macOS Archive

Apple will announce that it’s shifting from using Intel processors to its own ARM-based chips this month at WWDC 2020, Bloomberg reports. The developer conference is due to take place starting on June 22nd with an online-only format due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bloomberg notes that the timing of the announcement could change due to the health crisis. Rumors of Apple switching to using its own ARM-based processors in its Macs have been around for years, but a recent report from Bloomberg claimed that the shift was imminent, and that the first Mac powered by an ARM-based processor would arrive in 2021. The company reportedly has at least three ARM-based Mac processors in development based on the next iPhone’s A14 chip as part of Apple’s “Kalamata” project. While I like ARM bringing the competition to x86, Apple is not the right company to get excited over. ARM in and of itself is already more fragmented and locked-in than x86, and Apple cranks this up a notch. A lot of people are excited over ARM Macs, but I have a feeling they may be in for a very rude awakening. No more Steam. No more Bootcamp. No more Linux or other alternative operating systems. Far more Electron apps and shoddy iOS ports (developers barely wanted to make native x86 Mac apps, even fewer will make ARM Mac apps). No Adobe applications for the coming years. iOS-like restrictions for ARM macOS. Rude awakening indeed.

Apparently, Apple is making macOS Catalina phone home so much it’s making the operating system slow, laggy, and beachbally, as Allan Odgaard details. Apple has introduced notarization, setting aside the inconvenience this brings to us developers, it also results in a degraded user experience, as the first time a user runs a new executable, Apple delays execution while waiting for a reply from their server. This check for me takes close to a second. This is not just for files downloaded from the internet, nor is it only when you launch them via Finder, this is everything. So even if you write a one line shell script and run it in a terminal, you will get a delay! Aside from the obviously terrible design and privacy implications of your computer phoning home to Apple every time you execute something, this is also another case of Apple only designing for the absolutely optimal use-cases – i.e., people working and living in Cupertino – and that’s it. The less optimal your internet connection or the farther away you are, the worse your experience will be. Apple has a few file system locations that require user permission to access them, for example ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, and ~/Downloads. Surprisingly though, just obtaining the display name or icon for one of these folders will trigger Apple’s code to verify that the client is allowed to access the location. This is done by sending a message to the sandboxd process which sends a message to tccd which calls SecCodeCheckValidityWithErrors and seems to communicate with yet another process, but I can’t find which, and this takes around 150 ms per location. It may not seem like much, but this adds up, and can add more than half a second of delay when opening an application. Like with privileged folders, keychain items also require permission for applications to access them. But again, something is wrong. Specifically calling SecKeychainFindGenericPassword can cause noticeable delays, on a bad internet day I had this call stall for 3.3 seconds and this was with System Integrity Protection disabled! And on other delays in launching applications in general: This is the worst issue, sometimes, things will stall for 5-30 seconds. Mostly though it is when launching applications. Sampling the application during launch shows stalls in ImageLoaderMachO::loadCodeSignature, SLSMainConnectionID, and many references to Skylight and CGS in the stack trace. The current best way to “address” this issue is disabling System Integrity Protection and disconnecting from the internet (!), and especially that second one is of course entirely unreasonable. I wouldn’t touch macOS with a ten-foot pole even before Catalina – it always felt slow and sluggish to me, even on faster Macs, and Mac hardware is terrible value right now – but with all the general complaints about Catalina, and now this, it’s getting ever clearer I’m not missing out on anything by sticking to Linux. At least my computer isn’t calling home to Clement Lefebvre every time I run a tiny script.

The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is working on three of its own Mac processors, known as systems-on-a-chip, based on the A14 processor in the next iPhone. The first of these will be much faster than the processors in the iPhone and iPad, the people said. Apple is preparing to release at least one Mac with its own chip next year, according to the people. But the initiative to develop multiple chips, codenamed Kalamata, suggests the company will transition more of its Mac lineup away from current supplier Intel Corp. I wonder just how locked-down these ARM Macs will be. Will it be App Store-only? Can you change default applications on ARM macOS? Can you install a browser engine other than WebKit? Do you have access to the file system? Will it ship with a terminal? I’m not so sure macOS users should be excited about ARM Macs.

Just another heads up that kernel extensions on macOS will soon stop working. This has been known for a while, but you might not even know you’re using kernel extensions in the first place. System extensions on macOS Catalina (10.15) allow software like network extensions and endpoint security solutions to extend the functionality of macOS without requiring kernel-level access. At WWDC19, we announced the deprecation of kernel extensions as part of our ongoing effort to modernize the platform, improve security and reliability, and enable more user-friendly distribution methods. Kernel programming interfaces (KPIs) will be deprecated as alternatives become available, and future OS releases will no longer load kernel extensions that use deprecated KPIs by default. If you use macOS, run kextstat | grep -v com.apple to see how many third party kernel extensions you have running. Things like VirtualBox, controller support for Steam, DropBox, Little Snitch, and more all come with kernel extensions, so there’s definitely chances you might be running some without even realising it.

