I remember seeing a page years ago that had Mac OS update files available for download from Apple. Does that still exist? You could tell what update was the latest and just download the file from that page I believe. It would have been pre-silicon (ARM) I'm pretty sure. You're able to keep a mac that's 100% offline updated for the OS that way.

It's quite hard to explain so I've filmed a very short video. I have tried everything within display settings on both devices, with no luck.

Chatgpt told me to try the "double push method" which apparently "realigns" the devices, but I haven't had a great deal of luck with that either.

My Mac and MacBook are 2021 and 2020 M1s, both running on Tahoe.

Any help would be appreciated.

Question for anyone in Canada who has an Apple Business account with Business Loyalty pricing.

Our company spends roughly $50–60k/year with Apple, so we’re in the $35k–$200k Business Loyalty tier and receive discounted pricing on various hardware, AppleCare and accessories.

Does anyone know whether there is a way to purchase through the regular Apple.ca retail website, but associate the order with our Apple Business Customer Number/account so that:

1. Our normal Business Loyalty discount is applied to the order; and
2. The purchase counts toward our rolling 12-month Business Loyalty spend?

In other words, I’m trying to determine whether the Business Store is actually required to receive our negotiated pricing, or whether a regular Apple.ca order can be associated with our existing business account during checkout or afterward and receive the same treatment.

I know purchases can be associated with an organization for Apple Business Manager/device enrolment. That’s not what I’m asking about. I’m specifically asking about Business Loyalty pricing and the rolling annual spend.

Would particularly appreciate hearing from Canadian Apple Business customers or anyone who has actually done this.

Hello all,

I'm the developer of Caxton. Part of my job is consumer data processing, so multi gigabyte logs, giant CSV exports, SQL dumps, and JSONL are a normal week for me, and for years my fix was keeping a Windows machine around because the standard tool for this (EmEditor) never shipped a Mac version.

The thing I actually wanted was for a huge file to not automatically mean some crippled read-only large file mode. You should still be able to search it, regex it, filter it, Replace All across it, tail it, diff it against another copy, and edit it like any normal file.

It memory maps the file instead of loading it into RAM, so the file stays on disk and only what's on screen gets materialized. Numbers from the benchmark harness, M1 Max with 64 GB:

• 10 GB log (80,610,954 lines): usable immediately, full line index finishes in the background in 19.5s
• literal search across the whole 10 GB, 1,613,344 matches: 1.3s
• Replace All across all 1.61M matches: 1.7s, and it lands as one undo step
• filter 80.6M lines down to the matching 1.61M: 1.3s
• 1 GB CSV, 2,022,947 rows by 50 columns: working grid in 2.6s, numeric sort across all rows in 8.2s
• memory stays under 200 MB with the 10 GB document open

Those are my numbers on my machine, the harness and methodology are published on the site, so check them against yours.

The CSV side is a real editable grid, not a preview. Typed sorts, value filters, dedupe, fill series, split and combine columns, fixed width conversion, and it saves back to the same plain file. On the text side there's regex search, multi condition filtering, follow tail, Batch Replace with pair lists, Find and Replace across folders with previews and backups, bookmarks, folding, multi cursor, side by side compare with copy changes across, 13 encodings, workspaces.

Native AppKit and Swift, no Electron, Apple Silicon and Intel. Everything happens locally, files are never uploaded anywhere, no telemetry.

It's commercial: 7 day trial, no card, then $9.99/mo, $99.99/yr, or $179.99 lifetime. If the trial or a sub expires it drops to read only rather than locking you out, opening, searching, filtering and copying still work, editing and saving is what requires the license.

Mostly I'm here for feedback from people who regularly get handed huge logs and exports from other machines.

caxton.app

This may be a super niche question:

I have a small business owner client who just bought a Mac for a new employee who lives out of state. She wants some level of management on the employee's device (to make sure it isn't used for personal purposes). It has already been bought and shipped to the employee.

I realize now that what we should have done is set up an Apple Business account, and then created a managed Apple Account and had this device set up before sending it. Apparently if you want to make it a managed device, you have to set it up in person. Hindsight is 20/20.

But, given where we are, would it work to:

1. Create an Apple Business Account for the business owner
2. Create a personal Apple Account for the employee, and have them use it for the new Mac
3. Transfer that personal account to the Apple Business account

?

