List of Mac that are not supported any moreAnswered

Hello,

We upgraded our TurboActivate library from 4.3 to 4.4 : this new version requires the CPU to support at least SSE4.2, and it should exclude machines shipped before 2008.

However, we found a user with an iMac9,1 from 2009 that had TA crashing because of 4.4 (everything works fine with TA 4.3) …

First of all, this is a bit embarassing to have TA crashing because of an architecture issue. I would rather expect it to return an error. But compiler may be the problem …
Anyway, I need to find a solution so our next updates won't crash for these users. So far, checking the Macintosh model is the only one I found : do you have a list of Mainctosh model that are not suitable for TA 4.4 ?

Thank you. Philippe

We haven’t compiled a list. Intel Core Duo doesn‘t support SSE4.2. You can view as much on the spec sheet on Intels website. They also released that processor in 2006; why Apple used it in a computer 3 years later is puzzling.

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Hello,

I would prefer an official list from Wyday, to be sure that I'm covering all the cases correctly. Can you help me please ?
I know these are old machines, but I cannot tell my users buy another one. We're making pro softwares, I need to provide them pro support, despite sometimes it's beyong my control. Until now, we didn't have a problem because we used TA 4.3.0, but we have been forced to upgrade to TA 4.4.4.1 because the recent certificate issue (despite it was beyong your control as well).

Also, where can I download TA 4.3.3 so I can support these machines by loading dynamically the TA library ?

Thank you for your help. Philippe

Any Apple device prior to 2008 is not supported. Any Apple device since mid-2008 that doesn't use Intel Core Duo is supported.

And, no we don't support old versions of TA, TF, TFS, and thus we don't provide them. We don't recommend using old versions either.

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Hello Wyatt,

A few customers purchased our product and everything was working fine 2 weeks ago. Now it isn't any more. They are professionnals and our product is essential for their jobs.

What should I do ? Refund them ?
If you understand my situation (and I'm not the only one in this case) : is there a solution, even if it is a bad workaround ?

Thank you. Philippe

For those customers on truly ancient hardware (insecure and not supported), have them use the previously version of your software and have them fix the CACerts on the machine.

This method: https://wyday.com/forum/t/5064/cannot-activatedeactivate-ta_e_inet_tls-on-macos-10-14-and-older/#post-23305

cd ~
curl -kO https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrgrootx1.pem
curl -kO https://letsencrypt.org/certs/isrg-root-x2.pem
sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain" "isrgrootx1.pem"
sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot -k "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain" "isrg-root-x2.pem"

And also replace /etc/ssl/cert.pem with the version downloaded here: https://curl.se/docs/caextract.html

cd ~
curl -kO https://curl.se/ca/cacert.pem
sudo mv /etc/ssl/cert.pem /etc/ssl/cert-bak.pem
sudo mv ~/cacert.pem /etc/ssl/cert.pem

That will put fixed certs in both places they need to be for things to work on old versions.

If they’re really professionals: tell them to unplug those machine immediately from the internet. Back up the data. Never turn the machines on again. There are so many known vulnerabilities for the max version of macOS that can run on those machines.

They‘re putting their data and their customers’ / clients’ data at risk every moment those insecure machines are connected to any network.

The Internet is a hostile environment for up-to-date software running on modern hardware. Those customers are doing neither of those things.

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Answer

Hello,

Ok, but this is not exactly the topic. My main issue is to identify the “too old machines” that needs a special behavior (whatever it is a bad workaround).

Anyway, here is how I handle this (this may be useful for others) :

  • I use the following command to determine if TA 4.4 will crash or not : /usr/sbin/sysctl -a | grep machdep.cpu.features
    If the result is empty, you are running an Apple M1 computer, it's fine. If “SSE4.2” can be found, it's also fine because this is a suitable Intel processor. Else it will crash, so applying a special behavior.
     
  • In this case, I'm loading an older version of TA via dlopen("path to libTurboActivate_4.3.0.0.dylib" , RTLD_NOW);
     
  • Then I retrieve and use the functions of this particular library via dlsym(oldLibraryHandle, "TA_IsActivated");
    If your code is well organized, this gonna be easy to refactor it.

.

For info, our users are making shows : often, the machine is not connected to internet, and only use our product. Nothing really to fear, even if the machine is outdated or not up-to-date. Sometimes, they don't even use an internet connection (except to activate our product).
Of course, the majority of our users are on recent OS and machines, but supporting reasonnably old hardware/OS is still our duty, whetever Apple is doing. I hope you could understand the situation (by reading other posts on the forum, I'm the only one in this situation).

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Answer

To finish, here is a list of (supposed) Mac that are not working/crashing with TA 4.4 (it is ok with TA 4.3) :

  • iMac10,* and before
  • MacBookPro5,* and before
  • MacBookPro7,*
  • MacBook7,* and before
  • MacBookAir3,* and before
  • Macmini4,* and before
  • MacPro3,* and before

I simply try to find all the Mac model not having the SSE4.2 instructions on Everymac website.
In brief : you should be concerned with most of Mac shipped in 2009 and before.
 

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