macOS Archive

Apple has just released Mountain Lion to the Mac App Store. For a measly $20, Lion users can move to the new release right now, and honestly, at that price, there's little reason not to for the Mac users among us. It's not a huge or massive release or anything, but if you're a fan of iOS, you're going to love all the OS bits and pieces that are being transferred to your desktop. Have fun installing, and, as always, be sure to read the only review that matters: John Siracusa's 25000 words long review (that's almost as long as the thesis I wrote to earn my master's degree, holy cripes!). I know what I'll be reading today on my brand new Nexus 7. If you can, please support Siracusa by buying the ebook version on Amazon (currently stuck in the review process, should show up any minute now). Why? Because Siracusa's kind of technology writing is something we need to cherish, because we have less and less of it.

Ars Technica is reporting that certain 64bit Mac models won't be able to run Mountain Lion. The problem is the graphic card drivers; these are still 32bit, and Apple is unwilling to update them to 64bit. A 64bit kernel can't load 32bit drivers, so that's that. Apple has a list of supported models on their Mountain Lion upgrade page, so you can easily check if your computer is capable of running Mountain Lion.

"I've lost track of the many reasons that have been given for the switch to Intel, but this I know for sure: no one has ever reported that, for 18 months, Project Marklar existed only because a self-demoted engineer wanted his son Max to be able to live closer to Max's grandparents." Amazing.

Apple has released OS X Lion 10.7.4, which, among several other bug fixes, plugs a hole in FileVault that affected some users. Nothing particularly interesting going on otherwise.

Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else.

"OS X is full of little design touches that have redefined what people expect from a personal computer, and which complement Apple hardware. In fact, you can't (legally) install the operating system on anything but a Mac, so the two are forever entwined - and that gives Apple advantages that other computer manufacturers simply don't have. Join us as we explore the world's most beautiful operating system and find out how Apple created it." Slightly nauseating hyperbole aside (I find Mac OS X bland and grey thank you very much), it's an interesting article.

We don't normally report on security issues, especially not when they occur on Mac OS X. So far, the security issues on the Mac can barely be labelled as such, and really don't deserve a lot of attention. Now, however, it would appear we're looking at the first successful widespread malware infection on Mac OS X. Not a bad track record for an eleven year old operating system, by the way.

"As noticed by several users running the developer preview version of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Apple is no longer including its X11 application for running software through the X Window System interface. The X Window System has an extensive open source history, with development on the Mac side being handled under the XQuartz project. Apple's X11 application has been based on this effort, although as with many open source projects bundled for use in commercial software, X11 has generally been somewhat behind the latest XQuartz releases. The current version of X11 is 2.6.3, while XQuartz is currently available in version 2.7.0." Makes perfect sense. I mean, you guys were using XQuartz already anyway, right?

It's still early days, but this has the potential to put more fuel on the Apple rumour mill fire than anything else in recent times. A BA thesis by Dutch student Tristan Schaap details how, during his internship at Apple's Platform Technologies Group, he ported Darwin to a certain ARMv5 developer board. A few blog articles later, and the headline has already turned into 'Mac OS X ported to ARM'. So, what have I been running on my iPhone and iPad all these years?

Apple has released Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (by far Apple's most inelegant product name). It's a whole bunch of under-the-hood stuff, mostly bug fixes. It adds support for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. It's all in Software Update.

And so the iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues. Apple has just announced that all applications submitted to the Mac App Store have to use sandboxing by March 2012. While this has obvious security advantages, the concerns are numerous - especially since Apple's current sandboxing implementation and associated rules makes a whole lot of applications impossible.

Introduction not necessary. Read it.

"One item of interest regarding last week's Mac OS X 10.6.8 update reveals that Apple has enabled TRIM support retroactively for solid state hard drives shipped in Apple-produced configurations. TRIM is a feature that allows solid state drives (SSDs) to automatically handle garbage collection, cleaning up unused blocks of data and preparing them for rewriting, thereby preventing slowdowns that would otherwise occur over time as garbage data accumulates."

"Using a Mac may certainly be a safer choice for a lot of people as despite being vulnerable they are not targeted. However this is not the same as Macs being secure, something Eric Schmidt erroneously advised recently. I may be able to browse impervious to malware on a Mac at the moment, however I personally would not be comfortable using a platform so easily compromised if someone had the motivation to do so. In this article I address just why OS X is so insecure including the technical shortcomings of OS X as well as Apples policies as a company that contribute to the situation."