Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Ed Bindels’s Apple Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands

This new museum in Utrecht (about 30–40 minutes south of Amsterdam) seems just astonishing. The rainbow wall of iMacs alone is incredible.

(Via Juli Clover.)

MacOS Seemingly Crashes After 49 Days of Uptime — a ‘Feature’ Perhaps Exclusive to Tahoe

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

If you keep track of time using milliseconds, and store that in an unsigned 32-bit integer, it overflows after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds. That’s the bug.

I think this bug is new to Tahoe. If you look at Apple’s open-source XNU kernel code — e.g. lines 3,732 to 3,745 in tcp_subr.c — you can see that the lines assigning the time in milliseconds to a uint32_t variable were checked in just six months ago, whereas most of the file is five years old. Also, I personally ran my MacBook Pro — at the time, running MacOS 15.7.2 Sequoia — up to 91 days of uptime in January. I even mentioned that remarkable uptime in my annual report card, in praise of Apple’s software reliability. Apple’s pre-Tahoe reliability, that is.

I was hesitant to link to this at all because the original (unbylined) report from Photon is so hard to follow. It’s downright manic — over 3,500 words with 33 section headings (<h2> and <h3> tags), with no cohesive narrative. The bug, seemingly, is not that complicated. The whole write-up from Photon just screams “AI-generated slop” to me, and I thus hesitate even to link to Snell’s piece linking to it. But I think the bug is real, and my sympathy for everyone afflicted with MacOS 26 Tahoe is sincere. (And if I’m wrong about the post being AI slop and a human at Photon actually wrote this, I would suggest taking it easy with the cocaine.)

macOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (no release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer, full installer, IPSW): macOS Tahoe 26.4.1 addresses an issue that could cause the M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro/Max MacBook Pro models to fail to join 802.1X Wi-Fi networks when using content filter extensions. See also Mr. Macintosh and Howard Oakley. Previously: macOS 26.4 MacBook […]

iOS 26.4.1 and iPadOS 26.4.1

Juli Clover (iOS/iPadOS release notes, no security, enterprise, no developer): According to Apple’s release notes, the software updates contain unspecified “bug fixes.” Benjamin Mayo: While the official release notes were vague, a thread on the developer forums indicates it actually fixes a significant bug related to iCloud data syncing. Developers had noticed that iPhones running […]

ClickFix Now Uses Script Editor Instead of Terminal

Thijs Xhaflaire (via Andrew Orr): Unlike traditional ClickFix campaigns that instruct users to paste commands directly into Terminal, the discovered variant uses a browser-triggered workflow to launch Script Editor. […] The page leverages an applescript:// URL scheme Clicking the “Execute” button invokes this URL scheme from the browser The browser prompts the user to allow […]