Apple Releases iOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, and Other x.4 OS Updates

UPDATE:

The problem appears to have resolved itself. Must have just been a delay in downloading the transaction history from Apple’s servers.

So the only outstanding question in my mind is whether subsequent Apple Card/Apple Pay purchases will or will not show up promptly in the wallet.

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I just updated my iPhone 17 Pro from iOS 18.3.2 to 18.4 this afternoon.

Afterwards, I made a purchase at a local grocery using my Apple Card via Apple Pay. Unlike the hundreds of similar purchases I’ve made in the 5+ years of having Apple Card, this purchase did not show up in the wallet (it normally would appear immediately, with a status of Pending).

I called Apple support to report my suspicion that iOS 18.4 had broken the transaction listing mechanism in my Apple Wallet. They had me talk to 2 people in Goldman Sachs, one of whom suggested removing Apple Card from my phone and re-adding it. After doing that, now the problem is infinitely worse: I can only see less than 1% of the hundreds of transactions I’ve made since getting Apple Card in August 2019.

Now they’re suggesting having a senior Apple tech advisor guide me through downgrading my iPhone back to iOS 18.3.2. I am quite leery of doing this.

macOS 15.4 Sequoia

Wallpaper no longer allows you to set your own custom colour.

System Settings > Wallpaper > Colours > +

The screen default to a white background regardless of any colour you pick.

Until Apple resolve the issue, you need to select one of the 19 default plain colours of the system.

Something I’d hoped to see mentioned here: Sometime in the course of recent MacOS updates, I started to experience sending messages from Mail taking between 3 and perhaps 7 or 8 tries before they would send. I reduced the frequency of Mail looking for new messages to every 5 min. and then every 15, and it reduced it to 2-4 tries, but that’s still too many. Anyone else experiencing that? Any sign of it being fixed in version 4?? The error message I keep seeing is, “The attempt to read data from the server “127.0.0.1” failed.”

I have updated my M4 Mac mini (Japanese) to macOS Sequoia 15.4 this morning, but Apple Intelligence is still not available. System Settings > ‘Apple Intelligence and Siri’ page says: “To use Apple Intelligence, Mac and Siri must be set to the same language.”

My system language is set to Japanese, but I have set Siri to use English (US) because Japanese Siri is even less usable than English Siri.

So, I still can’t use Apple Intelligence, but I guess that’s a good thing (maybe until the next year)…

iPhone, iPad and Apple TV seem OK after the updates.

It is irritating that the setting for automatic updates is turned on after this update. At least there was on obscure alert about this during the process. Also the update nagged me to turn on Siri voice activation, which I never want. The only suitable choice was “Set up later” so I guess the nagging will return.

BTW - my iPad battery was draining very fast a couple of days ago. I read somewhere (maybe Tidbits) that some apps chew up battery if Background app refresh is enabled. Annoyingly I found that nearly all my apps had it set to “on”. I switched nearly all of them “off” and the battery issue has gone.

I hate it when the software decides these things for me!

I’m still not seeing the watch update - anyone else having this?

No sign of the watchOS update this evening in Australia.

I’ve checked the Apple docs and not mentioned, so guess it was pulled or not released

Finally! This bug has made it necessary to reboot my Watch several times a week since the introduction of WatchOS 10. Nevertheless, having learned from past experiences, I will wait at least a week before updating any of my devices, awaiting the absence of reports about new bugs that break things.

Right here, I guess:

That’s localhost. Are you using your own mail server, or perhaps the Proton Mail bridge app?

I’ve read that the watch update was pulled shortly after release.

Yes, this is a Proton Bridge issue. They had me change my outgoing port in response to a previous problem and also suggested the (partial) fix re: having Apple Mail scan for new messages less often.

But now it’s also happening when I send messages using my older email account and my old ISP’s SMTP server.

I would say a bigger question is why in the world I would open a news app looking for recipes or why you would clutter up the news with recipes?

