
  I’ve been comfortable upgrading on day one for a couple decades, and have never had a problem. The difference in most cases is the areas where Apple doesn’t control – I don’t use a lot of third-party extensions but a lot of apps, even popular ones like Dropbox, used to do pretty invasive things which were prone to breaking. People in industries like audio production where much of the software has DRM systems have decades of scar tissue from that kind of stuff, so I totally understand why they hesitate.

hedora 2y ago

They keep breaking and + unbreaking my old Samsung Laser Printer (PCL compliant) I think 14.4 fixed it, for what it's worth. Since Linux CUPS and Apple use the same underlying open source drivers, Arch is bug-for-bug compatible. I wish they performed some sort of automatic regression testing on stuff like this.

tgv 2y ago
I have an old Samsung laser printer, and the only machine that can print to it is a macbook. I've got a Windows PC, and it won't install the driver that is supposedly recommended (weirdly enough by HP?), while another version of that driver can't connect to the printer. It's quite bizarre.

CoastalCoder 2y ago

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

TonyTrapp 2y ago
I have doubts it's the latter - just a day or two ago there was an article trending on HN that building Hackintoshes is becoming harder and harder because Apple is removing drivers for old hardware only found in Macs that are not supported anymore.
- joshspankit 2y ago
  Also doubt it’s the latter: Compatibility with old hardware has never been high on Apple’s priority list.
lolinder 2y ago
Alternatively, is this evidence of a changing news cycle that is spending more time on the always-present background noise of social media complaints about updates? Do we perceive the rate of failure to be higher because news these days often takes the form of "let's summarize some reddit threads" and outlets realized that warnings about errors when updating software reliably get clicks?
- freedomben 2y ago
  Yes, I think you have nailed it. I have seen this same phenomenon happen in nearly every niche that I pay attention to. Only thing I would add is that a lot of articles are based on tweets, often from random users where the article author did nothing to verify and just included the tweet as the source
- alt227 2y ago
  To be fair, the media has been doing this for at least 10 years.

fifteen1506 2y ago

[flagged]

TheCapeGreek 2y ago

Suppose I'm lucky that my only symptom so far is the occasional unexplained crash on PHPStorm.

blacklion 2y ago
It is exactly crashes of Java caused by changing (breakage) of POSIX API by Apple.

speak_plainly 2y ago

Add this to the list of issues: “macOS Sonoma 14.4 Bug 'Destroys Saved Versions in iCloud Drive'” https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-saved-versions-icloud-drive/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-sav...

contingencies 2y ago

For me OSX updates have broken, over the past few years, my USB C ethernet dongle and firmware upload connectivity to specific hardware chipsets. This caused me to buy a non-Apple laptop. Now my Apple laptop refuses to update at all (top of line 4 year old laptop with max spec) so the upgrade driven failures problem category has effectively gone away, but OSX is becoming increasingly unusable. As a result I won't be buying more Apple hardware and have moved back to Linux as the primary machine - super fast and stable, with a slight setup tax and occasional annoyances.

freedomben 2y ago
What brand and model of laptop hardware do you buy now? I have been extremely happy with framework laptops, although my big complaint is that the trackpad on my 3rd gen is worse than on my first gen, so they might be trending the wrong direction on track pads. But otherwise, my experience with Fedora on framework hardware has been remarkable
- pdimitar 2y ago
  Not your parent poster. I know libre everything is an important cause to fight for but I didn't want to beta-test new products so I bought a refurbished HP 15s about two years ago. Full AMD configuration (I was specifically looking for that) and the CPU (5500U) is surprisingly fast. I have put 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD with high durability value and just recently provisioned the machine with Manjaro + XFCE. Works amazingly quickly and everything was fine out of the box (used my Airpods Max as well). Apart from me not liking XFCE (and X11 in general) and that I'll re-provision it with KDE instead, I am very happy with the result. This laptop puts my iMac Pro to shame.
- contingencies 2y ago
  Lenovo. Would have got framework if available at the time.

actualwitch 2y ago

> Scanning Apple's release notes or security update disclosures for the update doesn't reveal any smoking guns Wait what? So 10 screens of bangers like "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges" and "An attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability may be able to bypass kernel memory protections. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited." are not considered smoking guns?

altairprime 2y ago
End users typically don’t tolerate security fixes that alter or break existing functionality, so it would be in line with common responses for those ten screens of security concerns to be disregarded. One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice — and also is causing much of the drama everyone’s seeing. Presumably there’s also a new Celebrite attack over USB-C / PCIe / Thunderbolt, and fixing it urgently has uncovered either a USB/TB spec bug, an implementation bug in the OS, or an implementation bug in the devices. It’s usually the devices, but sometimes it’s not.
- grodriguez100 2y ago
  > One of the fixes this release is untrainable SIGKILLs programs for illegal memory accesses, which is a perfectly boring and sensible security practice The signal raised for page faults should be (and actually was, before 14.4) SIGSEGV, and not SIGKILL. This behaviour is even defined by POSIX. There is no reason why this should change, specially not in the final release instead of in the public betas and early access releases (where the change was not present).
  - altairprime 2y ago
    To clarify so that I’m not responding incompletely, are we seeing all page faults, i.e. process swapped to disk, now raise SIGKILL — or is this behavior reserved only for certain page faults, i.e. out-of-bounds and permission-denied (R^X) accesses? The former would be a catastrophic defect and probably result in the release being pulled from distribution. The latter would be a new classification of certain kinds of page faults as “safe” and “unsafe”, and only the safe ones are allowed to comply with POSIX signal handling. Perhaps they’ll propose an update to POSIX now that the zero day response has shipped.

