Apple is on a roll with software updates today. In addition to releasing iOS 8.4 and Mac OS X 10.10.4, it’s also pushed out new versions of GarageBand and now iBooks Author. The software that allows you to publish iBooks moved up to version 2.3 today. OS X Yosemite 10.10.5 version iMac 27 inch iBooks author 2.4 iBooks 1.2. I use iBooks author to create an iBook for my university course. At the moment, I'm just. With Yosemite, Apple has unleashed the most innovative version of OS X yet—and once again, David Pogue brings his expertise and humor to the #1 bestselling Mac book. Mac OS X 10.10 includes more innovations from the iPad and adds a variety of new features throughout the operating system.
It’s common advice to wait for the X.Y.1 release of a new version of OS X before upgrading, since Apple often fixes bugs that crop up at launch quickly. OS X 10.10.1 Yosemite has been out for a bit now, though, and while it’s working fine for many people, there are still a variety of complaints making the rounds on the Internet (for what was fixed, see “Apple Releases OS X 10.10.1, iOS 8.1.1, and Apple TV 7.0.2,” 17 November 2014). Here then is a collection of five problems and solutions (or at least workarounds) that we’ve either experienced or had reported to us.
If you’re just getting started with Yosemite, be sure to check out Scholle McFarland’s “Yosemite: A Take Control Crash Course” for information about what’s new and how to take advantage of Yosemite’s new features. And remember, since it’s one of our new Crash Courses, you can read it online for free!
1. Miscellaneous Wi-Fi Issues — Since the launch of Yosemite, we’ve heard hundreds of complaints about various Wi-Fi connectivity issues: spotty connections, slow speeds, high latency, and more. We were puzzled by these problems, none of which we experienced personally, but developer Mario Ciabarra believes he has found an explanation for at least some of the problems.
What he discovered is that in Yosemite, Macs are using Bonjour over Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) to discover devices to connect to for AirDrop, AirPlay, and other services. AWDL is a low-latency, high-throughput, peer-to-peer connection that runs over Wi-Fi but has its own dedicated network interface (much like general Wi-Fi or Ethernet). In the past, Bonjour was used only over standard Wi-Fi networks or Bluetooth. But when it works over AWDL, it appears to strain the hardware, hurting performance.
Fortunately, it’s easy to disable AWDL, but the fix also disables AirDrop and requires working at the command line. Copy the line below and, at the command line in Terminal, paste it, press Return, and enter your password. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t persist between reboots, so you’ll have to apply the fix every time you reboot your Mac.)
sudo ifconfig awdl0 down
If you see the error message “ifconfig: interface awdl0 does not exist,” you have older hardware that doesn’t support AWDL.
You can re-enable AWDL and AirDrop without rebooting by entering this line in the Terminal.
sudo ifconfig awdl0 up
2. Save Dialogs Expand Offscreen — Have you ever tried to save a document, only to find that you can’t see the Save button because it’s off the screen? A bug in Yosemite can apparently make Save dialogs grow in height by 22 pixels each time one is opened.
Jason Snell of Six Colors discovered some Terminal commands that reportedly fix the Save dialog, but one of his readers suggested an easier way: hold the Shift key down, hover over the left or right edge of the dialog until the cursor becomes opposing arrows, and then drag inward to shrink the Save dialog.
3. Menu Bar Items Redraw When Switching Displays — Those who use Yosemite on a Mac with multiple displays may be seeing an ugly visual glitch that causes menu bar items to redraw when switching between displays. We anticipate Apple fixing this in an update, but if it really bothers you, Jeff Carlson discovered a workaround: disable “Displays have separate Spaces” in System Preferences > Mission Control. You must log out and back in for this to take effect.
Making this change has numerous side effects, so you need to figure out which behavior you prefer. In fact, with “Displays have separate Spaces” turned off, OS X behaves much like it did before 10.9 Mavericks. The main differences include:
- You get only a single menu bar on the main display, rather than the active app on each display having its own separate menu bar.
- Both displays combine to create a single large desktop, and windows can span the gap between displays rather than showing on only one.
- When you enter a Space on one display, the other display shows a blank screen instead of other apps.
If you don’t like these changes, you’ll have to put up with the visual glitch until Apple gets around to fixing it.
4. Overly Bright UI — One thing Managing Editor Josh Centers noticed after installing Yosemite is how incredibly bright the interface became.
The easy solution is to turn down the brightness in the Displays preference pane (or in your monitor’s settings if you use a third-party monitor). But you might want to look into the free f.lux app, which can automatically adjust brightness and color tone throughout the day. A recent update lets f.lux activate Yosemite’s Dark Mode at sunset.
f.lux is a great app, but if you work in a field where color accuracy is key, be sure to disable it before engaging in graphics work, since f.lux changes color temperature.
Yosemite Performance Problems — Although Yosemite runs on the same Macs as both 10.9 Mavericks and 10.8 Mountain Lion, some of its new features may not work well on Macs on the older end of the spectrum. If you feel that your Mac runs more slowly after upgrading to Yosemite, try these bits of advice:
- Turn off Yosemite’s whizzy transparency effects by selecting the Reduce Transparency checkbox in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display. (Obligatory nod to those who used Eudora — remember the “Waste CPU cycles drawing trendy 3D junk” setting?)
