It isn’t immediately clear to me from the article why these updates can’t just be patches; it sounded like a large part of the problem here is that what’s ostensibly a couple kilobyte delta to fix ends up bloated to multiple gigabytes because of things like each update requiring firmware for every single Intel mac, and a copy of the entire dyld cache for System libraries. What is it about the update process that makes it so you can’t just skip out on extra fluff if it doesn’t need changing?
It’s not immediately clear why the update system is like this but agreed with author that it totally sucks. There’s an OS update waiting on me to install, stating it contains only a fix for the Mac mini m1, which I do not have. It would be one of those “flash all ye firmware” updates if I would run it. Every update is. Updates are atrocious. The only upside I can think of is that rootkits might have trouble persisting?
