abMacAdmins.news 2026-03-13
Scripting OS XThis week's MacAdmins.news has (more) thoughts on the MacBook Neo, 50 years of Apple, my experiences with LLM assisted coding, many great articles from Mac admins, and lots of updates.
William SmithRE: https://mastodon.social/@macadminspodcast/116210668791222826
Just listened to the latest episode. Really appreciate the attention paid to so many different aspects of a horrible situation.
Regarding good things coming out of difficult times, my favorite is the dildo brigade starting off as a joke but becoming a weapon exposing ICE’s fragile toxic masculinity.
Regarding how other countries can help, just pay attention, look for similar signs, and give your all to stop something like this happening there sooner rather than later.
Bart#macadmins No idea if this is of use to anyone else but I've uploaded some middleware I created that interacts with the Apple Business Manager API with a bit of SOFA on top. Once set up you can then fetch device info as needed using simple api requests and not worry about managing client assertion and access token (obviously this sits behind your firewall or something). Releasing this in the spirit of "if one other person on the planet other than me finds this useful then that's a win"
For #macadmins that use Outset, there's a new beta release for v4.3 https://github.com/macadmins/outset/releases/tag/v4.3.0.22014
Fixes some bugs and stuff and brings two new features:
Background script execution https://github.com/macadmins/outset/wiki/BackgroundScripts
Ed25519 script signing https://github.com/macadmins/outset/wiki/ScriptSigning
Interested to see what people think 🙂
This week, MacAdmins.news looks at (of course) the MacBook Neo and other releases from Apple's "big week," but also Tahoe interface and updates, and more MacAdmins tools and articles.
too many names@chrisatzinger There's a free Slack community of 82k #MacAdmins Apple device admins over at https://macadmins.org, if you wanted some friendly help and advice - highly recommend even if you're just considering/new to the space, organizations of all different scales hanging out there
Scott BlakeOne of the questions that I keep hearing is "[H]ow do I start if I already have a fully deployed environment?" I attempted to answer that question in https://macadminmusings.com/blog/2026/03/03/from-clickops-to-code-terraforming-a-live-system/. I try to take a high level view and define the steps to take to avoid breaking everything. I hope it helps to guide people onto a path toward success.
It is also starting to take hold in Device Management and more vendors are starting to support it in their own ways. Zentral.com has supported Terraform for years. Fleet Device Management uses YAML files and deploys them using GitOps. Jamf announced support for Terraform last year. I'm sure there are more.
Infrastructure as Code as a concept is gaining ground in different IT-related circles. It was originally just for IT Infrastructure, but it spread quickly. For instance, Okta announced Terraform support in 2019.