HumblyTossed 2y ago

I'm really curious what Apple does with all that money they have. To be worth so much and mess up the basics ... I just don't get it. What the heck is going on over there?

tibbydudeza 2y ago

It just works - sorry I could not help it - if my USB hub stopped working with a Windows Update I could not do my work.

microtonal 2y ago

This seems quite out of character for minor macOS releases. Yes, stuff breaks, but seldomly so broadly in a minor release. Speculation about why: Apple had to push out a major iOS update before March 6 for the EU DMA deadline. They had almost two years to prepare, but they figured out fairly late that they could not negotiate (most of) their way out of it. So the weeks/months before the release, probably most of the focus of the OS (and infrastructure) teams was on the March 6 deadline. I imagine that they had all security updates rolled into the macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 branches already. Then when March 6 came around, they released iOS 17.4 and they had to rush out macOS 14.4 as well (macOS 14.4 was already a day later than iOS 17.4, which is untypical for Apple), to avoid that bad actors find macOS vulnerabilities by looking at iOS changes.

dgellow 2y ago

The thing really weird is the different behavior between beta and release versions

porcoda 2y ago

This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(

lm411 2y ago

So far I've had two issues after the update: - JetDrive / SD drive wouldn't mount - Time Machine backups started failing with "Time Machine did not back up because the backup disk was previously encrypted but is no longer encrypted" I've resolved both issues. Still not happy to have to waste two hours of my life on it.

michelb 2y ago

I have zero problems with the listed things, but Safari refuses to keep me logged into sites. It's like cookies are no longer working or something. Extremely annoying.

warvair 2y ago

Strangely enough, at about the time this macOS update came out, the virtual USB hub in my Win7 VM (Fusion 11.5.7), which I run on a Catalina (10.15.7) Mac broke. This is after years of no issues. I didn't update anything except maybe Chrome & Tailscale on the Mac, maybe Firefox & Cisco Anyconnect on the VM. No changes to the VM settings or the devices I normaly plug into the Mac's USB. Now I did update a MBP on the same network to macOS 14.4 when it came out, but how could that affect anything?

flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago

Apple updates are a joke. I have a script in my dotfiles to recognize when an apple update overwrites `/etc/zshrc` to run, among other things, a utility that rewrites your path in a nonstandard way (I don't remember the details, I think it was something related to config file load order?) Nothing I've done so far to stop the overwrite in the first place has worked.

turquoisevar 2y ago
Is there a particular reason you’re not putting .zshrc in the user’s home folder ~/.zshrc? In any case, / root and /etc (to an extend) are part of the system volume (or rather the system volume snapshot if we want to be pedantic). With some exceptions Apple considers that fair game. There’s a bunch of symlinking and firmlinking done to make it look like one coherent whole but only the stuff on the data volume is safe. That said, if for whatever reason you need to put something in root you can create your own synthetic firmlink[0] with /etc/synthetic.conf. I believe some also reported success by simply making a subdirectory under /etc and use that instead but YMMV. hoakly goes into extensive detail with what changed with volumes on macOS (back in 2019 I believe): https://eclecticlight.co/2021/01/13/big-sur-boot-volume-layout/ https://eclecticlight.co/2021/01/13/big-sur-boot-volume-layo... 0: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/creating-root-level-directories-and-symbolic-links-on-macos-catalina/ https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/creating-root-l...
rgovostes 2y ago
Some notes on how Apple sets up paths in /etc/zprofile: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-path-set-in-zshenv-is-overridden/432227#432227 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/432226/homebrew-pa... > The solution is to do path initialization in ~/.zprofile on macOS. This file is loaded after /etc/zprofile and before ~/.zshrc.
- flaminHotSpeedo 2y ago
  Thanks! I prefer to set my path in ~/.zshenv so I don't have to worry about anything misbehaving in non-login shells, but this rabbithole led me to a good option to cover both: https://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2003/msg00600.html https://www.zsh.org/mla/users/2003/msg00600.html

Neikius 2y ago

I moved from m1 MacBook pro to m2 recently. Just like that my monitor's built in KVM stopped working in a reasonable manner. Can use it to drive the web camera which sometimes works normally and sometimes with shitty frame rate. Microphone now appears and then gets evicted (rode USB mic), my headphone preamp will crackle like mad so it is useless... I got this monitor specifically to be able to work with the stupid m1 limitation of 1 external screen and to be able to switch seamlessly to my secondary rig. And it could be connected using one cable as it does power delivery. Now I have an expensive montor that is useless for the purpose I got it for. Not sure whether to blame dell or apple but do not remember many instances of issues like this in my life. Being a PC guy forever and now got forced to use apple for work. Really don't understand why it's being pushed so much in corporate env. lately? Maybe I am just weird.

rectalogic 2y ago

14.4 seems to be breaking Docker desktop for some uses too https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220