macOS 14.6.1, macOS 13.6.9, iOS 17.6.1, and iPadOS 17.6.1 Fix Advanced Data Protection
Apple had a bad week. On 29 July 2024, the company released updates to all its operating systems with a few minor changes in macOS 14.6 Sonoma and nothing but bug and security fixes for everything else (see “macOS 14.6 Enables Double Display Support for 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro,” 30 July 2024). We noticed no problems after installing, so we gave our usual recommendation for minor updates that don’t address zero-day security vulnerabilities—wait to install until it’s convenient. Usually, showstopper problems will be reported within a few days, and Apple will pull or replace the release quickly. This time, it took over a week.
On 7 August 2024, Apple pushed out macOS 14.6.1 Sonoma, iOS 17.6.1, and iPadOS 17.6.1 with release notes saying, “This update includes important bug fixes and addresses an issue that prevents enabling or disabling Advanced Data Protection.” Apple also released macOS 13.6.9 Ventura with slightly more concise release notes that say, “This update addresses an issue that prevents enabling or disabling Advanced Data Protection.” (For more information about what’s involved here, see “Apple’s Advanced Data Protection Gives You More Keys to iCloud Data,” 8 December 2022.)
Indeed, when I went to System Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Advanced Data Protection and clicked the Turn On button, I was prompted for my Apple ID password, but the password dialog disappeared after I typed a single character, the System Settings screen flashed, and I was presented with the error below. On subsequent tries, the setup got farther, but I wasn’t willing to remove my old devices from my account to complete the setup process.
Apple’s security updates page says the updates don’t address any vulnerabilities with CVE entries, and Howard Oakley reports that the only changes are to the Security framework and some keychain-related files. The question, then, is what might be included in those “important bug fixes.”
There have been a small number of complaints about macOS 14.6. In TidBITS Talk, Ronald Lynch reported that, after updating to macOS 14.6, he lost access to Pages templates he had stored in the Template Chooser and couldn’t create new ones. Installing macOS 14.6.1 didn’t bring back his previously stored templates but allowed him to create new ones. In other forums, multiple people have reported extreme slowdowns and problems with Bluetooth pointing devices, plus individual complaints about mounted NAS volumes disappearing from the desktop and enterprise authentication issues. As yet, it’s unclear if these were general bugs or issues specific to particular setups. Nor have follow-up posts said whether or not they were fixed by macOS 14.6.1.
iOS 17.6 has triggered complaints about dropped network connections and notifications not working, along with the perennial problems with battery life that usually resolve within a few days once iOS rebuilds indexes and caches. Again, I haven’t seen any subsequent reports about iOS 17.6.1 either way.
There is one new complaint about macOS 14.6.1 related to headless Macs (those without displays). A TidBITS reader reported that he wasn’t able to connect to a headless Mac mini after updating. He had to turn Remote Management off and back on to regain the ability to connect remotely. If you are updating a headless Mac, connect it to a keyboard, mouse, and display before updating, and toggle the Remote Management setting in System Settings > Sharing > Remote Management before removing them.
My revised advice about updating to this set of updates is as follows:
- If you’re still running macOS 14.5, macOS 13.6.8, iOS 17.5, and iPadOS 17.5 with no problems, stick with them for a bit longer. None of the identified security vulnerabilities in those releases are actively being exploited in the wild, so there’s no big win in updating right away. Revisit the question in a few weeks.
- If you updated to macOS 14.6, macOS 13.6.8, iOS 17.6, and iPadOS 17.6 but aren’t having any problems and don’t intend to turn Advanced Data Protection on or off, stick with them for another week or two to make sure Apple didn’t introduce any more bugs in the latest updates.
- If you updated to macOS 14.6, macOS 13.6.8, iOS 17.6, and iPadOS 17.6 and are having issues of any sort or want to turn Advanced Data Protection on or off, update right away to take advantage of Apple’s fixes.
There’s no question that Apple dropped the ball here. Advanced Data Protection may be a relatively new feature used by only a tiny percentage of the Apple audience, but automated testing should have caught the error I showed above. Perhaps Apple has redirected most of its testing resources to the forthcoming macOS 15 and iOS 18, but that’s no excuse for causing trouble for the current user base with a weakly tested update.
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.
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.
Howard Oakley’s piece and comments below are no more flattering for Apple.
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)
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adam
I read your last paragraph as “you can now safely update to X.6.1” while in your original message you advised us to wait a week or two. According to you can/should I update?
Norbert
And on the day it was released, I upgraded to 17.6.1 with no problems detected so far.
Curious – is anyone else experiencing this?.
I updated to 14.6.1 both at work and at home shortly after it came out. Both machines are shut down overnight. Now whenever I restart, the grey notification comes up saying there is a system software update available; do I want to install now or later. However, when I go into System Settings > General > Software Update it tells me I’m up to date with macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93).
Do you have a device running the iOS betas attached (wired or wireless) to your Mac? That might be causing this. In the past it seems the software update wasn’t available, but as of the update it’s been made available so you’re prompted to install it.
No, I don’t download/install iOS or macOS betas.
Also, no iOS devices are/were connected to the Mac Studios,
You could try Howard Oakley’s SilentKnight This is how it looks when you are still on 14.5.
Maybe one thing on this list is not up to date? Or if all is OK, you can ignore the notification?
Thanks – I installed and ran Silent Knight at home – confirms there are there are no updates available. The notification continues to appear.
Our work systems are pretty much locked down and unfortunately not worth the hassle of trying to get IT approval to install Silent Knight there.
Just a nuisance having to go into software update every day to double check that no updates have appeared.
I experience the exact same thing with 14.6.1. And I don’t even sleep or shut down the systems over night. When I arrive in the morning, they’re showing that updates are available. Click on the notification and it takes you to the update page in Settings where it shows that no updates are available.
