Have Monterey Updates Gotten Smaller?
By my reckoning (and your mileage may vary), the 12.1 update was 2.8 GB for Intel and 3.2 for M1, which are about 1 GB smaller than the equivalent updates for Big Sur. macOS 12.2 update was smaller still, at 2.4 (Intel) and 2.75 GB (M1).
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The only cost of Monterey’s smaller updates is longer time required to ‘prepare’ each update prior to its installation, which has risen from 15 minutes (macOS 11) to 30 (macOS 12).
I continue to have problems, starting with Mojave or Catalina, where sometimes an update doesn’t complete and I have to power cycle the Mac several times.
Previously:
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For people with high speed internet, I wish update were bigger if the installation time is smaller. It takes less than 2 min to download. a 2.8GB file with 300Mbps Internet. And considering most people do downloading in background. I think this is the wrong optimisation.
I'm the head of technology for an international company that has an unusually high percentage of Macs. I can't go into detail on a public forum, but the time and resources required to keep our Macs up to date and otherwise manage them has become a significant disruption. We're not going to walk away from our Mac users, but I am hearing more and more people in my company (including Apple users) talking about rebalancing toward Windows devices for new employees. Since so much of today's computing environment is focused on cloud resources and cross-platform apps, the idea causes nowhere near the concern it once did, and I can't say that it is wrong. This is compounded every time we experience a UI change from Apple that seems to fly in the face of previous Apple human interface guidelines or we encounter an app built with a cross-platform framework that ignores Mac conventions.
I can't see any reason why "preparation" can't occur in the background: a symptom of bad programming.
If you have rural internet, 2.8Gb takes 3-4 hours to download, assuming the connection doesn't time out in the middle. That's a stupidly large amount of information. If you have 2.8Gb worth of bugs to fix, you're doing something really wrong: bad programming.
And Michael mentioning that updates don't work for him, suggests this is more of the same thing: bad programming and bad testing.
Some of Apple's hardware is good (M1), some isn't (butterfly keyboard). But the software quality seems to be in free fall.
And paradoxically, my Monterey Hackintosh updates perfectly each time...