/System/Volumes/Data/Users/Shared/Previously Relocated Items/Security/hbbackup

I don't know how people are supposed to know this. Plus it is taking up 50GB of space!

You can still use printers from the 90's on modern Windows, meanwhile MacOS seems to break support for recent printers between minor updates.

It's not like they're a cash-strapped start-up, if Microsoft can afford to invest in maintaining backwards compatibility, so can Apple.

Sounds like Apple is just lazy and doesn't care what it breaks treating their desktop OS like their mobile OS where app devs need to keep pace with them, and fans will die on the hill defending them.

What about backwards compatibility?

Maybe .ps would be better, but even that isn't universally accepted.

It did exactly what it was programmed to do. It was not a malfunction, it was intentional:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1AKIl_2GM&t=57s

Why does my MacBook which isn’t enrolled in an mdm ping Apple for mdm config and policies? Why is accountsd phoning home when I’m not signed into an Apple account? Why does the Mac generate absurd amounts of app analytics which you can view in the console app yet can’t delete despite the fact that you turned off all analytics when setting up the machine? Why regardless of if I have WiFi logging enabled or disabled is it still spitting out WiFi velocity reports.

The OS used to be damn near perfect and it’s gone down hill since the first version to introduce iCloud signin. Every new feature they add is something I’ll never be interested in using. Disabling services you don’t want running so they stop phoning home or consuming resources is almost impossible anymore, requiring a dance of booting into recovery mode, disabling every single system protection mechanism, and then booting completely vulnerable into normal mode to then pray that the launchagent gods actually let you turn off mediaanalysisd or if nothing else that sudo has permission (sudo!!) to delete the plist file, and often you get permission denied errors or the process comes back after a reboot. It’s a shit show. The frustrating part is sip and all those things that prevent us from tuning our machines don’t even stop rootkits or the numerous zero days in the wild since it came out

> Write XOR execute (W^X)

> Apple Silicon Macs will enforce a restriction called “write XOR execute” (W^X). This means that chunks of memory will be designated as writable, or as executable, but never as both at the same time. Many macOS apps contain performance optimization programs that require memory to be both writable and executable, but this can lead to serious security issues. By enforcing W^X, Apple will harden Mac security at the memory level. App developers, however, won’t be left out in the cold — if they still need those optimization programs for their apps, they can use a new macOS API that provides a way to switch between write and execute permissions quickly and safely.

And the nature of W^X - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX

> W^X ("write xor execute", pronounced W xor X) is a security feature in operating systems and virtual machines. It is a memory protection policy whereby every page in a process's or kernel's address space may be either writable or executable, but not both. Without such protection, a program can write (as data "W") CPU instructions in an area of memory intended for data and then run (as executable "X"; or read-execute "RX") those instructions. This can be dangerous if the writer of the memory is malicious. W^X is the Unix-like terminology for a strict use of the general concept of executable space protection, controlled via the mprotect system call.

---

See also Porting just-in-time compilers to Apple silicon - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/port...

And W^X now mandatory in OpenBSD (8 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11789169 )

It's still often a good idea to wait a few days or weeks before updating just in case you're caught by the bugs, but the rates of errors are usually much lower than the mainstream media reporting would lead you to believe.

And people give Microsoft shit for not supporting Windows 10 more than 10 years when Apple only does 5.

>I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days

That's incredibly brave (or foolish) to have no fear of upgrading Arch, considering Arch does indeed break, it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.

Also had EndeavourOS for a while when I attempted to switch to Linux and, gave up on it when an update left me without sound. It's a great "batteries included" Arch distro, but can't tolerate such risks on a daily driver machine that I need it to work 100% of the time, every time.

For daily driving without update anxiety I'd go for something boring like Ubuntu/Debian based OSs, Fedora if you want more up-date, or even OpenSUSE if you want a sane rolling distro, but I'd stay away from Arch if you want your computer to just-work(TM) and don't wanna be your own part-time sys-admin.

It's officially considered "vintage" 5 years after it is last sold, but that doesn't mean it won't receive OS updates. Apple considers hardware to be obsolete 7 years after sale ends, but is still likely to receive security updates for a while longer.

Their phones enjoy an even longer support window than their desktops/laptops if you consider security updates, the iPhone 5s (2013) just received a security update last year.

Unlikely since several of the issues seem to happen only on Apple Silicon.

Do you have any more info/links about this? I’m curious, since I do have a Pro Display XDR, and I’ve been trying to understand for some time how exactly it’s able to reach its bandwidth, which is definitely a rabbit hole.

You ask any long time macOS/OSX user and they will point to Apple software quality worsening well before anything comes up in the news media.

Heck, I'm in the camp that thinks Apple OSX software quality peaked at Snow Leopard and it has been all downhill since then, and this camp is massive.

I doubt we're being influenced by the "media".

More likely neither. Software just becomes larger and more complex and thus slower on older hardware.

(My 2021 MacBook Pro 14" is still lightning-fast though, I never wait for anything.)

How much have they /really/ added to the OS (which is enabled on my hardware) and consuming extra resources?

One of the reasons MS introduced "patch Tuesday" in 2003 was because Windows updates until then had been notorious for years for causing issues randomly, which their corporate users hated firefighting without warning. By rolling out their updates on a predictable schedule, corporate IT depts could set their calendar to keep a day (or two) per month clear to do post-update firefighting, or (if they were really on the ball) to make time for their own QA before releasing the update to the rest of the org.

So unless the QA firing you're talking about was more than a quarter-century ago, Windows updates have always been issue-laden shitshows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Tuesday

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.

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.

Why is preventing trapping on an illegal memory access a sensible security practice?

Preventing the access, sure, but I'm not seeing what force killing a process does for security, especially given there are perfectly reasonable reasons why one might want to trap the signal.

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).

And let’s be honest, Microsoft is absolutely no stranger to releasing updates that break systems. Far far from it.