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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

I find myself pushing off macOS updates far more often than I do Windows updates. They seem to take far longer and I feel like it's a black box as to what's really going. If I have it hooked up to an external monitor, there's a chance it just stops displaying the progress bar for the update on the monitor for periods of time, making the entire process seem like a black box. And then once it comes back up, sometimes I have to open the lid and login with the built-in keyboard just to resume using everything connected to my dock.

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I've been wondering why MacOS updates take so long. Surely with how MacOS has a read only root volume and APFS can do snapshotting they can build the new boot image while the system is running and then just ask for the user to reboot into the new volume, after that consolidating the snapshots by deleting the old boot image.

One potential source of the long update installation time is going to be in how they ship firmware updates as part of their OS updates now and have done for a while (Note that they stopped shipping external firmware update packages for years).

At least work Mac you can still choose not to update. That seems harder and harder to do in Windows 10.

Honestly it’s not much better these days. Sends you a notification you have to manually dismiss every day.

You can set "Do Not Disturb" hours for notifications -- e.g. from 4:00 AM to 3:59 AM.

But then I wont get any notifications at all, I need other notifications I just don't need one stickied to my screen trying to force me to update.

On Mojave, there is an option to disable automatic macOS upgrade checks (not sure about Catalina/Big Sur). I only get nagged for security updates, though I believe you can disable those as well.

I'm on Big Sur, think I did disable it on Mojave now you mention it. Guess it got turned back on.

Obviously there are always work arounds but we have to remember for 99% of users this is just the reality they're stuck with.

Same here.

With Windows I'm doing regular updates and know that these take 15 min max. Make coffee and update is completed.

But with MacOS it is usually at least hour to complete update and it is always showing "2 minutes remaining" for 30 minutes...

It's incredibly frustrating when a software update offers no feedback. I understand Apple doesn't want to burden its non-technical users with the details of what the update is doing but it gives them no recourse when something happens like as described in the blog post.

There should be a hot key that can display the log of the software update process. That way the user can search for "MacOS update stuck on reticulating splines" to try to find possible solutions. I really don't understand why Apple makes it so hard to diagnose issues with their systems.

And all the programs that stops working with each update. Have to hold off just to ensure that all programs are updated. Hated that each update broke something in my workflow, one of the reasons I moved away recently.

I thought it was always better to disconnect your external screen (from a Macbook) during an update.

Isn't this a ridiculous requirement in 2021?

It’s not meant to be used as a headless system so I don’t think so.

Fwiw n=1 my update to Big Sur went surprisingly smoothly in full clamshell mode connected to 2 external displays.

Headless means without any monitor.

You could reasonably refer to running in clamshell mode as headless, but calling a system with external monitors connected headless does not make sense.

But I get what you mean.

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