Virtual Machines and Sonoma

Regarding Device Support for macOS 14 beta 2, I too was confused by what it does so I asked around internally. In short, it updates the MobileDevice infrastructure [1] on macOS 13 so that I can actually install macOS 14 beta in a VM. Which is pretty much what the description on the Downloads page says, it’s just a little fuzzy on the motivation.

However, it won’t help with this issue:

How do we update our VM running macOS 14 beta 1 to beta 2?

I’m not aware of any good way to do this )-:

Obviously that’s a major bummer. I don’t have any info to share on this front, other than the fact that the Virtualization folks are well aware of the need for this.

Share and Enjoy
—
Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] MobileDevice is a private framework that Apple software, like Xcode and the Finder, uses to talk to iOS-style devices. When it comes to Apple silicon Macs, the OS install process is similar to iOS, and that’s why MobileDevice comes into play here.

Someone using Virtual Buddy discovered a way to enable updating a Sonoma VM to a later beta release. I tested it myself and it works although you may have to refresh the Software Update panel a few times before it sees the later beta. Apparently, it's a one shot deal. To update to a subsequent beta, you have to run the script again.

Here's a link to the script.

I've also succeeded with the comment in the virtual buddy repo, updating my UTM Sonoma beta 7 to rc. I can't stress enough how vital better virtualization support for us developers is. There are just so many roadblocks to virtualizing, and thus, testing other OS versions, it has become a major issue for our company. We're developing software for large enterprise customers and require a thorough testing environment across all supported OS versions. It's bad enough that there is no more professional virtualization software for macOS guests, since Parallels seems to have given up on that topic completely and UTM remains the only option. Also, the limitation of 2 VMs running simultaneously needs to be lifted ASAP and support for remote debugging needs to be added to Xcode. I'm not even getting started on better developer documentation... I don't mean to rant, but there's just so much frustration accumulated. I really enjoy macOS, but developing for it, especially when it's not a GUI app, shouldn't be this frustrating and full of roadblocks.