- With the new way Safari handles tab overflow in Yosemite, it can be hard to realize just how many tabs you have open. Josh found his Mac getting increasingly sluggish, only to discover that he had hundreds of forgotten Safari tabs open! Closing them restored his Mac’s performance.
- If you find it takes longer than you’d like to open a new Finder window, it may be because of the Finder preferences setting that has new windows opening to show All My Files. Since that’s essentially a Spotlight search (and not one that makes a ton of sense to us), new Finder windows will appear faster if you select a directory like your home or Documents folder in the General pane of the Finder’s Preferences window.
- If you use FileVault and are seeing slow boots, complete with a progress bar, you may be able to resolve it by turning FileVault off and back on, running Disk Utility’s Repair Disk function in between. You can find full steps in Topher Kessler’s article on MacIssues.
- Look in Activity Monitor to see if a particular app is causing your slowdowns by monopolizing the CPU, and see if you can quit it using the X button in the toolbar. Adam Engst’s new iMac with 5K Retina display has been a nice performance boost beyond his old 2008 Mac Pro, so he was perturbed when it became extremely sluggish. Investigation in Activity Monitor revealed a
cloudd
process that was using 100% of the CPU, and further research linked it to iCloud. Adam turned off each of the services in the iCloud pane of System Preferences, force quittingcloudd
after each one, until it stopped relaunching and sucking CPU. The problem seemed to be with Reminders,though turning it back on later didn’t causecloudd
to go nuts again. - If all else fails, you may need to back up the Mac, reformat the disk, perform a clean install of Yosemite, and restore your apps and data. This is non-trivial and time-consuming, so it should be a last resort, and you should be sure to have a bootable duplicate as well as a Time Machine backup for safety’s sake. For full instructions, we recommend Plan B in Joe Kissell’s “Take Control of Upgrading to Yosemite.”
This article is over four years old and some details have changed.For up-to-date help, read “Three Ways to Reset a Lost Admin Password in High Sierra” (5 July 2018).
Several years ago, I was helping a client upgrade her Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, but she couldn’t remember her administrator password. Because she also couldn’t find the original system CDs that shipped with her iMac, I had to resort to some advanced techniques few home users would ever be able to figure out.
Starting with 10.7 Lion, you could still call on all those options, but Apple added a method so easy that even an inexperienced user can do it — the Apple ID-based password reset. Let’s explore all the options to reset a password. Which you should use depends on the specific version of Mac OS X, and how the Mac is set up.
But first, there’s an important caveat about any of these methods, related to the login keychain.
Reset Login Keychain Password — No matter which of these methods you use to reset a forgotten administrator password, it won’t update the password protecting the account’s login keychain, which stores all of the user’s passwords. Since the keychain is protected by the now-forgotten administrator password, there’s no way to get back into it. Newer versions of Mac OS X may prompt about this problem at startup; otherwise you’ll need to delete the keychain and start it over again, using these steps:
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- Open Keychain Access from
/Applications/Utilities
, and choose Keychain Access > Preferences (Command-,). - In newer versions of Mac OS X, you’ll see a button labeled Reset My Default Keychain in the General pane. If you have that button, click it to remove the old keychain and create a new one with the new password.
- If that button is not present, choose Edit > Keychain List (Command-Option-L), select the login keychain, and click the minus button to delete it.
- Open Keychain Access from
- Quit Keychain Access and restart the Mac. A new login keychain will start collecting and storing the passwords for Wi-Fi networks, email accounts, Web sites, and other logins as they occur.
If you can’t work with Keychain Access because of something like Messages Agent constantly asking for the forgotten login keychain password, you’ll have to resort to the command line, with these steps:
- Reboot into Single User mode by restarting the Mac and holding Command-S while the system comes back up. Numerous lines of status messages will scroll by.
- Once you have a command-line prompt, enter this command to mount the root Mac OS X drive as writable, so you can make changes to the filesystem:
mount -uw /
- Figure out the shortname of the account you want to reset by looking through the list that results from typing this command:
ls /Users
- Now enter this command to delete that account’s login keychain, replacing shortname appropriately:
rm /Users/shortname/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
- Restart the Mac by typing:
reboot
When the Mac comes back up, Mac OS X should create a new login keychain.
Now let’s move on to resetting the password!
1: Use the Command Line — In early versions of Mac OS X, the command line was the best way to reset a forgotten administrator password. Even now, command-line password reset remains available, making it the most universal approach that will work in any situation. If you’re not turned off by typing highly specific commands, follow these steps:
- Make a note of the user account shortname by opening the Home folder (in the Finder, choose Go > Home) and checking the folder name at the top of the window. If you can’t get into the account at all, you can determine the shortname later on.
- Reboot into Single User mode by restarting the Mac and holding Command-S while the system comes back up. A lot of arcane status messages scroll by, and leave you with a command-line prompt.
