08 May 2026

405: Conference season

Six Colors Apple in the Enterprise report card and 26.5 goes release candidate

Conference Season

Conference season is fully upon us now. MacAD.UK and Mac Admins Europe were in the previous month, ACES, WWDC, MacDevOps and PSU MacAdmins are imminent. Mac Admins India Connect, JNUC, MacSysAdmin and Objective-by-the-Sea are a bit later this year.

OAuth review checklist: 4 steps to assess risk

🚨 In April, a compromised OAuth token resulted in a breach at Vercel. This is the reality facing security teams: 🥷 An infostealer hits a vendor in your SaaS ecosystem, the attacker works backwards from stolen access, and an old consent becomes the front door. 🚪

If you haven't made OAuth grant reviews a regular part of your on-going security program, you should.

Download Nudge Security’s OAuth & MCP Investigation Checklist to learn the repeatable way to uncover risky OAuth grants and MCP server connections.

Download Free Guide

If you haven't chosen the conference to go to or to present at yet, registration is still available for those later this year! (MacSysAdmin just opened registration.)

You can always find the list at my conference overview page.

📰 News and Opinion

Apple in the Enterprise: A 2026 report card

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

This is our sixth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of about a hundred admins, half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices.

With six years of history, some interesting trends are emerging. There are some great gems in the full commentary, even though that is quite a wall of text to read through.

The complete 2026 commentary

If You Stop Hiring Juniors, Your Senior Engineers Own You

Justin Smestad:

if you stop hiring junior engineers, you just handed all of it to your senior workforce.

From JNUC Diversity Sponsorship Recipient to a User Group Community Builder

Cesar Santana, Jamf Tech Thoughts:

If you're on the fence, don't be. Everyone in this space started where you are, and I promise most of them are a lot nicer than your grumpy old IT boss.

🔨 Support and Tutorials

Managed Brew Access

Joe Nash, Workbrew:

Managed Brew Access closes that gap. It moves brew access management into Workbrew itself, so the Console state and the device state are describing the same thing.

Suppress premium features in Apple's Keynote, Numbers, and Pages apps on macOS

Graham Pugh:

deploying the managed preferences for Keynote, Numbers, and Pages will reduce confusion for users of these apps until such time that Apple figure out a way of organisations purchasing subscriptions for their app services.

Turning on FileVault using the fdesetup command line tool may not include displaying the personal recovery key on macOS Tahoe

Rich Trouton:

On macOS Tahoe, this recovery key information is not displayed when the same command is run

How to make and roll back to a snapshot

Howard Oakley:

If you want to restore just part of a snapshot, you can mount it as a volume in the Finder and copy the folders and files you need from there, as if it was a backup. This article considers how you can address a bigger problem, where your best choice is to return the whole of your Mac’s Data volume to how it was when a snapshot was made.

How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?

Howard Oakley:

[I] didn’t consider minimum specifications for a usable VM. Given current interest in running a VM on a MacBook Neo, I thought it would be worth examining these afresh, from macOS Tahoe.

Certificates and Tokens

HCS Technology Group:

This article explains the differences between certificates and tokens in Apple ecosystems, including how each is used to secure communication, authenticate services, and manage access.

Stop Prompting, Start Orchestrating

Scott Blake:

Everything is “AI” now, which means the word no longer tells you anything useful about how the system actually works. In software development, the shift isn’t happening in the models. The shift is in how we use them.

The GUI we didn't build

users could schedule the update for whenever made sense for them. 2am on a tuesday. lunchtime. tonight after work. they were in control of the timing. Apple handled the nudging.

Do you even know how LLMs work?

Alfredo V. Clemente:

The goal is to give you an in depth but approachable understanding of LLMs, how they work, and how they are trained. We will ignore some details, and provide simplified explanations where appropriate.

🤖 Scripting and Automation

AutoPkg Wizard - a new open source app for AutoPkg users

Graham Pugh:

The result is an app I have called AutoPkg Wizard.

Jamf Icon Uploader

HCS Technology Group:

Jamf Icon Uploader is a utility that streamlines the bulk upload of icons to Jamf Pro, eliminating the tedious process of uploading them one at a time.

♻️ Updates and Releases

🎧 Listen

Michael Thomsen of Origin 84, Part Two - Reusable Compliance Policies, ISO 27001 Audits, and Building a Fractional GRC/Strategy Bench

Command Control Power:

host Joe and guests discuss standards, policies, certification, and compliance with Michael Thomsen of Origin 84 in Sydney, continuing an ISO 27001 deep dive.

This is why you can't delay macOS updates

Apple @ Work:

Ray Canzanese from Netskope joins the show to talk about the latest news around the macOS ClickFix campaign.

Live at MacAD.UK 2026

Mac Admins Podcast:

Live at MacAD! We’re talking about Apple Business, the MacBook Neo, and hopes & dreams going into WWDC

Cyberattacks are raising your prices

Lock and Code:

Velasquez about cybercrime’s impact on small businesses, the new threats being deployed because of AI, and what is necessary to protect business owners and their consumers.