The Apple Silicon Era
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The transition to Apple-designed processors for the Mac—and away from Intel Mac chips—is about to become real. Apple Tuesday unveiled more details about its first in-house Arm-based processor, which is dubbed the M1. Apple is touting a range of benefits, including performance and battery life gains, with the M1 processor. The company also unveiled the first three Mac models that will get the chip. “This truly is a huge day for the Mac and a huge day for Apple,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook Tuesday during a prerecorded event unveiling the M1 chip. “The M1 chip is by far the most powerful chip that we have ever created.”
The M1 is the company’s first chip for the Mac in more than a decade, following the shift to Intel processors in 2006 in a move away from PowerPC processors. However, Apple has already been designing its own Arm-based processors for years, including for the iPhone and iPad. The transition to Apple Silicon in the Mac is expected to take two years, according to the company. The launch of M1 also comes amid already strong momentum for the Mac, with Apple reporting record revenue for its Mac business in its latest quarter.
What follows are five key things to know about Apple’s M1 processor.
Sophos M1 Mac Download
The latest operating system from Apple, macOS11 Big Sur, has arrived and it brings with it a few significant architecture modifications. In this article, we will take a look at these changes, as well as some of the things you might consider doing to automate much of the deployment of Intercept X on macOS.
On Premise (SEC): Sophos Anti-virus for MacOS version 9.10.2 and above have full support for Big Sur, and support for M1 processors via emulation (Rosetta 2). Applies to the following Sophos. Once the scripts run, a Mac will have two new and nasty files one of which phones home to the malware’s authors to report it was installed. LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with support for M1 Arm Mac and 'user interface variants'.
These changes started to appear with macOS Catalina (10.15) – Apple is beginning to deprecate the use of system wide kernel extensions in favour of user space system extension APIs. This allows software like network extensions and endpoint security solutions to extend the functionality of macOS without requiring kernel-level access.
Sophos Home for Mac Antivirus - Free Download. Includes a 30 day trial of Sophos Home for Mac Premium, with advanced ransomware scanning in real time. In the current version of Sophos Home, there is no way to disable pop-up notifications either in the Sophos Home software installed or in the Sophos Home dashboard. As a workaround, you can turn off the system notifications on your Mac. Go to Apple Menu.
An interesting third party review of some of the most significant changes in the last decade Apple have recently introduced can be found here.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a GA version of Intercept X for Mac available on the first day of release. The good news is that we now have an Early Access Program (EAP) available in Central, whereby customers can nroll devices running macOS11 in order to receive a pre-release version of Sophos Endpoint v10.0.2.
TIP: As you can appreciate, we don’t typically recommend using EAP (pre-release) software on a production system. If you would like to prevent users from upgrading to BigSur AND if you or your customer are using Sophos Endpoint, then it’s worth noting that the SophosLabs have added an Application Control detection for the Big Sur installer. This means that you can control its rollout by blocking the application – the installer is classified as a “System Tool”.
Most of you are probably aware of the process on how to join an EAP and then enroll devices, however if you would like some info on this process click here. Typically, we don’t make EAPs available to Sophos Central MSP accounts, however given that some customers may be purchasing new Apple hardware that comes pre-shipped running Big Sur, we have extended the EAP to MSP customers too.
About new hardware, the following Macintosh models (at the time of writing) use the new Apple M1 ARM-based system chipset:
Sophos M1 Mac Os
- MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
- Mac mini (M1, 2020)
- MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020)
Sophos Intercept X for Mac does not natively support this new chipset; however, it can be made to work using a piece of backwards compatibility software called Rosetta 2. This software needs to be installed on the Mac before joining it to the EAP and it updating to 10.0.2. More info on this process is also covered in the EAP community post above.
On testing the deployment of Intercept X on a brand new macOS11 device, I found the installation routine quite user intensive with several prompts required to allow permissions etc. before a complete protected state could be achieved.
There are several things that can be done to reduce these prompts, specifically using an MDM provider (such as Sophos Mobile or JAMF) to essentially pre-trust extensions using the Sophos ‘Teams ID’ of 2H5GFH3774. This is a trusted ID that is used in the development of Sophos code, to automatically whitelist our software:
I found that this configuration made the deployment of Intercept X for Mac on macOS Catalina and older, virtually ‘silent’. There were still some prompts that required user interaction when deploying on Big Sur, however this will still down on the amount of interaction required without any applied MDM settings.
Our wonderful professional services team have also created a number of scripts to use with JAMF to automate deployment on Macs. Info on this can be found here.
Sophos Endpoint Mac M1
Expect to see some more information in the new year, once a GA version of 10.0.2 for Mac is available, on how to automate the deployment further.