Originally published at: macOS 14.6.1, macOS 13.6.9, iOS 17.6.1, and iPadOS 17.6.1 Fix Advanced Data Protection - TidBITS
Apple’s latest updates address a problem that prevented users from turning Advanced Data Protection on or off. What other problems might they fix as well? Read on for details and our installation advice.
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Anybody know what in 14.6 was fixed by 14.6.1? I hadn’t noticed any issues, but it must have been something important for a second update to come along so quickly.
According to Apple’s release notes, macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 fixes an issue that prevented the enabling or disabling of Advanced Data Protection. Apple says there are also other “important bug fixes.”
This update and re-update dance is getting annoying. Have they ever made use of Rapid Response or do they seriously think we enjoy constantly fiddling and rebooting our devices or having them offline for 30 min every week is enjoyable? We’ve never had hardware this fast and yet, we’ve never had it offline as much due to patches and patches to the patches and repatching. This is not what progress is supposed to look like. And only with software do we put up with this constant beta testing malarkey. Imagine if your car ran this way. I expect more from Apple.
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Howard Oakley’s piece and comments below are no more flattering for Apple.
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To me (and I have complained about this before in various TidBits threads), this behavior from Apple reflects how poor their overall software-development processes/practices are, and also IMHO, how these software-development processes/practices have degraded over the years.
It’s not like Apple does not have the cash to invest in better software-development practices.
Ok, I admit I sound like a broken record on this topic. (“broken record”: old-school, analog metaphor)
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Yes, it does sound like a broken record, and I’m going to delete future general complaints in keeping with my long-standing policy. It’s totally fine to complain about something specific that’s associated with the current topic, but unless you’re experiencing problems with the versions of macOS, iOS, and iPadOS discussed in this article, please keep the general complaints to yourself.
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For iOS 17, there were 4 versions of 17.0 released within a month, 3 versions of 17.1 released within just over a month, 2 versions of 17.2 released within a month, 2 versions of 17.3 released within a month, 3 versions of 17.4 released within a month, 2 versions of 17.5 released within a month and so far 2 versions of 17.6 released within a month. I would say that the advice about installing x.0 and x.x releases should be pretty clear. As an additional comment, my workplace has allowed the 17.6.1 release to be installed to my work phone, but they did not allow the initial 17.6 release.
I upgraded to 17.6 this week just before 17.6.1 came. I have a music player app called Neutron. It is very advanced. I tweak a lot of settings. After upgrade all the settings were reset to default and it had lost the path to all the playlists. This has happened before, so I have made a checklist that I followed to get it setup again. I have discovered no other bugs.
I can’t find “Advanced Data Protection” in my iCloud settings, even using the search box. This is with an M2 MBA running 14.6.1.
There are Apple ID requirements (you must use two factor Auth, for example) listed on this page, which also include minimum OS levels for all Apple devices logged in.
It would be in Settings / Apple ID / iCloud at the bottom.
It’s much more complicated than that, and a blanket recommendation to skip X.Y releases would be dangerous. First off, many of the 17.X releases introduced new features, so it’s not entirely surprising that they’d need a bug fix. And people might want the features! Second, quite a few of the updates fix zero-day security exploits, so it’s entirely reasonable that Apple pushes out an immediate update and that people be encouraged to install it.
Here’s another way of looking at the release history:
- 17.0: Three updates, two of which address zero-days, and it makes sense it would have the most updates given that it’s the X.0 release
- 17.1: Two updates, one of which addresses a zero-day
- 17.2: One update
- 17.3: One update, but 17.3 itself addressed a zero-day
- 17.4: One update, but 17.4 itself addressed a zero-day
- 17.5: One update
- 17.6: One update
Many of these releases fix bugs that are really tweaky. iOS 17.1.1 fixed a problem where Apple Pay and NFC payments didn’t work after wireless charging in certain cars, and another where the Lock Screen widget for Weather didn’t always correctly display snow. And many of the bugs don’t even merit mention in the release notes. I’d love to know how Apple decides which bugs merit mention and which don’t.
We cover all Apple releases and try to provide sensible update recommendations for each one. Sometimes that involves updating immediately when there’s a zero-day involved, but much of the time we recommend waiting and checking for online reports before installing. In this case, the online reports wouldn’t have made any difference—I found no mentions of the Advanced Data Protection issues in discussions, and only a handful of complaints that affected more than one person in TidBITS Talk, Apple Discussions, and the MacRumors forums.
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Ah! Got it, thanks.