Apparently nobody is checking the OS or its “developer betas” for bugs anymore. It’s all just one big never-ending public beta.
I’m not quite sure of all the references, but here are my current recommendations:
This problem happened on the 2 Macs I manage: one is an M1 mini and the other an M2 MacBook Air.
On both updates, which I manually installed from Settings, I’ve seen a strange notification bug.
After the updates completed and I logged in to the restarted system, I got a notification that updates were available. If I moused over the lower right corner of the notification and clicked on Details, it opened the Settings app to the Update screen and nicely showed that I was already up-to-date.
The notification usually appeared the day after the update, and would reappear every other day until I used the Details button to dismiss the notification.
Prior to 14.6, I’ve never seen this ill-informed notification.
I also saw this one after the 14.6 update (2018 Intel Mac mini). It presented a notification saying that an update is available, but after going to Software Updates, there was nothing available.
Last week, I ignored (clicked the “X” dismiss button) the notification about 14.6.1. When it appeared again a few days later, I ignored it again. Then when I decided to install the update (yesterday), I saw 14.6.1 listed twice on the list of available updates.
I started the update and left the room (didn’t come back for several hours), so I don’t know if it tried to install the update twice. It is (successfully, it appears) running 14.6.1, and the installation only appears once in System Information:
Same problem occurs on my M1 Mini after update to 14.6 and 14.6.1. Frequency of the notification decreases after 1-2 days even after hitting delete button on the notification.
Each of the 3 macOS updates I’ve done and at least a couple IIRC of the iOS/iPadOS ones did the same thing but the alert on final reboot disappeared once I went to Update in preferences and let it scan and tell me I was up to date.
… And I just got a spurious notification today, after having installed 14.6.1.
Hopefully that will do it. I just clicked through the alert on my system.
I have an M1 MacBook Air which refuses to update to 14.6.1 and seems “stuck” at 14.5. Judging from what I’ve read in these comments, maybe it’s actually a good thing it won’t update, as I’m not experiencing any of the problems 14.6.1 is causing!
For those who remember the classic MacOS days, right before the transition was made to OS X, users were complaining that the OS was becoming “buggier and buggier” - and that “we are being patched to death”. That same thing is happening now. Seems like we will need something to replace our beloved Unix-based OS very soon…!
I think not. As I understand it, macOS is derived from BSD UNIX, which has been under constant development/patching since the 1970s or earlier. A virtue of UNIX is keeping things as local as possible, the opposite of “spagetti programming”. When bugs are found the defective code can be corrected with minimal affects on other parts of the code. UNIX is made to facilitate patching. An example (with some controversy) is the Apache web server.
You said “UNIX is made to facilitate patching.” So the constant patching of our operating system is OK with you? It stands to reason that the more patches are made, the more unstable something becomes. Patches don’t make something stronger, they make it weaker.
To fix bugs and security issues - yes, I’d rather have the OS patched than used it unpatched.
I’m not sure that’s true.
I’ve also seen a response that says that bugs are worse now than they used to be, but how do you quantify that? If bugs (particularly security issues) were undiscovered and unpatched, it was still a bug.
The issue is that our computers are now more connected than ever so patching security holes in particular is vitally important, especially for people with lots of valuable information stored on their computers, online, etc. I prefer Apple issuing updates when it’s important to do so rather than waiting for the second Tuesday of every month, as Microsoft does.
But the thing is that if you prefer updating once a month or something like that, just update when it’s convenient for you, unless, of course, the bug is something affecting your use of the Mac. Just know that there is a potential issue that may make your system vulnerable, but that’s no different than every Windows user who needs to wait until Patch Tuesday.
The inability to toggle Advanced Data Protection is not a concern for me - I have it toggled on, I don’t need to toggle it off right now, but if I do need to, I know that I can do so after an update (or just do it on my iPad or iPhone instead.)
That depends on the nature of the patches. Nowadays all my Debian server systems (mostly VMs) are configured to do automatic upgrades, because the patches from the Debian Security Team are intentionally very small and only fix security issues, which are worth having, in a timely manner. Even such gradualism is not proof against adversity, though: Debian recently had a nasty ext4 corruption issue as a result of importing the “Stable” kernel from upstream, over which they have limited control. But, overwhelmingly, it is an enormous benefit to carefully introduce changes that are known to be good for security and stability.
In my opinion Apple’s QA is on the floor, however, undeniably macOS is a large and complex operating system with a lot of moving parts, and it’s intended to be user-friendly to boot. There’s just no getting away from the fact that a large surface area like that is going to make more of the bugs shallower and more noticeable to larger numbers of people.
If we can’t stay on the subject of these particular updates, I’ll close the topic.
The false appearance of disagreement is a question of the semantics of “patch”.
When patch means workarounds, what in physical systems is also called “jury rigged”, patches are points of weakness, as bjbear71 notes.
When patch means repair or extension, a patch can strengthen or extend the capacity. This is the sense I intended.
Patching so that it works as intended makes macOS stronger. Unfortunately, the properly functioning system software then reveals the weakness introduced by patches to application software, that has been jury rigged to work around System software failings.
And now it seems that Apple has re-released iOS 17.6.1 and iPadOS 17.6.1, presumably to fix something very small.
I wonder if the fix was to address the Apple Fitness+ issues fixed in watchOS and presumably tvOS.
Interesting … I’m not seeing it in Software Update. I checked that I wasn’t on the beta path as well, no go.
Apparently on some iPhones, the newer build of 17.6.1 is not available OTA (software update), but can be installed via the finder if one connects the iPhone to a Mac directly. Since Apple has not explained what the newer build changed, not sure if it is worth the effort.