27.07.2020

Macos Don't Offer Software Updates

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  1. Macos Don't Offer Software Updates Free
  2. Macos Don't Offer Software Updates Windows 10
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macOS Catalina updates improve the stability, performance, or compatibility of your Mac and are recommended for all Catalina users. To get these updates, choose System Preferences from the Apple menu , then click Software Update. Learn more about updating the software on your Mac.

For details about the security content of these updates, see Apple Security Updates.

  1. Mar 11, 2017  Below your available updates you’ll see Updates Installed in the Last 30 Days. MacOS system updates, Apple applications, and any third-party apps downloaded from the.
  2. Dec 26, 2018  Mac users have recently begun to run into an issue that prevents them from using MacOS effectively: When they try to turn their Macs on, they get a message that says, “A critical software update.

Dec 28, 2018  The 2013 Mac Pro is still on the market, being sold by Apple. I know Apple has pretty much never dropped software updates for devices less than 3 from the time taken off the market (with the exception of Xserve G5) so it should get macOS updates until 2022. Does this mean, in your opinion. Apr 12, 2020  The three major desktop operating systems on the market are Windows 10, MacOS, and Chrome OS. Here's an exhaustive comparison for would-be. May 24, 2020  New updates for macOS Follow. There are two download types. Zoom will now offer 16 different colors for annotation and remember the last used color when a user starts annotation. The Don’t Connect to Audio setting in the Join dialog now applies to webinar attendees.

  • macOS 10.15

macOS Catalina 10.15.6

macOS Catalina 10.15.6 introduces local news in your Today feed in Apple News and improves the security and reliability of your Mac.

Apple News

  • Local news in your Today feed provides extensive coverage of San Francisco, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Houston, and New York City
  • More stories available from local news providers with a subscription to Apple News+
  • Your daily newsletter from Apple News can now be personalized with stories that reflect your interests

This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements.

  • Adds a new option to optimize video streaming on HDR-compatible Mac notebooks for improved battery life
  • Fixes an issue where the computer name may change after installing a software update
  • Resolves an issue where certain USB mouse and trackpads may lose connection
Software

Enterprise content:

  • When using the built-in keyboard with a non-U.S. keyboard layout on some Mac models, passwords with certain characters are no longer rejected at the Mac login window
  • Allows command-line tools that don't use CFNetwork, such as curl(1), to continue connecting to TLS servers that use certificates issued by the recently expired AddTrust External CA Root
  • Major new releases of macOS can be hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag, if the Mac is enrolled in Apple School Manager, Apple Business Manager, or a user-approved MDM.
    This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-004.

Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices.

macOS Catalina 10.15.5

macOS Catalina 10.15.5 introduces battery health management in the Energy Saver settings for notebooks, a new option to disable automatic prominence in Group FaceTime calls, and controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR. The update also improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac.

Battery Health Management

  • Battery health management to help maximize battery lifespan for Mac notebooks
  • Energy Saver preference pane now displays battery condition and recommends if the battery needs to be serviced
  • Option to disable battery health management
    For more information, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211094

FaceTime Prominence Preference

  • New option to control automatic prominence on Group FaceTime calls, so video tiles do not change size when a participant speaks

Calibration Fine-Tuning for Pro Display XDR

  • Controls to fine-tune the built-in calibration of your Pro Display XDR by adjusting the white point and luminance for a precise match to
    your own display-calibration target

This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements:

  • Fixes an issue that may prevent Reminders from sending notifications for recurring reminders
  • Addresses an issue that may prevent password entry on the login screen
  • Fixes an issue where System Preferences would continue to show a notification badge even after installing an update
  • Resolves an issue where the built-in camera may not be detected when trying to use it after using a video conferencing app
  • Addresses an issue for Mac computers with the Apple T2 Security Chip where internal speakers may not appear as a sound output device in Sound preferences
  • Fixes a stability issue with uploading and downloading media files from iCloud Photo Library while your Mac is asleep
  • Resolves a stability issue when transferring large amounts of data to RAID volumes
  • Fixes an issue where the Reduced Motion Accessibility preference did not reduce the speed of animations in a Group FaceTime call

Enterprise content:

  • Improves performance on certain Mac models when enabling hardware acceleration in GPU-intensive apps such as those used for video conferencing
  • Addresses an issue where Microsoft Exchange accounts were unable to sign in during account setup when using Conditional Access
  • Apple Push Notification Service traffic now uses a web proxy when specified in a PAC file via the Proxies payload
  • Resolves an issue that prevented some displays connected to MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019) from waking from sleep when the Mac wakes
  • Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag
    This change also affects macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra after installing Security Update 2020-003.

macOS Catalina 10.15.4

macOS Catalina 10.15.4 introduces iCloud Drive folder sharing, Screen Time communication limits, Apple Music time-synced lyrics view, and more. The update also improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac.