Furthermore, did Apple learn nothing from trying to shoehorn everything into iTunes back in the day?

I love Paprika and hope Apple hasn’t messed with my ability to save recipes to this app. Plus, I don’t use Apple News and sure wouldn’t consider using a news apps to find recipes.

Ugh. Not a fan of this, Apple.

I haven’t received it yet, either. None of the Apple news sites that I usually check (9to5Mac, MacRumors, MacWorld) have reported any delay, but I did find this via search:

I believe that all the recipes in the News app are taken from newspapers and magazines that the News app covers. So, they have simply created another category and provided some useful features for material already appearing in the app.

This is similar to the Sports and Games sections of the app.

Anecdotal, but I just tried on my 15.4 MacBook Air with the Proton Mail bridge. It sent mail fine, and there were no errors or messages.

I’d say if Apple has people with newspaper experience on its News+ content and advertising teams, recipes and food articles—along with stories on fashion, entertainment, and sports—feel like a natural fit for a news app because the multiple sections of a newspaper are the non-digital way to target advertising to specific groups.

So, many people who use News+ as an adjunct or a replacement for their traditional newspaper(s) will not be suprised (or will expect) to see non-hard news content in News+.

I have an update scheduled tonight — hoping it’ll help.

It’s out now :)

15.4 broke my UPnP server, FireStream (for the second update in a row). Insists I need to “Restore Purchase.” When I do that it prompts me to login to the App Store (I was already logged in). Login again, and the “Restore Dialog” just prompts me again…

Previous update also broke my CouchDB Server. Worked them out last time. But not FireStream this time.

Sent a note to Cyaneous (FireStream developer).

Cyaneous replied:

“Apple has broken something with the activation system - we are working on a fix and will be submitting it to Apple later today.”

Just updated to 15.4 and my first email reply on Proton took 3 tries before it would send. Any other suggestions? Proton support just says to try deleting and restoring the account, but I’ve already done that at least twice.

I totally agree with you about the annoying Apple auto-setting of your preferences.

For me, I am starting a checklist (which I will follow after every macOS update), for which the first two items are:
-ensure Apple Intelligence is turned OFF
-ensure sw updates are under my manual control (not Apple auto-update)

I just finished installing the WatchOS 11.4 update. It took about an hour to download and install, more than double the length of any of the other installations in the x.4 group (that includes one installation of iOS, two installations of macOS, one installation of TVOS, and an installation of HomePodOOS). My iPad and Vision Pro were already the release candidate betas and required no update.

There is also a firmware update for the AirPod Pro 2, which I installed while installing WatchOS.

So yesterday, Apple came out with software updates, and, as usual, I began installing the updates on my various Apple products, one at a time. By bedtime, My M1 MacMini, my Gen8 iPad, my iPhone 16ProMax had all upgraded and appeared to be working fine. I left the Apple TV to update itself, and, since it was bedtime and I use my Gen6 AppleWatch to track my sleep, I decided to upgrade that next day. Upon awakening, I noticed that my sleep had not been tracked overnight. I kind of shrugged it off as I had an appointment to keep. But my wife ALSO uses a Gen6 AppleWatch to track her sleep told me that hers wasn’t tracked overnight either. Just wondering if anyone else had noticed anything similar?

Donnie

No - I updated my phone to 18.4 and my watch (still on 11.3.1) tracked my sleep as it always does. (Apple Watch Ultra.)

Another comment: I use the app Sleep++ to augment Apple’s sleep tracking. It’s free with ads, with an inexpensive one-time in-app purchase to remove the ads, and it does a much better job for me, especially tracking times that I am awake during sleep time, when I actually fell asleep and woke up, etc. I used the app AutoSleep for years before Apple supported sleep tracking but switched to Sleep++ this year, and I find it much better for me. As it’s free, it won’t hurt to give it a try and see if it works better for you.

No, changes to Apple News+ won’t affect Paprika in any way, whether or not you use Apple News.

