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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what he would have said about the 20 minutes when you can't use the computer and the 1+ GB download it takes to update a state-of-the-art mac from macOS 13.5 to 13.5.1 that has one (1) bug fix ("macOS Ventura 13.5.1 fixes an issue in System Settings that prevents location permissions from appearing.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37206660

I miss having Steve running Apple.

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Coming from the patching experience on various Linux distros (and even Windows), I really want to know what Apple is doing under the hood with macOS updates. Their point updates are multiple gigabytes and often take 20-40 minutes to install. My Arch system updates itself in a couple minutes (even if I haven't updated for a month) and there's no "unusable" phase of the upgrade process, other than a normal reboot for kernel updates.

A few years ago, they moved the OS to a “sealed system volume” — basically, the entire OS is stored on an immutable disk image, signed and verified with a Merkle-tree sort of structure. This has a few advantages: malware cannot modify the OS, you can’t brick your system by accidentally deleting OS files, updates are far more robust (they don’t have to change files on your root filesystem), and the OS can be stored unencrypted meaning you can boot the system without requiring the user’s password first. (And of course, there’s an opt-out if you really want to modify OS files.)

The big downside is that installing an update means you have to rebuild and re-sign the entire OS image, which takes forever. When they first introduced this model, I was surprised at this: I expected they could generate the new OS image in the background, while you’re still using the computer, then just swap over to the new image with a single reboot, instead of requiring a ton of downtime. I think they might finally be doing this with macOS 14/iOS 16 — I’ve been running the betas for both and noticed restarting to install updates has become far, far faster — like maybe a minute or two.

I’ve been running the betas for both and noticed restarting to install updates has become far, far faster — like maybe a minute or two.

Nice! (And thanks for the backgrounder. It's the first time I've seen this explanation on HN.)

Isn’t Fedora Silverblue follows the same model? I haven’t used it much, but I remember upgrades being faster, not longer.

I assume he would say the same things I would hear him say in meetings where the installer team would show him the lastest versions of the application. A special memory comes from the time where the installer progress bar starting going in reverse. The installer and mail teams received a lot of abuse. It took a special person to stay motivated given all of the challenges they faced and the feedback they got from SJ.

As a customer (my personal computer/display/phone/etc spend with Apple over the past 20 years or so: $25k+): I would prefer having someone in charge who can tell/understand/sense and say that something is clearly not good enough and then actually getting it solved. Tim Cook does not strike me as that kind of guy.

The abuse isn't required though.

(These extremely slow updates thing has been going on for many years now. So many lifetimes wasted.)

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