4 ms·

Entirely agreed the loss of simplicity is a shame. I do wonder though if the current "APFS subvolume" approach is an acceptable alternative. What I don't under

by g_p 5y ago

Entirely agreed the loss of simplicity is a shame. I do wonder though if the current "APFS subvolume" approach is an acceptable alternative. What I don't understand is why the apple installer and updater seems to do a lengthy installation, when it seems to be effectively creating a "sealed image". Does anyone know of a good resource explaining the modern MacOS installer? It strikes me Apple could ship a delta image for the system subvolume, and just ensure the hash is correct before rebooting. That seems to not be what's being done, given the length of time an update takes. I wonder why they don't do this though, given it seems nothing can edit the system volume, so it ought to be shipped as an image?

sneak 5y ago
I think (a guess from experience) that a huge amount of Apple work is done under intense time pressure, and prioritized as related to the bullet point list of new features being pushed for that release's marketing communications. The installer being better isn't going to sell more computers; it ain't really broken, so there would need to be some real incentive to do anything other than incrementally fixing it. (This is not to discount the small amounts of polish they add to these tools bit by bit over time as they are incrementally improved, such as the black full screen background for the system updater.) A total overhaul of such a central system (used regularly by millions of machines during updates) is a gigantic risk, to put it mildly. They also just took one such big risk with the whole APFS migration/system volume thing, which to their credit went well. Every now and then Apple will actually rewrite an app, like they did to Disk Utility not long ago. This usually makes it worse, and relegates anyone serious to the command line tools (which are fortunately quite complete and comprehensive, even if their man pages aren't). I have a feeling they spend the most high-quality application developer resources on things like iWork and FCP and stuff that users actually live and breathe every day, not stuff they run a few times a year unattended.
bombcar 5y ago
I don't exactly know what the MacOS installed does - but I do know that as recent as Catalina having MacTeX installed in /usr/local would cause it to flip out and take hours and hours to install.

by g_p 5y ago

sneak 5y ago

I think (a guess from experience) that a huge amount of Apple work is done under intense time pressure, and prioritized as related to the bullet point list of new features being pushed for that release's marketing communications. The installer being better isn't going to sell more computers; it ain't really broken, so there would need to be some real incentive to do anything other than incrementally fixing it. (This is not to discount the small amounts of polish they add to these tools bit by bit over time as they are incrementally improved, such as the black full screen background for the system updater.) A total overhaul of such a central system (used regularly by millions of machines during updates) is a gigantic risk, to put it mildly. They also just took one such big risk with the whole APFS migration/system volume thing, which to their credit went well. Every now and then Apple will actually rewrite an app, like they did to Disk Utility not long ago. This usually makes it worse, and relegates anyone serious to the command line tools (which are fortunately quite complete and comprehensive, even if their man pages aren't). I have a feeling they spend the most high-quality application developer resources on things like iWork and FCP and stuff that users actually live and breathe every day, not stuff they run a few times a year unattended.

bombcar 5y ago

I don't exactly know what the MacOS installed does - but I do know that as recent as Catalina having MacTeX installed in /usr/local would cause it to flip out and take hours and hours to install.