Thanks, Doug. I guess we’ll see what happens tonight, huh?

Donnie

So apparently, I jumped the gun somewhat here. I got up a few hours earlier than normal this morning for a 9:00 AM procedure. When I checked, the Health app indicated that it had no data. Hence, my unusual early exercise at jumping to conclusions. I just now re-checked, and voila, there last night’s sleep data was, as it’s supposed to be.

Thanks everybody, sorry for the false alarm.

Donnie

But you will not be able to save the Apple News recipes in Paprika as far as I can tell.

It would be nice if they let you open the page in Safari, then save, but that would take you out of the eco system that is News. Kind of like Pinterest in that regard.

And they did. My FireStream server is back up!
;~}

I just had a simple msg. take almost 10 tries to send. Worse than before updating my MacOS.

Any other suggestions, anyone??

I confirm. Started work today with a white background. Lame.

Updating to iOS 18.4 changed my Mail setting “Ask Before Deleting” to off.

That’s a pain!

It’s easy enough to find a sample of a color you like and blow it up into a full-screen sized image and use it like a wallpaper photograph.

Installed the update on M3 MacBook Pro, iPad Pro 11” and iPhone 13 Pro.

The only issue is it knocked both my pairs of KEF wireless loudspeakers (annd subwoofers) off my wi-fi network, LS60 and LSX. At least my iPhone couldn’t find them.

Quit and relaunched Apple Music a bunch of times, with no effect.
Restarted the speakers, which I’ve rarely needed to do, and restarted iPhone.
Finally found them again, but music to the LS60s kept dropping out and coming back after a minute or so. Annoying!
After a half hour or so, it was all back to normal. Very weird.

I ran into an issue with MacOS 15.4. It upgraded well, and seemed just fine. But I noticed that many text files would not open in BBEdit afterwards. The text files in question, used by my scripting system, have non-standard extensions, such as .auto instead of .txt.

The error that popped up was this:

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I contacted Apple support and they blamed the developer of BBEdit. I contacted them and they explained that Apple was wrong. The explained the OS is reporting this error because it has “quarantined” the files in question.

They told me a Terminal command I could use to “free” the files from quarantine:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine “full path to directory of files”

That worked, and the files once again opened in BBEdit. But I’ll need to do this for all directories containing these script files.

Has anyone had success choosing different default translation apps on iOS 18.4 I have a few but only one seems to be possible. Perhaps the apps need to be updated so that can hook in.

I tried to install 15.4 on my new studio yesterday; I was experiencing beach balls and a couple of kernel panics on 15.2, and, as it’s a new piece of hardware and shipped with a special version of 15.2, I was hoping 15.4 would help resolve some of these issues. It. Did. Not. It borked on the third reboot, and then went into a boot loop for at least 8 gongs, and eventually dumped me out into recovery.

I spent the better part of six hours trying to research the symptoms and errors I was having, something about user tokens being missing, so I was unable to reinstall sequoia. It also wiped out my user directory and wiped out my applications in utilities folders. The error said that there was a problem when migrating the data volume during the update. No kidding.

This shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, except I had no bootable clones that I would normally have nightly, as bootable clones have been apparently deprecated or simply forgotten about at Apple. I had all my data, but I had Just bought this new studio couple weeks ago, and migration assistant would not function properly for me to get a good transfer from my beloved 16-year-old Mac Pro so, I had to start from scratch, and take a factory user account and rebuild literally 25 years of customizations, which had traveled with me through several computers via, you guessed it, the glory of bootable clones. Migration Assistant couldn’t even give me what I needed from my up to date Time Machine., either on the first or second rounds.

I’d worked on manually getting it to about 75% rebuilt hitting it every day for two and a half weeks. Yes, I also have a lot of apps that are time-consuming to reinstall and reconfigure and customize, never mind all my scripts, bash files, bin files, chron jobs, and on and on. Then there were all the apps that required contacting the developer to have my installation quotas reset so I could license them to the new machine. And let’s not forget how much effort it takes to safely and reliably and seamlessly relocate user data to external volumes.

