01 May 2026

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We organized a conference and had a blast!

Mac Admins Europe 2026: It's a wrap!

Yesterday, more than 250 Mac Admins from all over Europe and the world met in Leiden, Netherlands to connect, share, and learn.

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The Mac Admins Europe team, led by Mischa van der Bent, with Rob Potvin, Jordy Thery, Anthony Darlow, and myself, put up a full day of amazing speakers, sponsors, and, most of all, the community. The host city Leiden, showed off with the most gorgeous sunshine.

Everyone, sponsors, speakers, and attendees, brought lots of enthusiasm and ideas. Many sessions had to start with a delay, because we had a hard time of herding everyone back in from all the socializing in the break area. It was a real community event.

We'd been talking about doing this for years, and we finally did it. Thank you to all who helped, sponsored, spoke, and attended.

It looks like this won't be the last time. No promises or details yet, but at the team's celebration/debrief breakfast this morning and the most used words were "next year…"

📰 News and Opinion

Apply for the 2026 MacAdmins Community and Conference Attendee Grant

The Mac Admins Foundation is pleased to open applications for the 2026 Community and Conference Grant supporting attendance at the MacAdmins Conference at Penn State University.

Conditional values aren’t values

Kitzy:

The system is very good at making silence feel like the rational choice.

Engineering in the Age of AI

Samuel Mills:

But the more I think about it, the more I realize this tool is distorting the things that make being a professional actually meaningful.

Thoughtful response to Graham's post from last week's issue.

An agent can translate a script from Python to Swift in fifteen minutes, a task that might take a human hours. On paper, that is a massive gain. But this speed creates a hidden tax. If you do not spend the time to refactor and document that code, you are just inheriting cognitive debt.

Hey, this example sounds familiar.

Kitzy wrote a response to Samuel's post. Dan Snelson published his updated AI Guiding Principles, which refers to Samuel's and my post. (Which the AI misinterpreted, twice.) I was asked about my thoughts on LLMs several times at Mac Admins Europe. (Likely provoked by me wearing a "rage against the machine learning" t-shirt.)

This discussion is very timely, valuable, and necessary. The concept and concerns around "cognitive debt" are fairly new. "AI burnout" describes a feeling many of us experience. I also believe the other impacts of this technology, and the behavior, choices, and marketing/hype of the venture capital infused AI industry raise significant ethical, social, economical, and ecological concerns, which are often left aside while focussing on the more immediate effects of how well the models may or may not perform. It is a complex, multi-layered challenge on so many levels.

Hank Green is mentioned in Kitzy's next post, too. He had Cal Newport in a recent video to talk about the state of the AI industry and technology and I have started listening to Newport's podcast, which I find quite insightful.

Is AI going to solve all of our problems?

Kitzy:

What I do know is that is AI going to solve all of our problems? is the wrong question. The right question is why we haven’t solved them already.

🔨 Support and Tutorials

Virtualisation on Apple silicon Macs is different

Howard Oakley:

As part of its engineering preparations for the switch to using Arm processors, Apple decided that the only practical way to support virtualisation on its new Mac hardware was to build it into macOS.

Managing Apple Intelligence settings for macOS using Blueprints in Jamf Pro

Rich Trouton:

Jamf Pro’s Blueprints can be used to manage Apple Intelligence settings, in place of managing these settings using a configuration profile.

What is device attestation, and why does it matter for Apple enrollment?

Kitzy, Fleet Blog:

you've already solved the "how do devices get enrolled" problem. But there's a separate question worth asking: how do you know the device that enrolled is actually the device it claims to be?

Using Baseline via AppleBusiness

General Guidance for Using Baseline with Apple Business

Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they can’t

Thom Holwerda, OSnews:

every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it’s trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably?

🤖 Scripting and Automation

Plist-Yaml-Plist revisited

Graham Pugh:

The result is the plist-yaml-plist-swift project, a standalone Swift binary that can replace the original python project

♻️ Updates and Releases

🎧 Listen

MacDevOps YUL 2026

Mac Admins Podcast:

Mac Devops YVR becomes MacDevOps YUL this year as the popular conference makes a move to a new city thanks to the World Cup. We’re here with conference founder Mat X to talk about what to expect, what’s on tap, and who should make the trek to Montreal

Michael Thomsen of Origin 84 on Building a Process-Driven MSP and Using Compliance Frameworks for Strategy

Command Control Power:

Michael Thomsen on Building a Process-Driven MSP and Using Compliance Frameworks for Strategic IT

Securing mobile apps in the age of vibe coding

Apple @ Work:

Alan Snyder from NowSecure joins the show to talk about MARI and the risks of LLM-generated code in mobile apps.