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I think they already confirmed at WWDC that external device booting is supported. Lots of use cases become impossible without it: reinstalling older OSes, reins
by mrpippy 6y ago
I think they already confirmed at WWDC that external device booting is supported. Lots of use cases become impossible without it: reinstalling older OSes, reinstalling without internet access, bootable backups, installing a beta on an external drive, etc etc.
- uniqueid 6y agoLots of use cases become impossible without it That may be the point. I doubt a majority of users ever go near Disk Utility (certainly not ditto, rsync, etc) MacOS sand-boxing won't give the user write access to the System folder, anyways. Apple management might not see the point in a user booting externally, when they could move their User data to an external drive, instead. If Apple walls off the ability to boot off an external drive, it's bad for 'power users', but good, in some ways, for Apple: stronger lock-in, tighter security, easier to sell higher-spec'd Macs (ie: with larger hdd's), and more iCloud subscriptions (cloud storage).
- sdflhasjd 6y agoSimilar maintenance use cases have been removed in the past due to non-removable RAM & SSDs. Only an Apple Store can now do backups from dead machines. If the new macs do boot external drives, I would not be surprised if it's severely "nerfed" - I don't expect _any_ access to the onboard storage, for example (which would break all the use-cases you listed anyway).
- sneak 6y agoAs it is I have been unable to reinstall my iMac Pro without internet access from a bootable USB drive; it seems to insist on internet recovery. Also, I think they explicitly want to disable booting of older OS versions as that is an attack vector for boot security.
- mrpippy 6y agoOn T2 Macs those are both disabled by default, but can be enabled with the Startup Security Utility in recovery mode.