So you now get to explain to grandma that she needs to enter her icloud password, get a password error, click on approve on her iPhone, then enter her password again with the 6 digit code shown on the iphone appended to the end of her password.
I called Apple Support and didn't tell me this information and simply said they can't bypass or disable 2FA. It was only by researching that I discovered this workaround.
This was one of the worst user experiences I have experienced on an Apple product.
It’s what I did on my machine running OS X 10.9. No second computer required.
I'm sure Apple know exactly how many people they inconvenience at any given point, and make a calculated decision about support.
MacOS 11.6.0: 11.22%
MacOS 11.5.2: 2.87%
MacOS 10.16.0: 44.92%
MacOS 10.15.7: 11.66%
MacOS 10.14.6: 6.80%
MacOS 10.13.6: 6.41%
Other 16.12%
Please note that macOS 10.16 == macOS 11 and that most of these tools don't seem to recognize Big Sur and later from Catalina.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/944559/worldwide-macos-v...
I maintain endoflife.date/iphone and endoflife.date/macos, and this has been a continuous problem - Apple doesn't provide a document that notes supported OS releases anywhere. The closest we got was in the iOS 15 releases notes which confirmed Apple would provide iOS14 with security updates (something that they clearly failed at).
Apple also released an emergency security fix for iOS12 when it was unsupported, which was nice - but Apple needs to clearly document when can users expect such fixes.
The only pages Apple does provide is list of supported devices, which only covers the latest OS, and is unreliable as a result.
https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphe3fa5df43/io...
It used to be we would pay a premium for slightly less good hardware, just to run the macOS.
Now, we buy hardware that is world-leading, and sponsor people to try to get Linux running on it so we can flee the mess that is macOS.
Supporting older hardware is extra work that doesn’t bring in extra money. Also, oftentimes, it isn’t possible to backport features in a performant way (a lot of the ML stuff would only crawl on 10 year old hardware, features such as Handoff and PowerNap require hardware features). End result would be a 20 year old machine that runs the OS, but doesn’t work with modern software.
That wouldn’t make customers happy, and would dilute the brand of their OS releases.
Mojave for example dropped all Macs with GPUs incompatible with their Metal API.
https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/09/macos-10-14-mojave-...
The arstechnica MacOS reviews are good for working out (sometimes resorting to speculation) what makes a Mac unsupported.
Moving to a virtualized instance is an option, but then I wonder how PITA it is to keep the virtual one secure.
If they are games, Boot Camp is an option on Intel macs, and CrossOver [1] is an option on Apple Silicon.
That's circular reasoning. The older operating systems are only getting security updates, as the article notes, so their definition of "actively updating" is "getting security updates". When Apple isn't issuing security updates, it is not "actively updating".
Maybe what the author wants to say is something along the lines that Apple should provide timely security updates for all operating systems released over the past 10-15 years.
Most of these laptops run at 2-4GB free space because MacOS already takes up a ton of space and throw on a few electron apps and its full.
Apple releasing 10.4
Apple releasing 10.6
Apple releasing 10.11
Apple releasing 10.15
And most importantly, what the actual fuck?..
Name me one widely deployed OS that promises its users patches ad-infinitum.
Microsoft certainly doesn't patch all older versions of Windows.
Neither do all the widely deployed Linux flavours, they all have clearly defined EOL policies.
Nor do the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD has a "current plus previous" policy.
You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere in terms of patching historical versions. Promising your users you will patch all historical versions forever is not feasible, because it means you are promising you will patch all dependencies forever, and that will require a lot of massive teams of developers doing nothing all day but patching legacy software.
This is pretty good. Macbooks do usually get software updates for many years - as do iPhones and iPads of late.
People who bought early Apple Watches (some of which were very expensive!) didn't get updates past watchOS 4 however, which was sad to see.
Each Apple laptop gets upgrades to newest for roughly 6-7 years.
The main thing that’ll drive me to that is Xcode, which Apple ties to macOS versions, so officially you can’t develop for an OS (macOS, iOS, etc) that is more than a year older than yours. The tricks used to get around that aren’t as reliable as OpenCore.
It's the Windows XP Home of operating systems.
For security reasons, you probably should partition your Mac, run Catalina or Big Sur* on your main partition with your personal stuff, PGP keys, and other important things, and have a separate partition with Mojave for your legacy apps. If those are mostly games, then you may be better off with a Windows partition instead of Mojave, because that would support even more games.
* A1502 does not get Monterey, I think.
