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

kinther@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 356 points –
USB hubs, printers, Java, and more seemingly broken by macOS 14.4 update
arstechnica.com
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And my IT team pushed this release as a required update, immediately, as soon as it dropped. And now they’ve learned a lesson. Wait a week or two on major point releases.

From what I understand, 14.4 was also a HUGE security release for active exploits in the wild. It might have been better overall to deal with temporary broken usb functionality than risk a severe vulnerability remaining on their network.

Seperate security from major updates maybe?
What moron decided to bundle both of those updates together?

14.4 wasn't that major of an update, it was mostly the security updates.

Why did it break so many things then?

Because of the security update part of things.

From the article:

The USB hub issue may be related to the USB security prompts that Apple introduced in macOS 13 Ventura

It also seems to have fixed a major memory leak bug for me, though I’ve only used it for a week or so now. Thank god.

My company paused the rollout once all these bugs started appearing. They pushed it live before knowing how the GM was being received at scale.

You would think... but they new before that it was a bad idea. Someone above them said "I don't care, just do it". They also probably said something about metrics.

That's why it is wiser to update when .01 .02 release launches.

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Apple: just works.

My ass.

Yup. Yesterday my mac turned my external display pink. The monitor was connected directly to the HDMI socket on the M1.

Tell me a more iconic duo than external devices and a panicking mac.

This used to happen to me regularly with a Dell panel. It would turn anything white pink. I found creating a custom colour profile and playing around with it until the whites were white again solved it. Then occasionally it would decide to revert to the default colour profile for no reason.

Stupidly frustrating but I’m passing on the tip incase it helps.

What I meant by "turned pink" is that the display showed only bright pink color and the mac display had a single corrupted line of pixels on it.

Oh ouch. Haven’t experienced that.

As someone using android/windows in private life and MacOS for work, I can confirm. As long as its Apple, it works. But as soon as you use any third party software or hardware, its completly bugged.

I cannot even agree to that. Like I get that the settings takes minutes to reload after a reboot. And I need to get in there because it always resets my mouse speed to the slowest possible. But I cannot change it because there are no settings for the mouse directly after a fresh boot! It is so absurd.

Using a mac daily for work, no it doesn't. Some built in software features keep fucking up, external device or not. Like the "pause music" button, which stopped working entirely on my mac no matter if you press it on the builtin or external keyboard, the multi desktop which keep fucking up and putting apps on top of other apps that are fullscreen, making them barely usable...

We agree on the external device part though, it can decide to stop working with stuff you used for months for no good reason

All this on an M2 pro that came out a year ago

I still think my 2012 Macbook Pro with the Highres screen was peak Apple. It’s been downhill ever since, but the current releases of macOS and iOS are a an extra special kind of crap. The worst part: it’s still miles ahead of Windows.

Windows tends to work with ever you throw at it though. Plug it in and somehow it will find a way to work.

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To be fair, when are printers not broken?

Buy a brother LaserJet and never worry again.

Brother gang, rise up

Our Brother sewing machine is fantastic. It doesn't print though

You know, we also have a very sturdily built Brother sewing machine and I never noticed that they're the same company that made our printer.

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100%. I got the Brother HL-2370DW and it served me well, but it’s a black-and-white laser printer and sometimes I needed to print in color. I got fed up dealing with inkjet printers so I got the Brother HL-3270CDW. It’s great at printing off props and visual aids for my weekly tabletop game and so on.

It’s not technically “perfect” - sometimes a Mac will fail to print to them wirelessly and say they printed fine (and that seems to be an issue on the Mac side) and I think we average maybe one paper jam per year - but it’s as close to perfect as I’ve ever gotten with a printer.

You have no idea how much I regret buying a Canon Pixmass printer on offer for 50€. I should have just sucked it up and coughed up 100 more to get a damn Brother laser printer.

Well,at least now I get to replace ink cartridges every week or so and I get to print my ass on photographic paper.

Live and learn I guess.

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I haven't had a broken printer in years!

My local library branch is walking distance and has free printing, so I got rid of my printer.

Awesome!

Last time I tried to print from a library, it was print-to-pdf wasn't an easy thing, and laptops were rare and underpowered. So printing from a different computer was hard if that computer didn't have the same programs.

I'm glad things have gotten better and you are able to use the library!

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This update causes my Jetbrains IDE to randomly crash several times a day, it's great. Also my USB hubs wouldn't work this morning until I power cycled everything a few times. What fun!

Ahh. This is why PyCharm is crashing on me all of a sudden.

My PyCharm has been more stable after I quit the Jetbrains Toolbox app. No crashes today at all.

But there are more emojis and now it integrates with icloud toilet to store your bowel movement stats in the Health app.

Who the fuck even needs usb hubs?

On a macbook? You can't plug a normal keyboard in without a USB hub because there's no USB-A port

You already have one keyboard, don’t need another one. What? The butterfly keys are broken? Shouldn’t have broken them I guess 🤷‍♂️

Literally anyone with an apple product because they don't include enough ports to plug in basic shit like a mouse or thumb drive? There's an entire product lines of hubs that are compact and flush with the laptop that exists solely because of apple

I regularly use a USB hub/Thunderbolt dock on my laptop. I sometimes have 5 devices plugged in at once (mouse, keyboard, MIDI keyboard, audio interface, hard drive).

Definitely skipping that update then. Thanks for the warning

Looks like there are two separate issues addressed in the articles. 1. You have to approve USB devices that are plugged into your Mac. I believe the fix is to unplug USB devices and plug them back in. 2. Microsoft Defender is crashing CUPS unless you manually give it full disk access. Either give it full disk access or remove Microsoft Defender from your Mac.

ETA: I just checked and I’m ok 14.4. No problems printing but it did ask me to confirm that I trusted every new USB device that I plug in.

Microsoft Defender exists for Mac? What?

My guess is it is for some corporate security policy that requires the same endpoint management. I had no idea it existed either before I read the thread on Apple forums.

Somehow it's managed to randomly toggle the DPI setting on my mouse.

It's a Sensei RAW, there is no software switch, it's all done in the mouse.

Fucked up my Logitech mouse options program and now it doesn’t work correctly

Might be intentional, recently Apple went the direction of silently dropping features in updates.

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And this is why I'm still on Monterey... Being in audio production, it's rare that updating your OS (barring security updates) improves your stability.

What's the oldest version of MacOS that I could reinstall on Apple silicon?

That depends on your Mac. The older the Mac, the older the version. On most M1 Macs, you can go back even to Big Sur, on M2 it's usually Monterey and so on. It might be different with the Pro/Max/Ultra variants though.

More important question for me:

what is the oldest MacOS with xcode support (and therefore oldest I can run brew on)?

I keep meaning to figure this out.

I believe brew dropped support for a high Sierra just a couple years back (2022 I think) but as of now my 2012 MacBook Pro is still chugging along whenever I need to compile or test something for x86 and can't be bothered to cross-compile from my new MacBook :)

This version naming is hrllaripusly awful. "It works on rotund tundra, but not alpine fresh. Hope that helps!"

Hehe, I absolutely agree.. for reference, High Sierra is v10.13, released in 2017. I'm now running v13, released 2022. They moved from v10.15 to v11 in 2020, when the arm chips were released.

My old MacBook could probably run 10.15 just fine, but I don't have any good reason to update it, as it's only purpose now is to compile distributables for other old machines.

Also: I really dislike that they've been pushing non-backwards compatible major releases so hard since 2020. I'm not updating my OS because I can't be bothered to break shit, it shouldn't be like that..

I'm still on macos 12 because every major update seems to break something in my dev flow