Finder

  • iCloud Drive folder sharing from Finder
  • Controls to limit access only to people you explicitly invite, or to grant access to anyone with the folder link
  • Permissions to choose who can make changes and upload files, and who can only view and download files

Screen Time

  • Communication limits for controlling who your children can communicate with and be contacted by throughout the day and during downtime
  • Playback control of music videos for your children

Music

  • Time-synced lyrics view for Apple Music, including the ability to jump to your favorite part of a song by clicking a line in lyrics view

Safari

  • Option to import Chrome passwords into your iCloud Keychain for easy AutoFill of your passwords in Safari and across all your devices
  • Controls for duplicating a tab and for closing all tabs to the right of the current tab
  • HDR playback support on compatible computers for Netflix content

App Store with Apple Arcade

  • Universal Purchase support enables the use of a singular purchase of a participating app across iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV

Pro Display XDR

  • Customized reference modes that you can tailor to specific workflow needs by selecting from several color gamut, white point, luminance, and transfer function options

Accessibility

  • Head pointer preference for moving a cursor on the screen based on the precise movements of your head

Macos Don't Offer Software Updates Free

This update also includes bug fixes and other improvements:

  • High Dynamic Range output to HDR10-compatible third-party displays and TVs connected with DisplayPort or HDMI
  • OAuth authentication support with Outlook.com accounts for improved security
  • CalDav migration support when upgrading to iCloud reminders on a secondary device
  • Addresses an issue where text copied between apps may appear invisible when Dark Mode is active
  • Resolves an issue in Safari where a CAPTCHA tile may display incorrectly
  • Fixes an issue where you may receive notifications for updated or completed reminders
  • Fixes an issue with screen brightness for the LG UltraFine 5K display after waking from sleep

Enterprise content:

  • Apple Push Notification Service traffic now uses a web proxy when specified in a PAC file
  • Resolves an issue where updating the login keychain password after resetting a user password would cause a new keychain to be created
  • After enabling ”Search directory services for certificates” in Keychain Access preferences, searching by email address in Keychain Access or Mail now locates a user certificate stored in directory services
  • When setting the DisableFDEAutoLogin key in com.apple.loginwindow, you can now sync your FileVault password with the Active Directory user password after updating the user password
  • Reinstates the ability to update or restore iOS, iPadOS, or tvOS devices by dragging .ipsw files to the device in an Apple Configurator 2 window
  • Addresses an issue where sending the EraseDevice MDM command might not cause the device to be erased
  • When logging in as an Active Directory user after using deferred FileVault enablement, the user is now prompted for their password to enable FileVault

Some features may not be available for all regions, or on all Apple devices.

macOS Catalina 10.15.3

The macOS Catalina 10.15.3 update improves the stability, reliability, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users.

  • Optimizes gamma handling of low gray levels on Pro Display XDR for SDR workflows when using macOS
  • Improves multi-stream video editing performance for HEVC and H.264-encoded 4K video on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)

macOS Catalina 10.15.2

The macOS Catalina 10.15.2 update improves the stability, reliability and performance of your Mac and is recommended for all users.

This update adds the following features:

Apple News

  • New layout for Apple News+ stories from The Wall Street Journal and other leading newspapers

Stocks

  • Get links to related stories or more stories from the same publication at the end of an article
  • “Breaking” and “Developing” labels for Top Stories
  • Stories from Apple News are now available in Canada in English and French

This update includes the following bug fixes:

Macos Don't Offer Software Updates Windows 10

Music

  • Restores the column browser view for managing the music library
  • Resolves an issue that may prevent album artwork from appearing
  • Fixes an issue that may reset music equalizer settings during playback

iTunes Remote

  • Adds support for using an iPhone or iPad to remotely control the Music and TV apps on a Mac

Photos

  • Resolves an issue that may cause some AVI and MP4 files to appear as unsupported
  • Fixes an issue that prevents newly created folders from appearing in Albums view
  • Addresses an issue where manually sorted images in an album may be printed or exported out of order
  • Fixes an issue that prevents the zoom-to-crop tool from working in a print preview

