Then I have the rest of the month to devote my time to this blog. Normally I write for print over the course of one week each month, for my regular six-page Genius Tips section. This year, that seems to have fallen to me, which is great in many ways, but it’s also a great deal of work. Among other things, he used to write some of the major features, including the year’s new macOS review and an article about preparing to upgrade. Late last year, one of my former editors at MacUser and a major freelance contributor to MacFormat (and Mac|Life) Adam Banks died suddenly. The problem is particularly severe at present, because of my workload for magazines like MacFormat. You are appreciated and I’ll personally understand whatever you choose to do and hope you figure out what’s best for you! (Or hell, just turn off comments when you need a break!)Īgain, thank you for all your effort and work to share valuable tools and knowledge over the years. Maybe just 1 Mac/art post a week and find a nice way to tell folks that you aren’t able to offer tech support via comments or something like that. I’m personally hoping you can strike a better blog/life balance if you end up wanting to continue with the blog at all. (And those who don’t understand aren’t worth your time and energy investment anyways.) I know I’m not the only one who has relied on you for incredibly valuable insights over the years, but you gotta do what’s best for you and I’m sure your readers and users will understand whatever you choose. I definitely understand that struggle, but maybe not quite on the scale of how prolific you have and continue to be with the daily blog posts and your tools! Thank you!
But to release a 3.45 GB update without explaining what it’s supposed to fix is about the most unhelpful thing that Apple could do just over two weeks after the last 3.1 GB update.
It appears that the bugs which this fixes in Safari and those frameworks were deemed significant enough to merit a ‘patch’ update before Big Sur goes into security-only maintenance on the release of Monterey. Among other private frameworks to have minor increments in build number are FileProviderDaemon, and other Safari frameworks.SafariServices and WebKit frameworks have an incremented build number to match that of Safari.QuartzCore framework has a single digit increment in build number, to 927.24.JavaScriptCore framework has a small increment in build number, to 16611.3.10.1.6.FileProvider framework has a small increment in version number, from 349.4.2 to 349.4.3 (build numbers are the same as its version numbers).AppKit framework has a small increment in build number, from 2022.60.126 to 2022.60.128.Problem Reporter.app in CoreServices, and its Private Framework CrashReporterSupport, have a tiny increment in build number, from 15053 to 15053.1.Notable changes in version or build number in components in /System/Library include: There are no changes in version or build number in any of the main bundled apps (those in /Applications and /Applications/Utilities), and Safari remains at version 14.1.2, although its build number increases from 16611.3.10.1. There’s no change in the Darwin kernel, which remains at version 20.6.0: Wed Jun 23 00:26: root:xnu-7195.141.2~5, and the macOS version changes from 11.5.1 (Build 20G80) to 11.5.2 ( Build 20G95).
There’s no change in the T2 firmware, nor in the iBoot version number of M1 Macs. There don’t appear to be any firmware updates, except possibly for some Intel Macs which lack a T2 chip.
For those running a local Content Caching Server, M1 Macs still need to download the first 910 MB of this update direct from Apple’s servers, so there has been no improvement in this update in terms of efficiency. Intel Macs get a little over 2.5 GB, and M1 Macs 3.45 GB, suggesting it has an effective payload of about 300 MB of “bug fixes”.
This is more than a minimal update, such as 11.5.1 which fixed a single vulnerability.
Apple has left us completely in the dark, except … The surprise update to Big Sur, bringing it to version 11.5.2, is the first that I can recall that has absolutely no release notes at all: none for users, who are merely told that it “includes bug fixes”, none for system administrators, and no security release notes.