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USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

arstechnica.com

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Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#71

Post by LeFantome »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #53
prirun wrote: post #20

My upgrade to Monterey (MacOS 12.x) broke my Canon D530 printer driver. Re-installing the driver didn't help. Now I have to print to a PDF, copy that to an old Snow Leopard 10.6 machine, and print from there. FYI, Snow Leopard is 11 major OS revisions behind Monterey. Printing worked fine in Mohave, 3 major revisions ago. I also can't write any files to /, even with SIP disabled, and during the Monterey upgrade, Appl…

I just saw an update come through on my Ubuntu 22.04 machine for CUPS. I know that Apple is the steward/owner of CUPS now, so I wonder if it's a related update.

I don’t think that Apple uses CUPS anymore.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#72

Post by RedShift1 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #30

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

Windows updates before MS fired their QA department were uneventful, after they fired their QA department, serious issues started popping up every single month. Including server systems not booting anymore.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#73

Post by freedomben »

contingencies wrote: post #47

For me OSX updates have broken, over the past few years, my USB C ethernet dongle and firmware upload connectivity to specific hardware chipsets. This caused me to buy a non-Apple laptop. Now my Apple laptop refuses to update at all (top of line 4 year old laptop with max spec) so the upgrade driven failures problem category has effectively gone away, but OSX is becoming increasingly unusable. As a result I won't be…

What brand and model of laptop hardware do you buy now? I have been extremely happy with framework laptops, although my big complaint is that the trackpad on my 3rd gen is worse than on my first gen, so they might be trending the wrong direction on track pads. But otherwise, my experience with Fedora on framework hardware has been remarkable

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#74

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

jsmith99 wrote: post #57
CoastalCoder wrote: post #30

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

This macOS version only supports models since 2017-19 (depending on product line). Apple don’t really have an excuse compared to Microsoft since they only have a few hardware options. It’s amusing to compare the comments here to the comments on windows update threads. As nobody else has, let me add the reminder for everyone to switch to .

Let’s be clear. 2017 is SEVEN years ago. Things could be far worse.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#75

Post by creshal »

RedShift1 wrote: post #62
anthk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the printer it's shared over a wifi network, you can just use netcat: nc your_printer_ip 9100

Doesn't that require your printer to support Postscript? Not many printers for mere mortals support such advanced technology.

PDF support is reasonably widespread these days.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#77

Post by Rinzler89 »

LeFantome wrote: post #55
CoastalCoder wrote: post #30

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

Apple does not accumulate a trail of old hardware. They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years. Their “tail” is always about the same length. I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days. It “just works”. So, a “long tail” of hardware is no excuse anyway. Apple is in the middle off a platform transition from Intel to their own silicon. Some of these pro…

>They deprecate their own hardware after about 5 years.

And people give Microsoft shit for not supporting Windows 10 more than 10 years when Apple only does 5.

>I use EndeavourOS on all my old Mac hardware and update without fear literally every couple of days

That's incredibly brave (or foolish) to have no fear of upgrading Arch, considering Arch does indeed break, it's not a question of IF, it's a question of WHEN.

Also had EndeavourOS for a while when I attempted to switch to Linux and, gave up on it when an update left me without sound. It's a great "batteries included" Arch distro, but can't tolerate such risks on a daily driver machine that I need it to work 100% of the time, every time.

For daily driving without update anxiety I'd go for something boring like Ubuntu/Debian based OSs, Fedora if you want more up-date, or even OpenSUSE if you want a sane rolling distro, but I'd stay away from Arch if you want your computer to just-work(TM) and don't wanna be your own part-time sys-admin.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#78

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

beeboobaa wrote: post #27
nickthegreek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh, this stuff isn't going to effect 99% of the userbase and their systems will continue to just work. All 3 of my mac laptops continue to work without issue.

Plenty of java software is used by regular users. Minecraft is incredibly popular and one of the few games that (used to) run natively on mac.

And there are multiple people here claiming that they aren’t having any Java issues.

People are all up in arms based on what’s essentially a misinterpretation of the nature and severity of these issues. Something is obviously up, but it’s not as simple as ‘Java no worky’.

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#79

Post by wasyl »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #30

Honest question: is this evidence of worsening QA at Apple, or a consequence of OS X growing a longer tail of old and varied hardware? E.g., how does this compare to the rate of equivalent problems with large Windows releases?

I'd guess not the latter — anecdotally, my intel mac has been increasingly sluggish after each macos upgrade, even after a clean install. I finally decided to revert to the oldest macos version possible (and then update by just one major version since unfortunately some apps I need don't support Catalina anymore) and the difference is night and day — my memory was right and my laptop _was_ faster before. And it's not hardware getting old or battery problems, it's the OS.

So I don't know if older macs are intentionally crippled or they're just ignored during QA, but I don't believe they're actually intentionally supported

Re: USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update

#80

Post by microtonal »

This seems quite out of character for minor macOS releases. Yes, stuff breaks, but seldomly so broadly in a minor release.

Speculation about why: Apple had to push out a major iOS update before March 6 for the EU DMA deadline. They had almost two years to prepare, but they figured out fairly late that they could not negotiate (most of) their way out of it. So the weeks/months before the release, probably most of the focus of the OS (and infrastructure) teams was on the March 6 deadline.

I imagine that they had all security updates rolled into the macOS 14.4 and iOS 17.4 branches already. Then when March 6 came around, they released iOS 17.4 and they had to rush out macOS 14.4 as well (macOS 14.4 was already a day later than iOS 17.4, which is untypical for Apple), to avoid that bad actors find macOS vulnerabilities by looking at iOS changes.

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