TL:DR; Apple’s latest updates to macOS Ventura can lead to your FileVault-encrypted Mac booting into Recovery, and, potentially, prompts to enter one or more of: Recovery Lock* password, if enabled, on Apple Silicon, or EFI/firmware password, if enabled, on Intel: 2. User account password (if there’s an admin user on…

(with apologies to Simply Red) There has been some recent confusion about deferring major Apple OS upgrades, specifically relating to macOS 13 Ventura. In general, one should strive to support Apple’s new OSes on the day that they are released; I recognize this is not possible for everyone, however. macOS…

macOS 13 Ventura includes new functionality in the new System Settings app to control services like LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons — Apple is (confusingly) calling this Login Items (found in Settings->General). By default, Apple has chosen to display notifications to the user when these items are installed. I won’t post a…

It’s Christmas in June for Mac (and iOS/iPadOS) admins. Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference 2022 is just a day away. …

Apple Geek Christmas is just a few hours away, and it’s not just developers that are both anxious and excited. Folks who manage large fleets of macOS and/or iOS devices will soon learn the changes ahead that will affect how they will configure, deploy, and manage devices in the future. …

Today is Apple geek Christmas. In just a few hours, Apple will announce the next versions of iOS/iPadOS and macOS. As someone who’s made a living for a number of years helping organizations manage their Apple device ecosystem, I’m both excited, yet apprehensive about what Apple will be announcing. Excited…

Apple uses certificates to digitally sign their installer packages (which are embedded inside their OS installers). A few Mac admins noted that the primary certificate, and the intermediate certificate, used to sign many of their packages, was going to expire on October 24, 2019 (which happens to be today). In…

Similar to how iOS is configured, macOS is now on a separate partition from user data, which acts as if it is read-only (but in beta 1, it’s merely SIP-protected). In the beta, you’ll see “Macintosh HD” and “Macintosh HD — Data”. Data is a separate volume mounted in /System/Volumes…

Today, Apple released updates for macOS Sierra (10.12.4), Mac OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan (Security Update 2017–001 and Safari 10.1), Mac OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite (Security Update 2017–001 and Safari 10.1), iOS 10.3, watchOS 3.2, tvOS 10.2, as well as updates to macOS Server, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages for both…