It took less than 10 minutes for the update to annihilate all that work. I’ve now been awake for about 26 hours repeating the build process, and, honestly I’m starting to hate Apple. The fact I had to settle for a $5k M3 Ultra, get absolutely gouged on storage and memory, and then spend another ~$2500 in peripherals to replace everything that was once inside my Mac Pro, killed any sense of joy one usually gets with a brand new device. The fact I couldn’t clone or migrate my way back to normal in the first place had me feeling pretty dejected. The update bork just sealed my opinion that I’m out of love with Apple. I’m just not having fun. I feel like a mark for spending what they charge. I like working with computers, not on them. /rant

Thanks for letting me vent.

Cheers

Grumpy Rico

One annoying thing I have discovered with 15.4 is that it refuses to open some of our data acquisition files. These are auto-generated plain ASCII files full of tab separated numbers that end in .dat just as they get spit out by some dedicated legacy detector hardware.

I had previously set up my Mac to default open them in a text editor of my choice. But with 15.4, upon opening such a .dat file, I’m shown a intimidatingly sounding dialog telling me that Apple cannot deem these files safe for my use (well thanks, but I never asked you, Apple, for your advice on what are my files). It then grants me two options: Done and Move to Trash. There are no obvious options how to get around this.

I figured, OK, perhaps I just need to drag the file onto a text editor or open it from one and it’s only double-clicking in Finder that’s now verboten. But no dice with the former and the latter does not solve the issue that a bunch of our scripts are now broken because they rely on opening a file from the CLI. An ln -s data.dat data.txt will not do the trick either, since obviously as soon as that symlink gets resolved we end up with the same Finder warning. So then I head to the Info pane to see if there’s at least some kind of “thanks, but now go away nanny Apple” option to set for this file. But no luck there either. Last chance: I figure maybe this is just an attribute that remains set until I open the file from within a text editor for the first time and/or save to from there again. So I took TextEdit to make sure I’m using Apple’s latest and greatest. But no luck with that either. I just cannot do anything to make that file able to launch from Finder and/or via something like open -e on the CLI.

nanny540×486 45.2 KB

By chance, a short while later I’m doing something else and for that I’m in Settings > Privacy & Security. Since I’m looking for something obscure and I can’t remember where it’s hidden away, I scroll all the way to the bottom. And look here! At the very bottom under Security there’s now an entry saying “data.dat” was blocked to protect your Mac. and next to it a button labeled Open Anyway. Hit that button and you are again presented with another doomsday dialog, but this time there is an “Open Anyway” option. Hit that and authenticate, and from then on the file will finally open straight from the Finder again. So success at last.

Still, frankly, it’s annoying that there’s no option to grant permission to a whole set of files. I don’t feel safer, Apple, but I do feel like I’m wasting time and my Mac is getting in the way of my work rather than doing what it was supposed to: make me more efficient at work. I for one am not liking these Windows vibes.

Have you tried the xattr command?

As with @doug2 's experience earlier in this thread, something like this on the command line should work:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine

Howard Oakley also has a few xattr utilities that might be useful:

I’ve also found (at least with Sequoia) that if you go to System Settings → Prvacy & Security and scroll down, you will sometimes see a button just below the “Allow application from” setting, where you can authorize a blocked app. You’ll need to provide admin-account authorization, but afterward, it will launch.

I’ve used this several times this week on unsigned applications. I don’t know if it will also work for data files but it’s worth a try, and easier than directly calling xattr to remove an attribute.

Are those Terminal utilities, or do they run as apps in MacOS?

@mjtsai writes about an issue sending email with Mail in 15.4 to.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/09/unable-to-send-messages-with-apple-mail-on-macos-15-4/

Some are Terminal commands, while others are graphical apps.

