7 ms·

I got a Windows PC for the first time in over a decade recently and I cannot understand why MacOS updates are so damned slow

husamia 4y ago
updates are fast but downloading takes longer to complete
runjake 4y ago
Because on newer Macs, it’s rewriting the whole OS partition with a new firmware image, much like iOS and IPSW files. Windows, on the other hand, generally does incremental upgrades.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  > on newer Macs, it’s rewriting the whole OS partition with a new firmware image TIL
  - js2 4y ago
    Apple switched to a read-only system volume beginning with macOS Catalina, released 3 years ago. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650
- throwup 4y ago
  That can't be the whole story. If we assume the drive can write 500MB/s (conservative), and an OS install takes up 50GB of space (conservative), it should take less than 2 minutes to write the partition. Where does the other 58 minutes go?
  - Bud 4y ago
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I wondered the same about Linux installers. I'm installing some kind of debian minimal which will take 300 MB on disk. It should be installed in a fraction of the second. Instead it takes minutes. All installer should do is: dd pre-assembled Ext3 filesystem from ISO to disk; extend filesystem to the desired size; write some configs like fstab. It could be really fast. My guess is that nobody really took the time to optimize it. Installation is only one-time procedure and even it if takes a hour, who cares.
    - sitzkrieg 4y ago
      thatd work if it wasnt for (some) settings of course. but even then, image and then update /etc and friends and done but here we are
    - vbernat 4y ago
      What you describe is the cloud image. You can dd it to your hard drive and it should work as is (initial password will be displayed on first boot). As for Debian, the slowness comes mostly for fsync calls I think. You should be able to use eatmydata to avoid this. See: https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_insta...
      - vbezhenar 4y ago
        Yeah, I know, my point is that ordinary installer should do the same with ordinary installer UI rather than trying to install every deb package over and over again, running its pre/post scripts, etc. What's the point? It should be deterministic anyway.
  - lxgr 4y ago
    At much of it, the OS and even applications actually seem to be running. I remember a macOS update with the full-screen progress bar, where a few minutes in, a browser tab suddenly started playing music, with no way to turn it off...
  - runjake 4y ago
    I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon quickly this morning and the entire upgrade took about 15 minutes on my M1 MBP 13". Presumably, you're experiencing the same download issues my work MBP is experiencing. It's been downloading for over an hour and is just barely past 50%. My Internet bandwidth is 10G real-world and un-busy, so presumably Apple's CDN is getting hit good.
    - davidf18 4y ago
  - stalfosknight 4y ago
    EFI updates are sometimes included with new versions of macOS.
  - gloosx 4y ago
    Other 58 minutes is collecting telemetry
- derefr 4y ago
  That doesn't imply it should be slow; that should imply it should be fast. At least, given that macOS is using a copy-on-write filesystem such that you can share blocks between multiple volumes/snapshots — which it is; and that the OS base-image is a sealed "everyone has the same cryptographic checksum" volume — which it is; and that Apple are using a binary-diff-based "create aside" OS-image update process, like ChromiumOS/CoreOS — which they are. They should only have to write out disk pages for the changes, and then just link the existing pages in to form the rest of the extents. Like a `btrfs receive`. But for some reason, despite all that fancy tech, it's still slow; and the install process still requires rebooting into a separate Recovery OS to do parts of the installation. Which, given the "create aside" part especially, is just ridiculous. You should be able to just run the installer in the background as you're using your device, and eventually be told "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS."
  - wingworks 4y ago
    "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS." Oh man, wouldn't that be amazing!
    - kaba0 4y ago
      NixOS then lives in the future, as that is exactly what it does!
      - nix23 4y ago
        Pff, FreeBSD and Illumos/Solaris have BE's (boot environments) since years
        kaba0 4y ago
        Can you give your system’s declarative configuration to another machine and boot into an equivalent one? :D
        vermaden 4y ago
- zamalek 4y ago
  This isn't really a viable excuse. Silverblue is also immutable and updates are applied in under 10 seconds prior to reboot (which is never affected by updates). Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.
  - piva00 4y ago
    > Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts. The same could be said to the opposite transition, from macOS to Linux and/or Windows. All of these OSs are mature and old enough to have thousands of papercuts different from the thousands of papercuts of the other OSs, the impression is mostly based on what you are used to. I used to be staunchly anti-Apple/Mac up to 2010-ish, nowadays I simply can't work and feel productive with a Windows machine. Linux can be a bit more pleasant until I get to the edges of the Linux-on-desktop UX and the experience crumbles. Windows is definitely the most unpleasant experience I've ever had on desktop OSs, and I was a user all the way from Win3.11 to Windows 7 (latest iterations only on a gaming computer though).
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Windows' updates got much less granular since Windows 10. It used to be that updates were delivered in individual packages that can be installed and uninstalled independently (within reason). Nowadays more and more updates come in a "rollup" package which is a bundle of many updates and it's take it or leave it. Even worse, some of the bigger feature updates are actually full OS reinstalls under the hood.
- js2 4y ago
  It's not how old the Mac is, but rather whether its running macOS Catalina or newer when Apple switched to a separate read-only system volume: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650
ar_lan 4y ago
My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly. I used to game weekly with my friends, and because of the above problem, I would have to turn on my computer the night before and start the update so I would be able to reliably play a game the following day - otherwise, there was an extremely good chance that they would start gaming at 8pm and I wouldn't be able to join until roughly 10pm due to the Windows updates. At the time, this was Windows 10. I eventually just switch to an old Xbox (ironically, still Microsoft), which was far more reliable (although XBox updates take forever too), because we could cross-play Apex Legends. But that is an 8 year old XBox One and it finally has crapped out on me. I'm currently finishing up getting parts for a new PC build, which will have Windows 11, and I really dread it. I wish Apex was for Linux because I just want to have a Linux-based gaming environment. -- Anyway - all this to say... macOS major updates might be slow, but they happen so infrequently, that it's not nearly a big deal. Minor security patches are almost never that slow for me, especially compared to Windows.
- ryan-allen 4y ago
  Did you have an SSD on your PC ~3 years ago? I never found it to be that bad or for it to take that long! I kicked off the Ventura update today on the M1 Pro, went out to get lunch, it had finished by the time I got back. I've been on the 'insider preview' track on Windows 10 and 11 for around 18 months. You get big updates maybe 2-4 times per month and they do take around 20 minutes to install. Stick on the regular updates track, make sure you get an SSD, and your new Windows 11 experience will be fine just fine :) Check out WSL too, it is pretty good. I'm split on Linux vs Windows vs MacOS for development, it's all a game of tradeoffs. The trick is to have a few computers!
- Scharkenberg 4y ago
  > My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly. Unless you manually seek preview updates, Windows gets updates once per month, on Patch Tuesday (a twenty-year tradition now). Two hours for "every single update" sounds implausible for Windows 10 because Microsoft has implemented changes to minimize the "offline phase" of the updates to mere minutes - even on HDDs. Which brings to my last point. If updates were taking long, then your OS was most certainly installed on a HDD. Everyone knows HDDs are slow as hell. Seriously, what was the point of replying with complaints about Windows on slow hardware and comparing it to mac OS on fast hardware? It almost feels dishonest. And for the record, Ventura is installing on the Mac as I type this on my Windows machine. The 22H2 update for Windows 11 had an offline phase of under 10 minutes and I have a non-NMVe SSD here. The Mac has already been down for about 15 and it's not even done yet.
gw99 4y ago
Wait until you buy a NOS Windows PC for the first time. I had a T495 take nearly two hours to run all updates in. About 20 minutes of that was it fannying around working out what to do. My MBP took 10 mins to update earlier. That's fine.
g_p 4y ago
There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the slowness, but a reasonably good technical write-up on the update mechanism is available at [0]. The time spent rebooting does seem excessive, especially when using image-based updates. [0] https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/19/explainer-macos-updaters/ https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/19/explainer-macos-updaters...
anigbrowl 4y ago
Windows does frequent incremental updates and makes them pretty painless, but has a bad habit of just letting the installation files pile up and fill your storage. If you or your PC supplier have the habit of having a small-medium boot disk (or partition) for just your OS and applications this can yield unwelcome surprises.
Razengan 4y ago
Windows updates when you don't want it to and does that often. Tons of horror stories out there. macOS updates much less frequently and never "surprises" you (at least it hasn't done to me)
acdha 4y ago
This is only about 5-10 minutes on modern hardware. Historically a lot of developers saw it as slow because it moved the contents of /usr/local in a naive loop which meant that systems using something like Homebrew spent 90% of the total time moving a million files one by one.
wyan 4y ago
Last time I checked the logs after an update, what I understood had happened was that the installer was installing the new files one by one, and logging each one of them. Which is a lot of files. I've no idea if this is still done this way, but I suspect it's part of the reason for the slowness.

