Apple Seeds macOS Sonoma 14.4 Beta 5 to Developers [Update: Public Beta Available]

Yay! More emoji. Truly some stellar developers working at Apple.

How many times do folks have to note that emoji don't come from Apple? They're part of Unicode, and Apple just enables them for their devices.

Yay! More emoji. Truly some stellar developers working at Apple.

Not to mention that late patch releases for an update are most likely to only contain spot bug fixes, not new features, or functionality, or major refactors/pieces of work/etc. Looking at the release notes posted ('https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-seeds-macos-sonoma-14-4-beta-5-to-developers.2420566/post-32968076') above we can see this beta 5 follows that expectation.

Well, this release (14.4) drops a few drivers that were used by Macs unsupported by Sonoma. I like to call that Apple's spring cleaning. They tend to do driver removals around this time. This year is the keyboard driver used by Macbooks 2015-2017. So folks using OCLP to install Sonoma will need to get a new version OCLP or their keyboard stops working. Last year's 13.3 broke legacy Metal support, also requiring some patching. Of course the release notes won't include them, because Apple likes to keep things a secret unless they have to disclose something, and because those Macs are unsupported to begin.

In addition, if you pay attention to the release notes of Xcode, Apple likes to do internal API refactoring with this release. Some system dylib adds/removes a few functions here and there. So if you copied a system application from 14.4 to 14.3, they may refuse to run, because they expected a new API, whereas if you copied from 14.3 to 14.2 they should run fine.

Apple still have to make them for their devices though (I understand and agree with what you’re saying, you’re just implying that Unicode has already made the emojis for Apple, and Apple has to just ‘enable’ them...)

Apple graphics designers have to make the icons that gets put into the font library. Unicode only defines the codepoint and what the icon should be in text, but actual graphics design is up to the vendor to design. That's why you have different water pistol icons in Android/Windows/MacOS. And people can't just rip the Mac icons out and put it in their app on another platform because it is actually copyrighted by Apple. It is completely incorrect to say Unicode makes the icons for Apple because Unicode does not make them.

Still waiting for a Music widget....

If we say not in MacOS 14.4, will you at least try eating something again? :D

Still waiting for a Music widget....

Well, this release (14.4) drops a few drivers that were used by Macs unsupported by Sonoma. I like to call that Apple's spring cleaning. They tend to do driver removals around this time. This year is the keyboard driver used by Macbooks 2015-2017. So folks using OCLP to install Sonoma will need to get a new version OCLP or their keyboard stops working. Last year's 13.3 broke legacy Metal support, also requiring some patching. Of course the release notes won't include them, because Apple likes to keep things a secret unless they have to disclose something, and because those Macs are unsupported to begin.

In addition, if you pay attention to the release notes of Xcode, Apple likes to do internal API refactoring with this release. Some system dylib adds/removes a few functions here and there. So if you copied a system application from 14.4 to 14.3, they may refuse to run, because they expected a new API, whereas if you copied from 14.3 to 14.2 they should run fine.


Apple graphics designers have to make the icons that gets put into the font library. Unicode only defines the codepoint and what the icon should be in text, but actual graphics design is up to the vendor to design. That's why you have different water pistol icons in Android/Windows/MacOS. And people can't just rip the Mac icons out and put it in their app on another platform because it is actually copyrighted by Apple. It is completely incorrect to say Unicode makes the icons for Apple because Unicode does not make them.

Oh, yeah. To clarify, I was talking more bout the beta 5 patch, not the 14.4 release in general. A late patch to a pre-release upgrade generally isn't going to have a lot of surface area.