After I upgraded from MacOS14.6 but before I upgraded to 14.6.1, I ran into problems with TimeMachine. I tried to step back to some settings from a day or two ago, and the process was extremely slow and finally failed because it needed another 5+ Gig of memory to store the data. After that, I was able to change the settings to new values. After I got that working, my MacMini couldn’t find the Time Machine drive. After some further fiddling I did a Restart to clean up the changes and then decided to Upgrade to 14.6.1 to see if that helped with Time Machine. After the restart, the Mac could find the Time Machine Drive and it seems to be working again, although it seems slow. It made me wonder some of the bug/s in 14.6 might have been in Time Machine. It’s something we normally don’t check often, so it might have slipped through.
This almost makes it sound like a new feature must inevitably come with new bugs.
Let’s not normalize current aberrations.
It is entirely possible to prepare new features without hampering systems. Apple is having trouble doing that right now, but let’s not conflate their struggles of late with some kind of fundamental equivalence. There is such a thing as good tools and processes, careful planning, and diligent verification of your execution before unleashing on your paying customers. What we are seeing lately with Apple is a lack thereof, not that it fundamentally does not exist or cannot be made to work.
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I just updated to 14.6.1 from 14.5 and now have external monitor weirdness…
I have a Macbook M1 Pro with 32GB, attached to a Dell S2721QS display via a USB C to Displayport cable. Prior to the system update this setup worked without problem.
Post update the mabook will only see the external display if it is hot plugged in. It will not recognise that there’s a display connected on startup / restart (with the display connected). More confusing still is that if I close the macbook’s screen, it just goes to sleep and will not go into clamshell mode.
Yes, the MacBook is plugged into a power supply.
Any thoughts?
I’m assuming you also have a mouse/KB attached to this MBP. Otherwise clamshell mode will not work.
I have a similar setup and am used to seeing the external display in clamshell mode take a while to be discovered on boot. While after boot the internal comes on straight away, the external in clam shell mode will at times take from seconds to quite a while to come to life and indeed sometimes even requires mouse clicks or KB presses to start displaying. There have been individual instances where I have even had to open and close the MBP to get the external display to start displaying after a boot. These instances have bene rare but I have observed them well before this most recent update.
yes mouse, kb & power attached…
I don’t think we’re seeing aberrations right now, but it’s impossible to know either way without access to Apple’s internal bug databases. The present is always in tighter focus than the past.
iOS 13 and Catalina were unusually problematic, but I haven’t gotten anywhere near the same sense of reproducible problems across the community since then. @das explained what was going on back then, and Apple changed its processes to improve afterward.
Totally agreed, and that should always be the goal. But simultaneously, it’s a simple fact that the more code that’s changed, the more opportunity there is for bugs to creep in. And all commercial software ships with lots of known bugs. David Shayer gave a good view of how Apple deals with bugs too.
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Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Broadly speaking, I think this is why we are seeing. OS X, and macOS, have been getting buggier and buggier for many years. Some bugs adversely affect function, some are a decline in the User Interface. For years many asked for bugs to be fixed, including a halt in addition of new features until the bugs were less, but it seemed those pleas went unheard. Meanwhile, to produce a useable product, all developers including Apple, had to work around a large undocumented catalog of bugs. Consequently code in most, probably all, released products has been riddled with non-standard code needed to work around the bugs.
Within the past year Apple announced a change in attitude. Apple’s programmers would be told to “take a week and do nothing but fix bugs” in the upcoming release. This announcement was met with great skepticism. First was plain disbelief. “I’ll believe it when I see it!” Second, and perhaps more important, the announcement appeared to confirm Apple’s lack of understanding of the current extent of the problem. “Debugging a future macOS? How about debugging the current product?” and “A week? Fixing existing known bugs will take more like a year!”
To Apple’s credit, it appears they heard and are trying to respond appropriately. Changes in macOS 14.5 and 14.6 were mostly unannounced, presumably many bug fixes as well as announced security enhancements.
A potential problem with fixing System software bugs is existing software has been “adjusted” to work around existing bugs. As the System software becomes more properly debugged, these “adjustments” (bug-fix workarounds) can cause problems. That is, at least in part, what I think we are seeing.
I don’t know Apple’s plans. I do know macOS 14.6.1 still has serious bugs. I hope for macOS 14.7 beta, indicating Apple is still intent on making macOS run as it should. Definitely not out of the woods yet. However, the current issues, and macOS point version releases with few or no new features, leave me feeling more hopeful than I have felt in a long time.
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For some reason, macOS 14.6.1 did not appear on the macOS 14 beta train catalog; I had to switch over to the mainline release to receive it, then switch back to the beta to update Safari Seed 18. This was not the case for the equivalent beta train for iOS 17 to receive 17.6.1.
No, I don’t know how that works either.