Mail

  • Addresses an issue that may cause Mail preferences to open with a blank window
  • Resolves an issue that may prevent using undo from retrieving deleted mail

Other

  • Improves the reliability of syncing books and audiobooks to your iPad or iPhone through the Finder
  • Fixes an issue where reminders may be out of order in the Today smart list in the Reminders app
  • Resolves an issue that may cause slow typing performance in the Notes app

Enterprise content

  • Fixes an issue where the user password might not be accepted at the login window after upgrading a Mac with an Apple T2 Security Chip to macOS Catalina
  • Improves compatibility with video conferencing apps on MacBook Pro models introduced in 2018
  • Users logged in as a standard user can now install apps from the App Store

macOS Catalina 10.15.1

The macOS Catalina 10.15.1 update includes updated and additional emoji, support for AirPods Pro, HomeKit Secure Video, HomeKit-enabled routers, and new Siri privacy settings, as well as bug fixes and improvements.

Emoji

  • Over 70 new or updated emoji, including animals, food, activities, new accessibility emoji, gender-neutral emoji, and skin tones selection for couple emoji

AirPods support

  • AirPods Pro support

Home app

  • HomeKit Secure Video enables you to privately capture, store, and view encrypted video from your security cameras and features people, animal, and vehicle detection
  • HomeKit enabled routers let you control how your HomeKit accessories communicate over the internet or in your home
  • Adds support for AirPlay 2-enabled speakers in scenes and automations

Siri

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  • Privacy settings to control whether or not to help improve Siri and Dictation by allowing Apple to store audio of your Siri and Dictation interactions
  • Option to delete your Siri and Dictation history from Siri Settings

This update also includes the following bug fixes and improvements:

  • Restores the ability to view file names in the All Photos view in Photos
  • Restores the ability to filter by favorites, photos, videos, edited, and keywords in Days view in Photos
  • Fixes an issue where Messages would only send a single notification when the option to repeat alerts was enabled
  • Resolves an issue that caused Contacts to launch to the previously opened contact instead of the contact list
  • Adds a two-finger swipe gesture for back navigation in Apple News
  • Resolves issues that may occur in the Music app when displaying playlists inside folders and newly added songs in the Songs list
  • Improves reliability of migrating iTunes library databases into the Music, Podcasts, and TV apps
  • Fixes an issue where downloaded titles were not visible in the Downloads folder in the TV app

Enterprise content

  • When using the built-in keyboard with a non-U.S. keyboard layout, passwords with certain characters are no longer rejected at the Mac login window
  • When sign in with Apple ID is not allowed by a configuration profile, the Sign In button in System Preferences is now dimmed

macOS Catalina 10.15

As I’ve discussed before, I work in a high-compliance organization, meaning, when OS updates are released, we need to be able to test them, roll the updates out to customers, and then ensure their successful installation. Up until recently, we had been using LANrev for Mac management and patching, which had the interesting ability to run the softwareupdate utility on a client machine, grab that update package(s), and then upload them to the server. With this method, we would deploy the OS update package like any other to the devices that required the update, after being vetted and approved internally. And overall it worked well. Since the update was treated as a standard package, the typical install status and reporting in LANrev worked the same way. We could audit failures, successes, etc., and repush the update as needed. This however became less and less stable over time, specifically starting with 10.12, where the updates would never install successfully on clients. Once we moved to AirWatch, I was happy to find that they also had an OS update mechanism in place. Their agent was able to download and install updates also using the softwareupdate utility (more on that later), and also interact with the VMware AirWatch Agent GUI in order to show prompts to customers and alert them that they needed to reboot, among other things.

In order to utilize the AirWatch Agent for Software Updates, you need to create a “Software Update” profile in AirWatch for macOS. This looks like so:

This profile specifies things like:

  • Update Source – This can be pointed at Apple’s catalogs, or an internal SUS
  • How to install updates and what updates to install – This has options like “Install Updates Automatically,” or “Download updates in the background,” or “Check for updates only.” It also specifies whether macOS beta updates should be allowed, or app updates should be installed by the Agent.
  • Schedule – This allows you to schedule how often to check for software updates.
  • Restart – This allows specifying whether or not the agent should restart after updates are installed (for those that require a reboot), and should the customer be given a grace period before the reboot is forced.

