Yesterday we had a bit of a digital download fire-drill: over a dozen Mac users filed bugs or contacted tech support to say that X-Plane couldn’t get their machine ID.
When X-Plane’s copy protection doesn’t work, that becomes the top thing on the priority list, full stop; we never want to see a paying customer unable to use X-Plane.
I contacted a number of users to request detailed information, and from those who I have heard back from, the answer has been consistent: the problem mysteriously vanished just as quickly as it appeared. Some of the users reported making the problem go away by reinstalling or rebooting, but each “work-around” was different, and some users made no changes, making me think the problem fixed itself.
So…the whole thing is a total mystery. While I’m happy to see users flying again as quickly as possible, not knowing what went wrong is disconcerting.
If you are on a Mac and you still can’t use your product key, please do contact tech support by email!
Update: turns out there’s a real explanation – see the comments section. I’m at least relieved that our code didn’t mysteriously go AWOL for one day.
Not a mystery at all – Apple pushed out an update that blacklisted their own .kext for their Broadcom BCM5701 Ethernet adapters, causing all Macs with BCM5710 chips to lose ethernet connectivity. No network card equals no MAC address on machines that have no Wifi chip: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/02/os-x-blacklist-accidentally-disables-ethernet-in-os-x-10-11/
This problem not only affected X-Plane, but also a lot of other software that uses MAC addresses, like Ableton Live.
Apple shipped an update correcting the list of blacklisted .kexts later: http://www.iphonehacks.com/2016/02/apple-fix-for-broken-ethernet-imac-macbook-pro.html
Here is what is very annoying about this: I have 3 macs, all with automatic updates disabled and all 3 got the update that disabled the Ethernet card, then all got another update fixing the problem and the update history shows none of it happening (you can dig into the system report and find the info). So, Apple realty does not abide by update settings and does not let us know when they actually modify the OS.
I have to correct myself: even though I had automatic updates disabled, a box allowing installation of “system data files and security updates” was checked on all my machines (the box is no longer checked). I still think that Apple show those installations in the update history for the sake of transparency and documentation (I would then have suspected the updates to have caused my lack of network and internet access and not spent an hour checking modem, router and umpteen ethernet cables!).