Apple Seeds Second Public Betas of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4

[MacRumors]

Apple today seeded the second public betas of upcoming iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 updates, allowing public beta testers to try out the new features in the software ahead of its public launch. The public betas come a day after Apple provided the beta updates to developers.

Public beta testers can download the updates from the Settings app on each device after opting into the beta through Apple's public beta testing website.

The new software for iPhone and iPad includes Priority Notifications, an Apple Intelligence feature designed to show you your most important notifications first, plus it adds a new Sketch style for Image Playground on all Apple Intelligence devices.

There is a new Apple News+ Food section for Apple News+ subscribers that aggregates recipes, food stories, and tips for healthy eating, plus an Ambient Music feature for playing chill music from Control Center. On the iPad and Mac, the new updates introduce Mail Categorization, a feature that was previously limited to the iPhone.

In beta 2, Apple added new emoji characters and debuted the Vision Pro app for iPhone. The update also brings Visual Intelligence to the iPhone 15 Pro Max.

An outline of all of the new features in iOS 18.4 can be found in our iOS 18.4 features guide.

Article Link: Apple Seeds Second Public Betas of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4

 

[thefrost]

Let's go. Another round of betas. /s

 

[GeneticBloom]

Looking forward to trying the visual intelligence. They finally fixed the mail app bug I've had since the first iOS 18.1 update on this last release, six months later.

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

Will 15.4 finally fix the spotlight bug that writes hundreds of gigabytes of data to my SSD every day? Seriously, I had to disable SIP to completely kill the corespotlightd process, absolutely absurd.

 

[Kar98]

Well finally RCS messaging is enabled with Mint Mobile.

 

[Robert.Walter]

Finally. Have had my new 16e acting as a 800$ paperweight since last friday bc I couldn't install my 18.4 based backup of my SE3. Somebody at Apple blew it by wrecking my new iPhone receipt and commissioning experience.

 

[Egregius]

Will 15.4 finally fix the spotlight bug that writes hundreds of gigabytes of data to my SSD every day? Seriously, I had to disable SIP to completely kill the corespotlightd process, absolutely absurd.

How did you find that? And how did you solve it?

 

[TheGenerous]

finally, see if this fixes the bug in The(Hub)

 

[Populus]

Will 15.4 finally fix the spotlight bug that writes hundreds of gigabytes of data to my SSD every day? Seriously, I had to disable SIP to completely kill the corespotlightd process, absolutely absurd.

How did you find that? And how did you solve it?

I’m also interested in this, and if it’s happening on external SSDs like the Samsung T5/T7, or on NVMes inside a Thunderbolt case.

 

[Dualica 01]

Just updated my ipad pro m4 and now my internet is broken. No lan, no wlan no hotspot is working.
Now I can’t even fall back on my backup, as it is in the cloud! 😭
Yes, I have done the usual, toggle wifi on/off, turned ipad off…
Anybody?

Edit: after some searching found a post from a different update. They suggested deleting incompatible certificates and VPN profiles. In my case that was NordVPN. Deleted it and instantly the wifi-connection was restored.
But I did learn something: keep a backup on the device, not only in the cloud!

 

[AF_APPLETALK]

How did you find that? And how did you solve it?

You'll need to open Activity Monitor, switch to the Disk tab, and search for "corespotlightd" and have a look at how much data's getting written by that process.

I had an absurd amount one time I checked, like 800+ GB. I also noticed that my computer would feel physically hot even when there was no reason for it to.

To disable, you have to also disable SIP. Simply unchecking all of the spotlight options, or disabling in through other means won't stop the spotlight process.

How to turn off Spotlight search on Mac

Has Spotlight been overloading your Mac’s CPU? We will help you disable Spotlight Suggestions and fully turn off Spotlight on your MacBook in no time.

cleanmymac.com

Supposedly it'll probably go away if you also reinstall the OS from scratch, but I'm a developer and have signing keys all over my machine for a bunch of different projects, so that's a nightmare.

I’m also interested in this, and if it’s happening on external SSDs like the Samsung T5/T7, or on NVMes inside a Thunderbolt case.

There's a way to move the spotlight index to another volume (other than the boot), so theoretically yes. Basically this bug seems to just write and rewrite stuff to the spotlight index over and over again, as fast as it can, which is AWFUL for the life of your SSD. Especially when the storage is soldered/integrated like they are on most Macs.

