Apple Releases macOS 14.2.1, iOS 17.2.1, iOS 16.74, and iPadOS 16.7.4
Apple has released minor updates to macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. With iOS 17.2.1 (iPadOS isn’t included this time, unusually), iOS 16.74, and iPadOS 16.7.4, the onscreen release notes admit only to unspecified “important bug fixes” and don’t mention security updates.
With macOS 14.2.1 Sonoma, however, there are security notes, which say the release fixes a bug where “a user who shares their screen may unintentionally share the incorrect content.” That’s credited to well-known developer Craig Hockenberry of The Iconfactory, and indeed, he posted about the problem on Mastodon recently.
If you use Screen Sharing in macOS 14.2 Sonoma, I recommend installing that update immediately. If not, and for all the other updates, given that Apple hasn’t provided any details that suggest urgency, you can delay installing until it’s convenient.
This is exactly why these days I would be very conservative with these updates. If Apple can’t be bothered to tell me what “important issue” it is fixing or which “in the wild” exploit is being patched, I can’t be bothered to take that risk.
Case in point: if you update to 14.2 or 14.2.1 shared folders in your VM will be broken.
There also are hundreds of posts on the Apple board that Sonoma breaks external monitors. I’m staying on Ventura as long as I can!
I just upgraded to macOS 14.2.1 from 14.1 and find that, in Safari, the Reader View option no longer works. I found online another user who noted the same thing. I use Reader View constantly and this is going to be a significant pain in the butt to deal with.
Sonoma breaks VMware Fusion for VoiceOver users: instant crash on VM startup. The cause was traced to a check in AppKit that forbids the use of APIs in the setuid helper used by Fusion. Both VMware and Apple know, but the fix hasn’t arrived, so I’m effectively without virtual machines. A very, very, very nasty surprise! I can’t survive long without those, because they often compensate for other accessibility bugs in macOS. :(
I’m not sure if this may be related, but on my Mac (just recently forced into Sonoma), I found that VirtualBox VMs all broke. Even after approving the kernel extension, the VMs would all crash with a “Code Signature Invalid” exception.
I had to reinstall VirtualBox (even though it was the same version) in order to get it to run. And then another reboot in order for VMs to run without crashing. Really frustrating, but it seems to be working for the moment.
See also: Cannot start any VM after upgrade to Sonoma 14.2 - virtualbox.org
Oof, glad you got it sorted though. Unfortunately my issue is confirmed to be a specific problem with the interaction of Fusion (which uses Apple’s hypervisor) and VoiceOver. I can literally turn off VoiceOver and then hit the start button to bring up the VM. As soon as I start VoiceOver again, crash. Very, very frustrating, but this is in Apple’s court and we all know what that means … Still, at least the VMware Fusion product manager knows about it as one of their fans brought it to his attention directly, which is certainly a plus point for Fusion users. Let’s hope, because that’s all we have. I will also look again seriously at UTM or qemu direct, as I really only mostly use Linux anyway.