{"id":41292,"date":"2023-12-04T16:37:30","date_gmt":"2023-12-04T21:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=41292"},"modified":"2023-12-04T16:37:30","modified_gmt":"2023-12-04T21:37:30","slug":"smaller-and-faster-updates-with-sonoma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/04\/smaller-and-faster-updates-with-sonoma\/","title":{"rendered":"Smaller and Faster Updates With Sonoma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Oakley<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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When a user accepts Software Update’s invitation to upgrade to macOS 13 or 14, rather than downloading a full installer app of about 12 GB, Ventura or Sonoma will instead attempt an update, in which only changed files are copied to the System volume, substantially reducing the amount to be downloaded, and increasing the speed of the update process. This also has the unfortunate side-effect that users who inadvertently start that update process have no easy way to abort it, and Ventura and Sonoma resulted in many upgrading sooner than they had intended [because Apple released them as updates rather than upgrades<\/a>].<\/p>\n

As far as I’m aware, Apple has made no announcements of changes in macOS updates for Sonoma, and there’s no evidence that any more of the contents of the SSV have been transferred to cryptexes, allowing them to be updated without rebuilding the SSV. However, the two unscheduled patch updates to Sonoma so far, in 14.1.1 and 14.1.2, have required the smallest updates since the days of Mojave. In the case of 14.1.2, the update was only 400 MB for Intel Macs, and 820 MB for Apple silicon, far below the smallest update sizes in Ventura. Although there’s some uncertainty as to exactly what was changed in 14.1.1, 14.1.2 contains two fixes to WebKit, thus in a cryptex, and some smaller updates in the contents of the SSV. In previous versions of macOS since Big Sur, those would have required larger downloads, particularly for Apple silicon Macs, which would have been at least 1 GB larger.<\/p>\n

Although harder to quantify, macOS update installation times have also become steadily shorter, at least on Apple silicon models, whose 30 minutes ‘preparation’ seldom takes even half that time. Some of this improvement in speed may be attributable to the smaller size of updates, of course, but on Apple silicon Macs they are now sufficiently quick as to be little interruption.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I continue to have problems, on multiple Macs, where updates repeatedly fail to prepare. So it takes a while to redownload the updater and prepare multiple times. However, I agree with Oakley that, when they work, the updates are smaller and install much more quickly.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n