This is the type of article that can be published continuously for all of history. The computers get bigger and bigger. It would be more impressive if the updates were smaller for a while.
Obviously this means you have to maintain 2 update tracks, one optimised flow for all the normies, and one for everyone who has disabled SIP. But the benefits are worth it when you consider all the electricity and bandwidth used by all the excess data you're no longer sending over the network.
Combine this with APFS snapshotting and it should make for a resilient update schema which uses minimal amounts of data.
Or am I completely wrong in my assumptions about binary diff patches?
> Since Big Sur, updates have reduced in total size, and in Ventura were close to or below earlier versions
Apple is shipping smaller updates over time, not larger (any more).
Also, I just checked. Even this record "small" sized update is still an upward trend based on when my Internet connection was originally provisioned.