With the upgrade to the most recent version of MacOS Catalina 10.15.4 (19E287), I received a handful of warnings about this or that legacy system extension:
- Legacy Developer: Sierrawireless
- Symantec
- Ploytec GmbH
- Legacy Developer: Novatelwireles
- Legacy Developer: Rim
- Legacy Developer: Lge
The "More Info" button takes one to this Apple Support Page. Some of these look suspiciously old to me, particularly the "Legacy Developer" ones. Rather than "contact[ing] the developer", I'd like to see more information about these extensions and determine two things:
- Is this extension related to an app (which I may no longer be using)
- How can I remove, safely, an unwanted system extension.
So, any information on how to dig deeper and act upon into these warnings would be appreciated.
2 Answers
Use System Report
The following worked for me:
- Click on the Apple icon then About This Mac
- Click on System Report
- In the left column, Click on Software > Extensions
- (Be patient -- it might take a while to load up the info)
- Click on the Obtained From column so you can skip over all the Apple provided extensions
- Look at each extension NOT provided by Apple. If the Dependencies field is Deprecated, you probably can (and should) remove it.
P.S.: A similar technique for Applications (see step 3 above) lets you quickly find all 32-bit applications, which will also be unsupported going forward.
1Don't panic. Your Mac will continue to work fine. Check out these two links. They have good info on the subject:
I was able to find the culprit apps in different folders, and once identified as really useless (RIM for example), I dragged the containing folder to the trash and voilà.
Other apps may just need updating, like Norton and Symantec.
Good luck.
1