Given your earlier quarantine issue, the following graphical apps from Howard’s page may be of particular interest to you:

• Pratique - remove quarantine attribute from a particular file
• Sandstrip - remove quarantine attributes from all files within a particular folder

Neither has a fancy interface. For example, Sandstrip has only a single “Strip Quarantine Flags” button. If you click it, it will prompt you to choose a folder to process. Once you do that, it will provide the number of files scanned and the number of files that were stripped of the quarantine flag. As is normally the case with Howard’s apps, he includes good documentation for both.

I’m guessing that this is because of the extension. Is it possible for you to simply use a different extension when creating the files? That might bypass the need to use the other solutions mentioned above.

After upgrading to macOS 15.4, I’ve noticed that the Messages app vanishes periodically. It doesn’t crash - there’s no crash notification - but it just disappears from the screen and has to be restarted. Not a huge problem, but annoying.

There’s a thread on the Apple Support Community about this, without any resolutions or workarounds.

That just happened to me with Preview. I used command-tab to get to Preview, released the keys, and Preview was no longer running. But this was on macOS 15.1, so the issue might predate 15.4.

I’m also not appreciative that Apple has decided to change OS updates now to “Download and Install Automatically” on all devices. I have to go through and change all the preferences again. I don’t remember this happening in the past.

Same with me but it’s Mail and I do get a crash report. I normally read a Smart Mailbox that’s set to All Unread, haven’t noticed one way or the other whether going to All Inboxes or an individual mailbox also crashes but I will try that for a day or three and report back.

Well…selected All Inboxes and it crashed when I deleted the 3rd message reading from the latest unread.

I will try just a single inbox and see if. that makes any difference.

macOS 15.4.1 Sequoia resolves the issue with Wallpaper custom colour.

I just updated my M2 Mac Studio from 15.3.2 to 15.4.1 and it did not go as expected. As soon as the download started I noticed it also included an update for the Studio Display. I was worried that it might not work – and it didn’t. I came back a short time later and there was an error message on the display

support.apple.com/display/restore

That Apple support page had too little information to help.

I was able to Screen Share the Mac Studio to my MacBookPro (Mojave) to confirm that the Mac had updated and restarted. Next, I dragged my legacy Apple Cinema Display off the shelf and hooked it up to the Mac. The Mac could only see the old display; the Studio Display was not available.

So after reading several threads I tried removing all connections to the display – which was a USB cable to my keyboard and mouse. Within a few seconds there was some additional information on the display indicating the update was starting. Starting? Had it not already done that and failed? Or maybe it was doing it again. A few minutes later, it updated and the Apple Studio Display was active.

TL;DR when updating an Apple Studio Display do not have anything connected to it except the TB cable and power cable.

I’m glad the update worked for you eventually, and I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t anticipate your setup (which does not sound esoteric at all).

Thank you for this warning. I’ll ask for clarification.

My setup satisfies your literal warning, in that nothing is connected to my Studio Display except the TB cable and power cable. But the other end of that TB cable is connected to a TB dock (which is connected to my MBA M3). Does this violate the intent of your warning?

Also, if I connect the Mac directly to the Studio Display but leave the TB dock connected to the other TB port on the Mac, does this violate the intent of your warning?

Will…

Good questions but I don’t have any answers for your setup. As noted, as soon as I disconnected the USB cable for my keyboard and mouse the install (re)started. Once that happened there was nothing else to investigate.

Good luck.

Since I seem to have an attention span half the length of whatever you hit me with, I had forgotten your warning by the time I installed macOS 15.5 (from 15.1) today, along with the Studio Display update.

Luckily for me, the Studio Display part of the operation seems to have gone without a hitch. One change from my earlier comment (“the other end of that TB cable is connected to a TB dock”) is that the other end of that TB cable was connected to the Mac, rather than the dock. The Mac was still connected to the dock from the other TB port, and that did not seem to cause any problem.