from Hacker News

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

by besus on 3/19/24, 1:10 PM with 166 comments

  • by prirun on 3/19/24, 2:15 PM

    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, Apple deleted all files and directories in / that they didn't recognize, including my system backup. I had to recover that from Backblaze. Can't say I'm a fan of recent MacOS. If you think you are in control of your Apple machine, think again.

  • by stingraycharles on 3/19/24, 2:13 PM

    Ok since these types of threads are typically filled with complaints, just to add another data point: I’ve upgraded last week and have not experienced any problems at all.

    And yes, I’m using USB hubs, printers and even Java.

  • by danieldk on 3/19/24, 3:14 PM

    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.

  • by speak_plainly on 3/19/24, 2:46 PM

    Add this to the list of issues:

    “macOS Sonoma 14.4 Bug 'Destroys Saved Versions in iCloud Drive'”

    https://www.macrumors.com/2024/03/19/sonoma-bug-destroys-sav...

  • by dalke on 3/19/24, 2:06 PM

    I got this from my bank's id authentication app:

    > BankID on card and macOS

    > A change was introduced by Apple in macOS 14 where one consequence is that BankID on card stops working for some users. We have reported to Apple and hope they fix the error in an upcoming update. Recommendation: Wait to update to macOS 14 to avoid problems when using BankID on card.

    Doesn't affect me as I use BankID on file (and I'm on 12.4), but the caution message sure surprised me, in the wrong sort of way.

  • by cjk2 on 3/19/24, 2:02 PM

    Signed up to complain about this one. Totally cursed. I had to dig out an ancient windows laptop because I can’t roll it back and I’m shafted.

  • by lupire on 3/19/24, 2:11 PM

  • by CoastalCoder on 3/19/24, 2:38 PM

    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?

  • by hedora on 3/19/24, 2:27 PM

    They keep breaking and + unbreaking my old Samsung Laser Printer (PCL compliant) I think 14.4 fixed it, for what it's worth. Since Linux CUPS and Apple use the same underlying open source drivers, Arch is bug-for-bug compatible.

    I wish they performed some sort of automatic regression testing on stuff like this.

  • by Neikius on 3/19/24, 7:15 PM

    I moved from m1 MacBook pro to m2 recently.

    Just like that my monitor's built in KVM stopped working in a reasonable manner. Can use it to drive the web camera which sometimes works normally and sometimes with shitty frame rate. Microphone now appears and then gets evicted (rode USB mic), my headphone preamp will crackle like mad so it is useless...

    I got this monitor specifically to be able to work with the stupid m1 limitation of 1 external screen and to be able to switch seamlessly to my secondary rig. And it could be connected using one cable as it does power delivery.

    Now I have an expensive montor that is useless for the purpose I got it for. Not sure whether to blame dell or apple but do not remember many instances of issues like this in my life. Being a PC guy forever and now got forced to use apple for work.

    Really don't understand why it's being pushed so much in corporate env. lately? Maybe I am just weird.

  • by Centigonal on 3/19/24, 1:55 PM

    Ever since updating last week, one of my two monitors (connected through a CalDigit USB-C dock) won't turn back on after inactivity.

    I have to open up System Settings, change the resolution for the monitor, and change it back every time I leave my macbook and come back.

  • by contingencies on 3/19/24, 2:52 PM

    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 buying more Apple hardware and have moved back to Linux as the primary machine - super fast and stable, with a slight setup tax and occasional annoyances.

  • by flaminHotSpeedo on 3/19/24, 5:37 PM

    Apple updates are a joke. I have a script in my dotfiles to recognize when an apple update overwrites `/etc/zshrc` to run, among other things, a utility that rewrites your path in a nonstandard way (I don't remember the details, I think it was something related to config file load order?)

    Nothing I've done so far to stop the overwrite in the first place has worked.

  • by spurgu on 3/19/24, 2:19 PM

    The application window switching has been glitching ever since I was forced to upgrade recently[0]. Instead of switching between windows of the same app it (using the keyboard shortcut) sometimes includes windows of all apps. Rebooting helps. Sometimes it starts working again for some unexplained reason after a while. Super annoying.

    To be clear I'm talking about Keyboard shortcuts -> Keyboard -> Move focus to next window.

    [0] I was running Big Sur because none of the recent MacOS updates really offered anything of interest to me, since I don't use most Apple software. But Homebrew and Element stopped working so I had to upgrade. I should've just upgraded to a newer, not to the newest version (which I tend to avoid due to issues like these that might come up). Lesson learned.

  • by warvair on 3/19/24, 4:06 PM

    Strangely enough, at about the time this macOS update came out, the virtual USB hub in my Win7 VM (Fusion 11.5.7), which I run on a Catalina (10.15.7) Mac broke. This is after years of no issues. I didn't update anything except maybe Chrome & Tailscale on the Mac, maybe Firefox & Cisco Anyconnect on the VM. No changes to the VM settings or the devices I normaly plug into the Mac's USB. Now I did update a MBP on the same network to macOS 14.4 when it came out, but how could that affect anything?

  • by gregoriol on 3/19/24, 2:04 PM

    I don't know how related it is, but since macOS 14.4, when I try to print a webpage in Safari (and I use this feature to export as PDF a lot!), it just crashes...

  • by lm411 on 3/19/24, 4:00 PM

    So far I've had two issues after the update: - JetDrive / SD drive wouldn't mount - Time Machine backups started failing with "Time Machine did not back up because the backup disk was previously encrypted but is no longer encrypted"

    I've resolved both issues. Still not happy to have to waste two hours of my life on it.

  • by porcoda on 3/19/24, 3:48 PM

    This would explain why a couple perfectly stable applications that I’ve run for years have suddenly decided to randomly crash repeatedly since updating. It’s been a while since Apple has released a version that has this many easily triggered bugs. :-(

  • by rectalogic on 3/19/24, 8:22 PM

    14.4 seems to be breaking Docker desktop for some uses too https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/7220

  • by actualwitch on 3/19/24, 2:54 PM

    > Scanning Apple's release notes or security update disclosures for the update doesn't reveal any smoking guns

    Wait what? So 10 screens of bangers like "An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges" and "An attacker with arbitrary kernel read and write capability may be able to bypass kernel memory protections. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited." are not considered smoking guns?

  • by michelb on 3/19/24, 4:04 PM

    I have zero problems with the listed things, but Safari refuses to keep me logged into sites. It's like cookies are no longer working or something. Extremely annoying.

  • by HumblyTossed on 3/19/24, 2:55 PM

    I'm really curious what Apple does with all that money they have. To be worth so much and mess up the basics ... I just don't get it. What the heck is going on over there?

  • by tibbydudeza on 3/19/24, 3:12 PM

    It just works - sorry I could not help it - if my USB hub stopped working with a Windows Update I could not do my work.

  • by TheCapeGreek on 3/19/24, 2:47 PM

    Suppose I'm lucky that my only symptom so far is the occasional unexplained crash on PHPStorm.

  • by dgellow on 3/19/24, 3:18 PM

    The thing really weird is the different behavior between beta and release versions