A lightweight macOS window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint. If you like the idea of scripting your own window or app management toolkit with JavaScript, Phoenix is probably going to give you the things you want. With Phoenix you can bind keyboard shortcuts and system events, and use these to interact with macOS. Pretty cool.

It’s well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I’ve discovered that on Catalina, pasting a file from Finder not only outputs the file path in Terminal, it also invisibly and permanently grants Terminal access to the file, bypassing any macOS privacy protections! This is such a weird bug… Or feature?

When you upgrade to macOS 10.15 Catalina, your boot volume will effectively be split into two. Assuming it’s the standard internal storage, your existing boot volume will be renamed to Macintosh HD – Data, and a new read-only system volume created and given the name Macintosh HD. However, when your Mac starts up in Catalina, you won’t see the Data volume, as it’s hidden inside the System volume, in what Apple refers to as a Volume Group. I miss the olden days where disk layouts were simple and straightforward. Look at the partition layout of any recent operating system, and you’ll be greeted by several small partitions with specific functions, such as boot manager partitions, restore partitions, and so on. These partitions are hidden, and I’ve always been of the school that if you need to hide something, you probably designed it wrong. In any event, I understand why this is necessary, but that doesn’t make it any less hacky and messy.

After my blood pressure dropped to healthier levels I got the strangest feeling of déjà vu. This felt exactly like using Linux in the early 2000s. Things break at random for reasons you can’t understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best. Then it hit me. This was not an isolated incidence. The parallels are everywhere. I certainly wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely a kernel of truth to the perception that macOS just doesn’t feel as polished and effortless as it once was, during the Leopard days.

Apple started adding user consent alerts way back in High Sierra. The first time an app would try to access your location, contacts, calendar, reminders or photos a system alert would prompt the user for consent. Mojave expanded these prompts to automation, camera and microphone. And now Catalina adds screen recording, keyboard input monitoring, access to folders such as Desktop, Documents and Downloads, user notifications and Safari downloads… These alerts are just another step on a long path Apple has been taking to protect user’s data. Previous steps include code signing, sandbox, gatekeeper, the “curated” Mac App Store and notarization. But security features are most useful when they’re invisible. All previous steps were mostly invisible. This last one… Not so much. There’s a lot of complaining going around in Apple circles regarding the latest Catalina betas and the excessive amount of permission alerts and associated user access problems. On his latest podcast, for instance, John Gruber detailed how it took him ages to figure out why the Terminal wouldn’t show him any directory listings, until he realised the Terminal needed disk access permission, but didn’t ask for it. This is, of course, all quite reminiscent of Windows Vista, and the goal here seems to be to turn macOS into iOS, with similarly harsh restrictions on what users can do on their computers.

What is Bitcode? Well, bitcode with a small b is an architecture-specific intermediate representation used by LLVM, and capital-B Bitcode pertains to a set of features allowing you to embed this representation in your Mach-O binary and the mechanisms by which you can provide it to Apple in your App Store submissions. Of course, the specter of macOS on ARM has been in the public psyche for many years now, and many have pondered whether Bitcode will make this transition more straightforward. The commonly held belief is that Bitcode is not suited to massive architectural changes like moving between Intel and ARM. I was unconvinced, so I decided to test the theory! By Steven Troughton-Smith, so you know you’re going to learn more than you bargained for.

Apple has released iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4. Both are minor releases, but at least macOS 10.14.4 has some nifty changes for Safari: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 includes support for Safari AutoFill using Touch ID and it offers automatic dark mode themes in Safari. If you have Dark Mode enabled in Mojave, when you visit a website that has an option for a dark theme after installing the update, it will be activated automatically. Every one of you using iOS devices or PCs running macOS know exactly where to get the updates.

At WWDC 2018 Apple gave us a ‘sneak peek’ at perhaps one of the most impactful developments on macOS since the transition to Mac OS X: UIKit apps running on the desktop. Today, I’m going to detail a special tool I built, called marzipanify, to get started with UIKit on the Mac early, and start the initial bringup of your iOS app on macOS. Amazing work by Steven Troughton-Smith.

Some more light reading, right in time for the weekend - the 147 pages long reference to APFS.

This document could prove quite useful to developers who might wish to add APFS compatibility to for instance Linux.

I had never heard of this functionality. It seems like one of those things particularly Apple ought to be good at to integrate in a user-friendly manner.