To my knowledge Linux has never worked well on intel macs with a T2 chip. Asahi linux is working on bringing good support to m1 macs, so it looks like for good linux support you either need a pre-T2 mac or a post-M1 mac.
This is not about EOL OS releases, this is about Catalina (macOS 10.15, released in 2019).
Apple advertises Catalina as still supported, last update was 15.15.7 on October 25 of this year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases).
>Neither do all the widely deployed Linux flavours, they all have clearly defined EOL policies.
The big difference here you forgot to point out is that you can almost always update to the next Debian (or whatever GNU/Linux distribution you use) Stable release with the hardware you ran on the last one.
You could also get new hardware from whatever vendor you want to since Debian (and any other GNU/Linux distribution) isn't vendor locked to a company that insists on selling you soldered RAM/SSDs and thermal throttling machines.
The Debian team also consistently honors their support cycles, unlike Apple.
>Nor do the BSDs, e.g. OpenBSD has a "current plus previous" policy.
Same thing as the GNU/Linux situation i mentioned above, the operating system is not vendor locked and you can almost always update to the next release with old (in the case of *BSD maybe even ancient) hardware, this is not true for macOS.
>You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere in terms of patching historical versions. Agreed, you have to draw the line somewhere.
The issue here is that Apple drew the line and then didn't even bother to honor it.
Microsoft certainly does patch all two years old versions of windows.
Second, as already pointed out by another poster in this thread, Apple provide free upgrades to newer OS versions for supported hardware (and the hardware support goes back a decent number of years[1]).
For the vast majority of people on Catalina, all they need to do is to upgrade to Big Sur, it is almost certain they are using compatible hardware[1].
> Name me one widely deployed OS that promises its users patches ad-infinitum.
> Microsoft certainly doesn't patch all older versions of Windows.
> Neither do all the widely deployed Linux flavours.
But the latest and greatest Windows and Linux releases are installable on older devices.
I extended the life of a 2011 iMac which stopped recieving updates from Apple by installing the latest Fedora.
Most Linux distributions draw the line at 32 bit hardware.
Windows 11 was controversial in that it dropped support for older computers. But this shows what the expectations are.
This was certainly true until recently when Microsoft went all Windows 11, which only works on a small, whitelisted subset of X86-compatible CPUs and also mandated TPM 2.0.
Now only Linux offers semi-guaranteed support for older hardware.
So is OS X Big Sur[1] and Monterey[2]
For the majority of people all they need to do is pull their finger out and upgrade the OS from Catalina to Big Sur or Monterey.
[1]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211238
[2]https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212551Supposedly they can also see which capabilities the client has, allowing the fix server side. Why they did that we can only speculate, same with why its not well known.
I can imagine an engineer with a kid who got a handmedown from mom/pop, and they silently fixing it this way because its within their expertise.
I'd like to hear the authentic story behind it. Hopefully one day!
It’s awful, because you end up with software that is pretty in a screenshot but is objectively less simple to use, because discoverability drops like a lead balloon.
It seemed to start when Forstall was ousted and Jony Ive’s team took over software design as well as hardware. Their recent laptops have shown you can give up a little form in favour of a lot of function, so hopefully the software teams are (re-)learning the same lessons.
Modern computers should last a lot longer than that, especially if you can pass them on to users with less demanding requirements.
And fortunately Macs do last longer than that, but you have to install Linux or Windows to keep them up to date.
The GNOME comment is spot on. Unfortunately while the screen and cpu/gpu/apu is amazing in the new M1P/M rMBP16, it is also one of the ugliest laptops Apple has ever shipped. (The best thing they did to the overall design of the iPhone recently, hardware specs aside, was to go back to making the rounded bubble 10/11 be like the 6 in the 12/13, which, despite being an improvement, is a reversion to the past. I also can't tell the difference in the design of the 12 and 13.)
This seriously does not bode well for people who deeply appreciate simple beauty in their daily-use tools.
I was spoiled over the last decade or so of my laptop being of extremely high performance/quality AND ALSO completely unnecessarily fucking gorgeous. Now it's an ugly grey brick. I hope those days aren't over forever.
Also Microsoft provides an official guide on how to install Windows 11 on older hardware. My neighbor has Windows 11 on his 10 year old laptop running an i7 2500 and it's butter smooth.
(Yeah sure, not your average Mac user, but still - don't discount the pain that any arbitrary update can and will inflict).
If the default/upgrade installation is failing then I'd try creating a bootable installer on USB [1]. If it still fails then try erasing the target drive first to do a clean install (you can do this by running Disk Utility from within the installer).
