The IT Nerd

On Thursday, Apple released a bunch of updates. Specifically:

• iOS 17.4.1 and iPadOS 17.4.1
• iOS 16.7.7 and iPadOS 16.7.7
• visionOS 1.1.1

And if you look at what the update said, you saw this:

Okay. So this has bug fixes and security updates with the word “important” in this description. That’s interesting. I wonder what the security updates are. Let’s look at Apple’s Security Updates Page to find out:

Under those updates, it says “Details coming soon”. Now Apple has done this before, but this isn’t an everyday occurrence. Thus it’s captured a lot of attention. And it’s resulted in a bunch of emails hitting my inbox asking why Apple wouldn’t release the details of what security issues they’ve fixed in this update. In my mind, there are three reasons why that hasn’t happened:

• You’ll note that there are no watchOS or macOS updates. One thing that Apple might be doing is that they are waiting for those updates to ship so that whatever security issues that these updates fix aren’t then instantly exploited.
• Another reason is that Apple wants a critical mass of people to install these updates so that when they release the details it won’t be instantly exploited because it’s that serious.
• All of the above.

Now in my years of covering tech, I’ve only seen Apple do something like this a handful of times. Thus you need to take this seriously and install the updates for iOS and visionOS ASAP. And then if there are watchOS and macOS updates that ship in the next week. You should install those too. Clearly whatever security issue(s) that these updates fix are serious enough for Apple to take this route. And I’ll also point out that it is entirely possible that Apple may go weeks before releasing the information about whatever these updates fix. But that shouldn’t stop you from going ahead and updating all the things. Security these days should be your top priority so the fact that Apple isn’t speaking to this in public just yet shouldn’t stop you from staying as secure as possible.

UPDATE: It turns out my first thought was the correct one. Apple released macOS 14.4.1 on Monday and the security releases page got updated just after that.

This entry was posted on March 24, 2024 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.