I’m a new Mac owner, made the mistake of using my phone and iPad and left the MacBook Air off so long, the battery went to zero. Plugged it into charge, tried logging in too many times, got locked out repeatedly, first because I tried to use my Apple account password. Discovered two Mac passwords, tried both, locked out. I figured the issue was that the unit didn’t have sufficient charge. After the unit charged up, I tried again. I noticed that I had two different Mac passwords listed. I had tried both before, neither worked. This time I tried what I thought was the correct one- nope- and it didn’t give me the chance to try the second (and now I know, correct) password, and I was locked out for 55 minutes. I saw my name with the photo I used to log onto my old PC laptop, and clicked on that. I tried both passwords, and the longer of the two passwords worked- but I quickly realized something wasn’t right because I was getting prompts about stuff that had been set up before, including associating the account with my Apple ID, etc… but after I shut the MacBook down and restarted, this “incomplete” account is the only one appearing on the login screen. How do I get the correct account to show up so I can log on after lockout time is up?

Just a rant tbh. My weekend is officially ruined. our network team is literally blowing up my phone right now because the recent macos updates are completely saturating the vpn tunnel for our european remote users logging in this weekend

I swear apple's content caching is pure voodoo when you throw split tunneling into the mix. I got so desperate trying to offload the traffic last night that I just threw a quick bare metal servermania box together out there just to test running an isolated caching relay outside our main corporate firewall

spoiler alert: it didn't even matter because half the endpoints are just straight up ignoring the MDM payload that enforces the cache server anyway.

Why is apple like this in enterprise environments? you push a perfectly good configuration profile and the OS just decides "nah im gonna download this 12gb file directly from cupertino". Anyone else dealing with this weekend nightmare or am i just losing my mind?

Update: followed the steps listed from a few folks, but specifically linked here: https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/s/h6r25xJUMf

So remove SIP, smoke /var/db/ConfigurationProfiles, reenable SIP.

Thanks everyone.

Original Post:

I was a MacTech at an institution up until May of this year (my role was eliminated). Bought myself a brand new MacBook Pro, and used Migration Assistant to transfer my user data over to the new system. I was selective with what I brought as I didn’t want any remnants of my old work.

Didn’t notice until today that System Profiles are present, locking out certain features. The profiles command in terminal shows that the system is enrolled to my old work’s Mosyle MDM via DEP, but it also shows that DEP is not available on the system (definitely didn’t enroll when I setup the Mac and this was bought at an Apple Store directly by myself). These profiles cannot be removed on my end.

Contacted my former colleagues and they confirmed my serial is neither in ASM or Mosyle on their side. Contacted Mosyle and I’m pretty sure they didn’t read my email properly cause they asked me to contact my work to have it removed from their MDM.

Thoughts?

Hello,

I recently took charge of my employers Mosyle system and currently working on getting everything updated and clear out any accounts from devices remotely of individuals who no longer work here. Has anyone worked with Mosyle and created a script that will push it out to devices to delete all user data that’s is not an admin account?

I’m not against manual labor but rather not go across twelve buildings to wipe each individual unit manually.

My Kyocera FS-1041 stopped printing from my second Mac. Two hours later I understood why, and it wasn't what I thought.

The FS-10xx series are GDI printers — no interpreter on board. Every page gets rendered on the host and converted to a format called KPSL by a separate filter binary that CUPS runs for each job. Kyocera's macOS build of that filter:

$ lipo -archs .../rastertokpsl.app/Contents/MacOS/rastertokpsl
x86_64 i386 ppc7400

A PowerPC slice. In 2026. On an M3.

It works today only because Rosetta 2 is installed. macOS 27 uninstalls Rosetta during the upgrade, and macOS 28 removes it except for a narrow games carve-out. After that the queue accepts jobs and prints nothing. Kyocera can't fix this — the hardware was discontinued years ago and only they have the source.

Except someone reverse-engineered that filter years ago: rastertokpsl-re, Apache 2.0, plain C. Because it's source, it compiles for arm64. Six files, one clang invocation, no CMake and no Homebrew needed — the macOS SDK already ships the CUPS headers:

cc -O2 -arch arm64 -arch x86_64 -o rastertokpsl-re \
   src/rastertokpsl.c src/halfton.c src/libjbig/jbig.c \
   src/libjbig/jbig_ar.c src/unicode/ConvertUTF.c src/main.c \
   -Isrc -lcups -lcupsimage -lm

Under two seconds. Universal binary, so it covers Intel Macs too.