[1] Instructions here: https://support.apple.com/HT201372
There must also be enterprise software that still weren’t recompiled or the vendor went under or threw the towel.
Those are a minority, but sadly we see that on every breaking change.
I've not gotten it to work in Wine/CrossOver, but perhaps someone more skilled than I am could get it to work. I've just used it in virtualized Linux for now.
One of my "important things" is a 32-bit app required for a freelance project. This freelance project also requires some 64-bit apps, so I don't see how two partitions would help here. Am I missing something? (Sincere question -- I'm looking for a new solution because I know Mojave won't be supported forever.)
If the app only available for 32-bit macOS, I suppose your remaining options are running Mojave in a local VM, or in the cloud (AWS offers Mojave instances for example) for your freelance work.
Out of curiosity, is this an internal enterprise app, or a consumer app? Most consumer apps have alternatives for 64-bit macOS.
> I know Mojave won't be supported forever.
It's unlikely to receive further security updates at this point.
If you're not on the latest macOS, you're not getting all the security updates. You will still get many security updates if you're one version prior (Big Sur right now), and if you're two versions prior you might get a few updates (Catalina). But you're unlikely to get updates to Mojave after this year.
Thank you for the suggestions :)
If Apple properly supported Catalina, that would be great; if Apple explicitly said that Catalina is out of support / EOL and people need to upgrade to Big Sur, that could be reasonable; but if they keep the two-year-old release in some limbo that's kind of supported but poorly, that's simply poor support.
Apple needs to make a clear choice and publish a specific date for each of their releases up until which they commit to backporting security updates, so that people can know what is the expectation for e.g. Catalina, whether it is considered supported or not right now.
Apple is giving you the update: Install it and now it’s up to date. They don’t have to support multiple versions of the same thing indefinitely.
The situations (devices) where the update isn’t possible (i.e. they’re outdated too early) can probably be counted on one hand.
The fact that Big Sur was released does not automatically mean anything about the support for Catalina, because there are all kinds of reasons not to make a major version upgrade even if the hardware is still compatible with the new version; the major upgrades do break certain aspects of software and implement changes to functionality and UI, not just fixes for security bugs.
The core issue is that simple questions like "Is Catalina being supported as of 14th November 2021 or not" and "Which is the date when Big Sur support ends and you are expected to migrate to Monterey or later for security updates" deserve a clear answer from Apple, and it seems that they are refusing to answering that with any official, published policy.
>iOS may now offer a choice between two software update versions in the Settings app. You can update to the latest version of iOS 15 as soon as it’s released for the latest features and most complete set of security updates. Or continue on iOS 14 and still get important security updates.
>https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-15/features/
Apple is not even meeting it's own guarantees.
For the more common and popular hardware there is a good chance that open source drivers can be maintained by the community but if your laptop relies on a somewhat obscure chipset or microcontroller then your mileage will vary...a lot. Look up "Intel GMA500 Linux driver" if you need an example of the pain.
Sometimes the decision could be entirely commercial. Most notably, OSX dropped support for all nVidia GPUs from Mojave onwards despite nVidia going on record saying they are happy to continue providing drivers but Apple won't sign them.
Not those shipped with Macs. The GeForce kexts to support the NVIDIA GPU gens that Apple shipped, Fermi and Kepler, are still present even on Monterey.
https://github.com/chris1111/Geforce-Kepler-patcher
Fermi was never supported beyond High Sierra IIRC.
I didn’t. IIRC they did some whacky thing on their own site such that it still worked in Chromium.
Use a phone, or a phone call to a trusted friend, to verify the signature of the certificate.
Obviously not instructions you can give to an ordinary user, but that line was crossed at curl.
TIL that support for NV cards on Monterey is gone, it definitely was there in the betas.
I think there two problems: the upgrade could not handle the way the disk was partitioned (or something else). Everything I tried kept failing until I removed the disk, and completely wiped it. Discussions I found online were not helpful.
The other part is the magic you need to download High Sierra on a newer Macbook. It is not as if you can just go to the Apple store and download it.
That said, I have been using Macbooks for work for the last 10 years or so. They always get upgraded a couple of times during their lifetimes. Usually not a big problem. So I was quite surprised how bad it went.
This has since been replaced by an M1 Air and Office 2021, but the migration was easier this way. Old versions of macOS are listed at this URL, which is how I got a link for the latest 10.15 installer.
IIRC there are plans to switch Chromium to its own certificate store on all platforms, but they seem to be a ways off.