I hate having SIP disabled, but I can't afford spotlight trashing the SSD in my MBP. I disabled and switched to Raycast.

 

[Adora]

You'll need to open Activity Monitor, switch to the Disk tab, and search for "corespotlightd" and have a look at how much data's getting written by that process.

I had an absurd amount one time I checked, like 800+ GB. I also noticed that my computer would feel physically hot even when there was no reason for it to.

To disable, you have to also disable SIP. Simply unchecking all of the spotlight options, or disabling in through other means won't stop the spotlight process.

How to turn off Spotlight search on Mac

Has Spotlight been overloading your Mac’s CPU? We will help you disable Spotlight Suggestions and fully turn off Spotlight on your MacBook in no time.

cleanmymac.com

Supposedly it'll probably go away if you also reinstall the OS from scratch, but I'm a developer and have signing keys all over my machine for a bunch of different projects, so that's a nightmare.


There's a way to move the spotlight index to another volume (other than the boot), so theoretically yes. Basically this bug seems to just write and rewrite stuff to the spotlight index over and over again, as fast as it can, which is AWFUL for the life of your SSD. Especially when the storage is soldered/integrated like they are on most Macs.

I hate having SIP disabled, but I can't afford spotlight trashing the SSD in my MBP. I disabled and switched to Raycast.

I had a similar problem in earlier betas of 15.2 maybe. There were always several processes running crazy. I noticed it only because I heard the fan of my M3 iMac when it was very quiet. I never heard it before and it was very hot in the middle of the bottom bezel.

There was also always corespotlightd involved but that wasn't the worst of those processes, I think 5-6 hab abnormal CPU usage, some of them had zero or near zero CPU usage normally and then around or over 100%. I had to kill them several times until it stopped and on the next day around the same time they came back.

In the meantime I sometimes used an app called App Tamer, that can limit or turn off every process.

It never came to my mind that Spotlight might be the reason because everything else from those amok-processes had more CPU load.

I don't know if it stopped because I did a more or less clean install on an external boot drive or it was fixed by an update later.

Or because I disabled Spotlight for another reason. I simply never use it.

Later I found out that that my iMac had written very much data for only half a year of usage.


Have you tried to put your whole drive just in here, instead of disabling it completely?

 

[TJFDenver]

does this fix the "location" bug (location settings not sticking for widgets, hence prompting for never, once, always) when using apps like weather, calendar, maps, etc.?

sadly, this bug was introduced (or re-introduced) in 18.3

 

[nitromaxx]

Just updated my ipad pro m4 and now my internet is broken. No lan, no wlan no hotspot is working.
Now I can’t even fall back on my backup, as it is in the cloud! 😭
Yes, I have done the usual, toggle wifi on/off, turned ipad off…
Anybody?

Edit: after some searching found a post from a different update. They suggested deleting incompatible certificates and VPN profiles. In my case that was NordVPN. Deleted it and instantly the wifi-connection was restored.
But I did learn something: keep a backup on the device, not only in the cloud!

This happened to me too on my iPhone 12 PM. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what went wrong, tried restoring with my MacBook, but since there was no internet service on the phone I couldn’t remove Activation Lock to do the restore, spent some time being mad that I was gonna have to buy a new phone because I wanted the 12 to last until Sept and the 17s, then I also found something that mentioned VPNs. Removed the NordVPN profiles and instant success. I even tried letting the app install the profiles again and it broke it again. I don’t know enough to know whether the fault lies with Apple or NordVPN, but it would be nice to have a fix.

 

[Dualica 01]

This happened to me too on my iPhone 12 PM. I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what went wrong, tried restoring with my MacBook, but since there was no internet service on the phone I couldn’t remove Activation Lock to do the restore, spent some time being mad that I was gonna have to buy a new phone because I wanted the 12 to last until Sept and the 17s, then I also found something that mentioned VPNs. Removed the NordVPN profiles and instant success. I even tried letting the app install the profiles again and it broke it again. I don’t know enough to know whether the fault lies with Apple or NordVPN, but it would be nice to have a fix.

Funny enough. I waited a day or two before installing on my iPhone 12 Pro after my iPad experience. Expected problems with the same VPN —> nothing. No problems at all 🤷🏼‍♀️