Apple silicon has made Mac exciting again. Exiting for consumers who can run most everyday tasks at near ludicrous speed. Exciting for IT admins as the rules for managing this new era of Mac shift around them. There’s a new normal, and what worked with Intel Macs might not work on Apple silicon. In this post we’ll look at Activation Lock. The good, the bad, and what’s actually true.

Malwarebytes has required full disk access on macOS Catalina and later since at least March 2020, but I only noticed recently as I was testing for Big Sur compatibility.

This post mainly exists to shamelessly promote my Jamf feature request to add support for RebuildKernelCache. Before jumping into the details, go upvote that feature request. You can always go backtrack later to downvote me if by the end you decide it’s not worth the support.

While some organizations went full steam ahead with Big Sur, in K12 education land we’re usually a few months behind. While testing our Big Sur deployment I found managing fast user switching using MultipleSessionEnabled in a GlobalPreferences profile payload is broken.

Like many of us during the pandemic, Big Sur has gotten a bit chonky. Not including the over 12 GB installer, it takes 35 GB to upgrade from a previous OS to Big Sur.