Latest issue 23 Oct 2026

424: Party for Two

Release Candidates and the two-screened iPhone

Apple published release candidate for the 27.2 updates this week, just in time for iPhone Duo release.

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Party for Two

In addition to the updates and the Duo, Apple also teased another event next week. The title “Pro and Tell” implies new MacBooks and/or iPads Pro?

My Friend, Tony Williams

Tom Bridge:

Tony was a character, first and foremost, but he was also an incredibly conscientious member of the Mac Admins Community, smart and giving, and always willing to collaborate on a solution.

I am glad that I got to meet Tony in person at JNUC in San Diego a few years ago, and got to enjoy conversing and working with him on Mac Admins Slack for years. I am going to miss him.

📰 News and Opinion

Viking Ships to Product Management: Selina Ali's Path into the Mac Admin Community

Kitty Shephard, Workbrew Blog:

Before Selina was a Senior Product Manager and a host of the Mac Admins Podcast, she spent ten years underwater.

Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio

Apple Machine Learning Research:

Over the past year, we have worked on several key innovations in MLX to make it easier and more efficient to run state-of-the-art LLMs locally on recent Apple silicon.

Apple should stop opening the iPhone one court order at a time

Lex Friedman:

Thirty countries and counting. And Apple continues to fight, frustrating developers and consumers alike.

⚙️ Apple Updates

macOS 27: When ‘Works Correctly’ Is No Longer User-Immutable

Dan Snelson:

With all versions of macOS 26 — on a supervised Mac — we can specify a setting which is user-immutable — even for local admins. With all currently released versions of macOS 27 — again, on a supervised Mac — that same setting can be disabled by even a Standard user.

🔐 Security and Privacy

Heartbreaker

Patrick Wardle, Objective-See:

by monitoring for the rapid creation or modification of encrypted files by untrusted processes, we can generically detect most—perhaps even all—macOS ransomware

🔨 Support and Tutorials

Deploy a Fleet lab with Apple Container and fleetlab

FleetDM Blog:

Run a local Fleet lab with MySQL and Redis on an Apple silicon Mac using Apple container and the fleetlab script.

Local network privacy is getting better

Howard Oakley:

From its introduction over two years ago in macOS Sequoia, there has been no way of resetting an app’s Local Network privacy. This is about to change in macOS 27.2, where you can now add and remove apps from the list in Privacy & Security settings. At last.

Exporting Managed Client data on macOS Golden Gate

Rich Trouton:

On macOS, you can access and read which managed preference settings are currently being applied to a particular Mac.

What the heck is /pkg?

Gavin Anderegg:

Recently, while troubleshooting a PATH issue, I noticed an entry for /pkg/env/global/bin. At first, I worried that something had gone horribly wrong. Turns out, this is part of macOS 27.0… though no one is sure what it’s for yet.

Setting up SSH keys on macOS with Touch ID

Nicolas Mattia:

Macs have a built-in so-called Secure Enclave, where we can create “identities” that simply cannot be stolen (unless maybe you’ve made enemies with a nation state). Those identities are protected with Touch ID and can be used for SSH authentication.

🤖 Scripting and Automation

Remediating eMudhra’s private key compromise with Jamf Pro

Dan Snelson:

A Jamf Pro Extension Attribute and remediation script duo

Application icon changes via NSWorkspace.setIcon no longer being reflected in Notification Center in macOS 26.4+

Ben Toms:

but since macOS 26.4 the rebranding options in both Jamf Auto Update and Notifier have stopped working, at least as far as the icons being shown in Notification Center for notifications.

Somewhat develoer centric explanation. Relevant, since it is mostly tools deployed for Mac Admin tasks where we like to have this kind of re-branding.

♻️ Updates and Releases

🎧 Listen

EWS Deprecation, Apple Mail/Calendar Issues, and a Jamf Conference Misadventure

Command Control Power:

focus on Microsoft Exchange Web Services (EWS) deprecation affecting Apple Mail on macOS and the ethical question of proactively extending EWS via PowerShell for former clients

A look at recent Apple security updates

Apple @ Work:

Adam Boynton from Jamf joins the show to talk about Apple's recent security updates and the importance of patching older devices.

Just Us

Mac Admins Podcast:

It’s just us this week, and there’s been a lot to discuss. Let’s hit some high points from 27.0.1 and PSSO fixes, to changes to Full Disk Access entitlements on the horizon.

A sextortion conspiracy killed his son

Lock and Code, Malwarebytes:

John DeMay about his son Jordan, his family’s relationship with social media, and what parents should know.

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