Even though Apple has a well-documented history of adding features for end-users and management within their 'Spring Updates', potential functionality breaking removals in a minor update are historically out of the norm and therefore, not expected.įurther complicating matters, the beta period for a minor update is much shorter (6-8 weeks) than the beta period for major system releases (4-5 months). In an effort to shore up security by removing deprecated programming runtimes from its flagship macOS – even with all the adequate warnings over the years – a removal of functionality at this scale in an update could lead to problems for users, admins and developers alike. Additionally included in the beta release notes for macOS Monterey 12.3, Apple states that the directory /usr/bin/Python will be completely removed. These warnings may be difficult for the end-user to understand, mainly being included to aid developers and admins in tracking down applications and scripts that require updating. In addition to the written warning to developers in the macOS release notes, Apple has gone the extra step to display informational messages when users attempt to use deprecated Python 2 runtimes in macOS Monterey. One simply cannot replace the runtime with a newer version and expect everything to ' just work.' The same is even true for the various minor versions of Python 3 that are currently supported in parallel, as evidenced by Python 3.7-3.10 being currently supported (as of this writing) while Python 3.11 is in beta. While Python 3 is the official successor, updating Python code from version 2.x to 3.x is not a trivial undertaking. This means that updates, bug fixes and security updates will only support Python 3.x moving forward, as Python 2 has reached end-of-life. Why the need for this change?Īs of January 2020, the organization that oversees Python development and releases officially sunset Python as of version 2.7 in favor of the newer, more secure Python 3 and subsequent versions.

The guidance for developers being to include any runtimes their solutions are dependent on within their apps.

Furthermore, Apple stated that scripting runtimes, such as those for Python, Ruby and Perl would no longer be included with future versions of macOS either. And Apple has been warning that the pre-installed Python 2 binary, which has been part of the Mac system since Mac OS X Jaguar 10.2, will be removed in a 'future version of macOS' since the initial beta release notes for macOS Catalina were released.

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