Once you have those settings in place, you can push that profile to the client, and two things should happen:

  • A Software Update profile should get installed with any customizations to things like the Software Update Server
  • A launch daemon and plist file should end up on the device which are used by the AirWatch agent

So why talk about any of this in the first place? AirWatch does make this quite easy to setup, so is a blog post really necessary? Probably not… But, we recently noticed that devices were not being updated even though the Software Update profile was on the system. This unfortunately meant that if new updates were made available, the devices may see them in the App Store like normal, but we couldn’t ensure their installation, and thus our device’s compliance. The other issue is that since AirWatch does some under the hood magic when setting this profile up with regards to the agent actually enforcing the updates, there was no indication from our console that anything had gone wrong. AirWatch saw that the profile was reported as being installed on the device, so why would it think anything was wrong?

Once I realized we had a bit of an issue with the launch daemon not being present on the systems, the first thing I did was open a ticket with AirWatch to report it!

I started thinking of other ways we could automate software updates, and now that we have a Chef infrastructure setup, I figured that should be pretty easy. We would just need to setup a launch daemon that calls the softwareupdate utility, and then the next time the customer rebooted their machines, the latest updates would all get installed.

No, don’t do this. This does not offer us very good compliance, as we know customers often go days, weeks, maybe months, maybe only once something stops working, before rebooting their machines. AirWatch has also done all of the hard work for us in having their agent be able to alert a customer, set deferral times, and enforce the reboot if needed, and I wanted to make sure those efforts didn’t go wasted!

I started looking at what was happening on a device that had the Software Update profile installed, and found that on devices that were being successfully updated, a launch daemon was present that was not on other systems. The launch daemon was called com.airwatch.AWSoftwareUpdateScheduler.plist and looked something like this:

This declares two important things, 1) the binary to run (AWSoftwareUpdateScheduler), and 2) the interval at which to run that binary, which corresponded to the software update check interval we set in our Software Update profile.

Macos Don't Offer Software Updates Download

In calling this binary manually and monitoring the logs that it spits out, it became clear that at its core, it was in fact just calling the Apple softwareupdate utility. But, it also opened a socket to the AirWatch agent binary in order to be able to show the prompts to the user regarding the reboots, and could essentially wait idle for an extended time and then reboot the machine, again after notifying the user. The interesting thing was when calling this binary on a device that had the Software Update profile installed, had a macOS Update available, but did not have the launch daemon present, it would run the softwareupdate utility, the update would get installed/staged, but that would be it. There would be no GUI prompt or anything. Running it again, same thing, it would just re-stage the update, but no GUI prompts.

This led me to begin looking for other pieces or files that might be on properly configured devices, but not on problem devices. This is when I discovered the Scheduler.plist, which contains all of the settings that you specify when setting up the Software Update profile in the AirWatch console. This file lives under /Library/Application Support/AirWatch/Data/

The Scheduler.plist file looks something like this:

Most of these keys are self explanatory and correspond directly to a setting in the Software Update profile we setup earlier.

With that new knowledge, I copied that file to a problem device, re-ran the AWSoftwareUpdateScheduler tool and lo and behold, when the update was installed/staged, the GUI prompt appeared! This means it should be pretty easy to utilize the AirWatch agent for prompts to our users, but set the settings and ensure they were on the devices using Chef! I would just need to deploy a launch daemon, which with Chef is done using the launchd resource, and put the Scheduler.plist file on disk, which can be done using the cookbook_file resource.

The other interesting thing I found while looking into this, is that the Scheduler.plist file contains a key called gracePeriod which was set to 7200 seconds for us. This corresponds to the Grace Period set in the Software Update profile, which (annoyingly) has a max value of 2 hours. This is actually something we had wanted to extend further, but since it wasn’t in the GUI, didn’t think it would be possible. But now that we were creating the Scheduler.plist with Chef, maybe we can make the initial reboot grace period longer, something like 8 hours? And wouldn’t ya know it, after setting the gracePeriod key to 28800 seconds, and running the AWSoftwareUpdateScheduler, I received a prompt like so:

This then would mean that you should be able to get far more granular with just about all of the keys in the Scheduler.plist if managing it directly (i.e. not using the AirWatch console). You could add more deferrals than the GUI allows, get more granular with time in between deferrals, etc.

I did eventually open a support case with AirWatch, since this needs to be fixed in the end as I’m sure many customers rely on it. But, this was a fun way to learn a bit more about the underlying “technology” AirWatch is using to perform and enforce macOS updates, and was once again a reminder of how awesome having a configuration management tool is. Yes, this all could have been done with relatively straight forward bash scripts and deployed via package or something, but this way it is centrally managed and we can ensure it’s compliance on the system.

As always, thanks for reading!