Amid the hype of the iOS 8.4 release, which included the new Apple Music streaming service, Apple also rolled out another update yesterday – OS X 10.10.4. The new update contains mostly “under-the-hood” bug and security fixes, but contains several performance improvements as well.
The biggest change in OS X 10.10.4 comes in the form of a network reliability fix. Many OS X users have been experiencing Wi-Fi connectivity problems in the past several months. The issue was a new network process called “discoveryd”, which was causing a host of networking errors – from failure to resolve DNS names, to creating duplicate machine names on the network, and more. For OS X 10.10.4, Apple reinstated an older process called mDNSResponder to handle networking processes. mDNSResponder worked well in previous versions of OS X, going all the way back to OS X 10.2 Jaguar, and has been modified to support newer technology introduced in Yosemite. The change should result in more stable network reliability across the board.
The update addresses several other issues, as well – “reliability improvements” are present in several apps, including Migration Assistant, iCloud Photo Library syncing, the Mail app no longer delays outgoing messages, and Safari sees a Javascript exploit patched. Migrating iPhoto and Aperture libraries to the Photos app has been deemed more “reliable”, as well.
OS X 10.10.4 is available now for upgrade. It’s likely that we will see one more OS X update (10.10.5) before the official release of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, currently being beta tested by developers.