macOS 15, iOS 18 et al
Apple released new versions of its various operating systems today that include security patches (also issuing important security updates for supported earlier versions, a new version of Safari for them, and an Xcode update to patch a keychain vulnerability).
Howard Oakley has some helpful posts about macOS 15.
And he offers a critical trick for stopping unwanted upgrades:
Advanced SilentKnight: updating macOS and avoiding updates
If you didn’t want to install that macOS update, there is a way that you can now persuade Software Update to forget that it has been downloaded and is waiting, ready to install. This is most useful if you didn’t intend updating macOS, and now want to undo the process.
Shut your Mac down, then start it up in Safe mode. Leave it there for a minute or so, then restart it back into normal mode. Those uninstalled updates should now have been flushed, and Software Update is back to where it started.
Ars Technica’s review of macOS 15 by Andrew Cunningham’s is quite thorough, as usual.
macOS 15 Sequoia: The Ars Technica review
The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as “the AI one” in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of “Apple Intelligence” features. That’s funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that’s coming out today. A lot of it is coming “later this fall” in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won’t be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won’t be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet. But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. …
The good
- Window tiling is good!
- Small but useful changes to most apps that don’t break anything that was already working.
- Compatible with most of the same systems as macOS Sonoma was last year.
The bad
- Apple Intelligence is the tentpole feature, and none of it is ready yet.
- Somewhat significant disk usage increase.
- Window tiling isn’t as flexible as it is in Windows 11.
The ugly
- Drops 2018/2019 MacBook Air for no great reason. Sure, the processor is slow, but it was also slow last year, and it did have an Apple T2.
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