hoakley November 30, 2023 Macs, Technology, Updates

Apple has released macOS Sonoma 14.1.2 and Safari updates

Apple has just released a security update for macOS Sonoma, bringing it to version 14.1.2.

The download is about 845 MB in size for Apple silicon Macs, and 428 MB for Intel Macs.

Apple states that this “provides important bug fixes and security updates”, and its security release notes reveal that it fixes two vulnerabilities in WebKit that have been exploited in earlier versions of iOS.

There are currently no matching security updates offered for macOS 12 or 13, but they do have Safari updates that appear to fix the same vulnerabilities.

This Sonoma update brings most Macs up to version 14.1.2 build 23B92, but M3 models have their own build number of 23B2091. The only significant change found is in Safari, whose version number goes from 17.1 (19616.2.9.11.7) to 17.1.2 (19616.2.9.11.12) (in Sonoma). There are no firmware updates, although there are concurrent updates to iMovie and Apple’s Pro apps, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion and Compressor, and Pro Video Formats.

[Updated 1945 GMT 30 November 2023]

4Comments

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1

John Gilbert on December 1, 2023 at 8:34 am

Has Apple given up on Rapid Security Responses? As it says here https://support.apple.com/en-au/102657
“They deliver important security improvements between software updates — for example, improvements to the Safari web browser, the WebKit framework stack or other critical system libraries.” This security update seems an excellent fit for an RSR.

I am not really getting stuck into Apple, rather what are your views on the state of RSRs?

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- 2
  
  hoakley on December 1, 2023 at 9:49 am
  
  Thank you: yes, many of us have been wondering. I’ll be writing about this for tomorrow (Saturday) morning.
  Howard.
  
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3

dsoliva on December 1, 2023 at 11:27 am

I do not get why Apple Silicon updates are twice the size of Intel updates. I do not get either why this is such a large update if they are only updating webkit.

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- 4
  
  hoakley on December 1, 2023 at 12:51 pm
  
  This is because macOS doesn’t simply update small components within the system. In this case, it probably represents the whole of the cryptex that contains WebKit and Safari, which is why the version of Safari has also changed. There are also a couple of minor build version changes in the /System/Library folder, so this isn’t as small as it might seem.
  Generally, Apple silicon updates are thought to be larger than Intel ones because Apple silicon updates all contain more, including much larger firmware, and possibly dyld cache files. These seem to come to a total of a little more than 1 GB, and we should be grateful that such a full update wasn’t required in this case. Look back at update size in Big Sur if you want to see it excesses – Apple’s engineers have worked hard to bring update size down since.
  Howard.
  
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