Verifying it was the interesting part. I fed the same CUPS raster to both filters and diffed the output. Same length, 130 differing bytes in a regular 96-byte pattern. Turned out to be a length field: the original pads a value to seven bytes, the reimplementation writes it in four and declares the shorter length. Both self-consistent. Printed pages are indistinguishable.

But the header difference goes the other way. Job title containing Größe:

original:  c3ff b6ff c3ff 9fff    ← UTF-8 bytes padded with 0xFF
re:        f600 df00              ← ö and ß correctly in UTF-16LE

The original mangles it. That encoding bug is exactly why the reimplementation was written in the first place — and it's present in the macOS build too. So the community version isn't just equivalent, it's better.

One more thing worth knowing: the repo ships its own PPDs. Kyocera_FS-1040GDI.ppd works for the FS-1041 and produces byte-identical output to Kyocera's macOS PPD apart from the embedded timestamp. So nothing proprietary needs redistributing.

Build script, installer and uninstaller are here: https://github.com/LazaroZero1176/rastertokpsl-re/tree/master/macos

Credit where it's due: original reimplementation by sv99, Linux/CMake support by Fe-Ti. I only added the Apple Silicon side.

Caveats: tested on exactly one printer (FS-1041) on macOS 26.7. The binary isn't signed or notarized — you build it locally, so Gatekeeper doesn't apply, but don't distribute prebuilt copies. And if your printer hangs off an AirPort base station like mine, that's a separate problem with its own quirks; _riousbprint serves one client at a time.

I currently have a M365 Conditional access policy that does not allow acess to company features unless you have a compliant device.

The issue is, I have a mixed fleet so intune and Jamf, for Mac and Windows. The intune devices work fine however, Jamf devices are blocked. I also have the Jamf connector enabled in Intune so the compliance should feed over. surprise surprise

Wondering if there is a better way to go about this. Thinking about having a seperate CA policy for Mac but not sure how to validate it since you can pull Jamf data to the policy

EDIT (08.26.2026)Found what I needed to make it all work

https://community.jamf.com/general-discussions-2/sending-jamf-pro-compliant-information-to-microsoft-intune-55387

I am in the process of migrating from Intune to Jamf and need to remove the Intune profiles from all of my Mac endpoints.

What is the best process to do this? I haven't been able to find anything definitive in terms of scripts to run locally on the machines or send to the machines that will remove all Intune profiles so that the user enrollment goes smoothly.

How's it been for y'all? Any horror stories?

For anyone who is trying to get more hands-on, Mark Buffington (Jamf) is doing a walkthrough of DDM Explorer on the next LaunchPad meetup. The focus is learning the framework, building declarations, and testing what it looks like to deploy them via Jamf Pro.

When:
🗓️ Fri, Sep 4 @ 12:00 PM Mountain Time

Where:
👉 https://rocketman.tech/lp-r

Also on YouTube:
https://rocketman.tech/ly-r

With the increasing frequency of Chrome updates, IT teams must proactively patch critical vulnerabilities. After testing several deployment methods (including Installomator and the Jamf App Catalog), I believe the built-in auto-updater remains the best way to upgrade your browser fleet at scale without interrupting your users at the wrong time, and ensuring all previously opened tabs are restored for a seamless user experience.

Continue reading… [Medium.com - free, no paywall]

I help with my local high school's journalism club and we're trying to buy/find some dirt cheap old MacBooks.

We'd need less than 15 and are hoping to stay under like $75 each. Don't need anything nice either, basically anything 2015+ (that works) mostly for writing and some basic photo editing.

We have Chromebooks but they're pretty locked down and a lot of the stuff we use is blocked (or just doesn't work on them)

When your company/school/etc replaces a bunch of Macs, where do the old ones actually get sold? Is there somewhere online I should be looking for school/business surplus or auctions?

Hi,

I built this as I was getting frustrated with bugs in Console.app and issues when trying to look at huge files. It supports following/ regex filtering and search and basically most of what one needs - 7 day trial, 19$ one-time price.
https://hormesislabs.com/logrider

Hope you find it as useful as I have

Thanks,

Andrei

Found this MacBook Air M1 in electronics scrap. It has Remote Management on it.