- Mount the root Mac OS X drive as writable, so you can make changes to the filesystem, with this command:
mount -uw /
- For those running 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, or 10.9 Mavericks, enter this command at the prompt to load Open Directory (which manages user accounts) manually, since it was deprecated in Lion:
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.opendirectoryd.plist
Skip this step if you’re running 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier. - If you don’t know the shortname of the account you want to reset, look through the list that results from typing this command:
ls /Users
- Next, enter the following command, replacing “shortname” with the desired account’s shortname:
dscl . -passwd /Users/shortname
If you get this error message, you may ignore it:launchctl: Couldn’t stat(“/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServicesLocal.plist”):No such file or directory nothing found to load
- Type in the new password.
- Restart the Mac by typing:
reboot
2: Use One Account to Reset Another — Since 10.4 Tiger, if a Mac had multiple administrator accounts, you could log into one account to reset the password in another. This remains possible, and is one of the reasons that many people who are responsible for the Macs of less-experienced users will often create a separate administrator-level account for troubleshooting. Here are the steps you need to follow to use this approach, assuming you have the necessary access:
- While logged in an administrator account in which you know the password, open the Users & Groups pane of System Preferences (it was called Accounts before 10.7 Lion).
- Select the name of the user whose password you want to change, and click the Reset Password button. (You may need to click the lock icon in the lower left of the window and enter an administrator password to be able to make changes.)
- Enter the new password, the same password again for verification, and a hint in case it’s forgotten again.
3: Use the Installer CD or DVD — Up through 10.6 Snow Leopard, if the Mac had only the original administrator account, and resetting the password via the command line was too scary, you could use the original Mac OS X Install disc instead. (Actual snow leopards may be endangered, but installer discs went extinct with 10.7 Lion, so this method is only for older Macs.) Here’s how:
Ibook Author For Os X 10.10 5 1
- With the Mac turned off, power it up, insert the disc immediately, and hold down the C key to make the Mac boot from the disc’s version of Mac OS X.
- From the Utilities menu at the top of the screen (or the Installer menu in 10.3 Panther), choose Reset Password.
- Select the hard disk volume, and the name of the original administrator account. (Stay away from the Root account.)
- Enter the new password, and then click Save.
- Quit the Mac OS X Installer, and restart the Mac normally.
Apple provides a support document with more details, along with instructions for Mac OS X 10.1 through 10.3, should you run into such an ancient setup.
4: Use the Recovery Partition — Starting with 10.7 Lion, which was sold only through the Mac App Store, the installer disc was replaced by the Recovery partition, a small chunk of the boot disk that contains a stripped-down version of Mac OS X and essential utilities. To reset the administrator password when running Lion or later:
![10.11.4 10.11.4](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126527220/745600267.png)
- Restart the Mac while holding down the Option key, and double-click the icon for the Recovery partition. A Mac OS X Utilities screen appears.
- Choose Utilities > Terminal.
- In Terminal, type
resetpassword
. Rather unusually for a task performed from the command line, a graphical Reset Password window appears. - Select the startup volume at the top of the window, and then choose a user account from the pop-up menu. In the fields below, enter the new password, confirm it, and add an appropriate hint.
- Click Save, and then choose Restart from the Apple menu.
5: Use Your Apple ID — Starting with 10.7 Lion, it also became possible to use your Apple ID to reset your administrator password. It’s turned on by default in the Users & Groups pane of System Preferences, but double-check to make sure.
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When this feature is active, if you enter the administrator password incorrectly at the login window three times, a popover appears with the password hint and a message saying “If you forgot your password, you can reset it using your Apple ID.” Here’s how to do that:
Os X Download
- Click the arrow icon to open the Reset Password dialog.
- Enter your Apple ID and its password, then click Reset Password to proceed.
- Enter a new administrator password, verify it, and fill in the Hint field so that you’ll get a memory trigger the next time you forget.
- Click Reset Password, and you’re done.
If you’ve also forgotten your Apple ID password, you can reset that at Apple’s My Apple ID page. Doing so relies on having access to the email address associated with your Apple ID; if that email account could be compromised, allowing the administrator password to be reset by the Apple ID might provide a way that the physical security of your Mac could be attacked. If you’re really worried, turn the feature off in the Users & Groups preference pane.
One quirk. If you upgraded from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion, you may not get the reset message after three incorrect attempts. To fix this problem while you can still access the account, open the Users & Groups preference pane, delete the affected Apple ID, and then add the same Apple ID back.
It’s also important to know that encrypting your Mac’s boot disk with FileVault 2 prevents you from using your Apple ID to reset your password (since the password is used in FileVault’s encryption). Read this Apple support document for more information about FileVault.
No Excuse for a Lost Password — Regardless of how or why an administrator password has been lost or forgotten, there are a variety of techniques that you can use to reset it and regain full access to a Mac. These techniques aren’t to be used willy-nilly, since the login keychain will be lost in the process, but whether the simple method of using an Apple ID is sufficient or you need to drop down to the command line, you should be able to get the access you need.