SYM-Lite is a lean, purpose-built script for executing MDM-agnostic Installomator labels and Homebrew casks / formulas, as well as Jamf Pro-specific policy triggers, all through a unified swiftDialog selection and reporting interface.

Key Features

• Unified execution support — Installomator labels, Homebrew casks / formulas, and / or Jamf Pro policies in a single session
• Interactive selection UI — Checkbox dialog with per-item icons; previously installed items are automatically disabled
• Alphabetical sorting — All Installomator, Homebrew and Jamf Pro policy items are sorted together by display name
• Early Installomator validation — Labels are verified against your active Installomator file
• Homebrew support — Casks and formulas run in the logged-in user context
• Inspect Mode — Real-time progress monitoring
• Silent mode — CSV-based automation support
• Path-based validation & cache monitoring
• Completion report — Per-item results with optional restart prompt
• Graceful interruption — Clean shutdown on SIGINT/SIGTERM

Continue reading …

It's my first time attending. If you're going what events are you going to? Any recommendations?

https://www.jamf.com/blog/jnuc-2026-session-catalog/

A Tech Thoughts article looks at DDM Service Configuration Files, undocumented support for Smartcard configs and login banners, and a proof of concept using them to manage third-party app configurations.

Service Configuration Files — The Superpower We Didn't Realize We Have

Hi everyone,

I’m using my personal MacBook for work (BYOD) and want to keep my personal life completely separate from company tracking.

To do this, I created a separate Standard (non-admin) User Profile on my Mac specifically for work. My boss is going to install some kind of work management/monitoring software on this work profile. (I don't know the exact software yet, but on my last Mac, I was able to factory reset it without any issues and always used my own Apple ID, so it shouldn't be locked via Apple Business Manager/DEP).

My questions for the experts here:

Since it's being installed on a Standard profile, is it completely isolated to that user account?

Will they be able to track anything I do when I am logged into my personal Admin profile?

If the software requests System-wide Admin privileges during installation and I deny it, can they still bypass that?

Just want to make sure my personal files, browser history, and data on my main profile remain completely private. Thanks in advance for the help!

Anyone hit this: Sensitivity Label button in Microsoft 365 apps grayed out & not operational on Jamf-managed Macs, but present on Intune-managed Macs.

Same user, same M365 apps build, same license, same MDM configuration.

I am lost! Anybody an idea?

Hey everyone,

Can someone help with disabling the updates for the Google chrome application in MAC.

Hey everyone,

I’m building a small IDE called Jcode using Electron + electron-builder.

Right now I distribute the macOS version through GitHub Releases. The current process is:

User downloads the .zip from GitHub. Extracts Jcode.app. Moves it into /Applications. Because the app is unsigned/not notarized, macOS blocks it with the “unidentified developer” / Gatekeeper warning. The user has to run a Terminal command once to bypass/allow the app.

What I want to do is make updates much easier.

For example:

Jcode v1 is installed → Jcode v2 is released → Jcode shows “New update available — Update Now” → user clicks it → app downloads the update from GitHub → installs it → restarts into v2.

I’m looking at using electron-updater + GitHub Releases.

My main question is:

Can I achieve this without paying for the $99/year Apple Developer Program?

More specifically:

Can an unsigned Electron app use electron-updater successfully? If the user has already bypassed Gatekeeper for the first installation, can future updates happen without requiring them to run the Terminal bypass command again? Will macOS Gatekeeper treat every newly downloaded/updated .app as a new untrusted application? Is there any legitimate way to get a reasonably seamless update experience without Apple Developer signing/notarization? If signing/notarization is absolutely required for the experience I want, what part specifically requires it?

I’m not looking for a way to disable or weaken macOS security. I just want to understand what is technically possible for an independently distributed Electron app.

If anyone has implemented something similar with Electron + electron-builder + electron-updater + GitHub Releases, I’d really appreciate hearing about your setup and what happens on a normal user's Mac.

Thanks!

My current environment is Windows only and managed in Intune. Leadership wants to start supporting MacBooks and is planning to use Jamf. I have experience bringing Macs into Intune, but I have never used Jamf. They also mentioned possibly Kandji. How hard is it to ramp up on Jamf Pro if you are already coming from an Intune background?