husamia 4y ago

updates are fast but downloading takes longer to complete

runjake 4y ago

Because on newer Macs, it’s rewriting the whole OS partition with a new firmware image, much like iOS and IPSW files. Windows, on the other hand, generally does incremental upgrades.

baal80spam 4y ago
> on newer Macs, it’s rewriting the whole OS partition with a new firmware image TIL
- js2 4y ago
  Apple switched to a read-only system volume beginning with macOS Catalina, released 3 years ago. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650
throwup 4y ago
That can't be the whole story. If we assume the drive can write 500MB/s (conservative), and an OS install takes up 50GB of space (conservative), it should take less than 2 minutes to write the partition. Where does the other 58 minutes go?
- Bud 4y ago
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I wondered the same about Linux installers. I'm installing some kind of debian minimal which will take 300 MB on disk. It should be installed in a fraction of the second. Instead it takes minutes. All installer should do is: dd pre-assembled Ext3 filesystem from ISO to disk; extend filesystem to the desired size; write some configs like fstab. It could be really fast. My guess is that nobody really took the time to optimize it. Installation is only one-time procedure and even it if takes a hour, who cares.
  - sitzkrieg 4y ago
    thatd work if it wasnt for (some) settings of course. but even then, image and then update /etc and friends and done but here we are
  - vbernat 4y ago
    What you describe is the cloud image. You can dd it to your hard drive and it should work as is (initial password will be displayed on first boot). As for Debian, the slowness comes mostly for fsync calls I think. You should be able to use eatmydata to avoid this. See: https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_installations_using_eatmydata.html https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Quicker_Debian_insta...
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      Yeah, I know, my point is that ordinary installer should do the same with ordinary installer UI rather than trying to install every deb package over and over again, running its pre/post scripts, etc. What's the point? It should be deterministic anyway.
- lxgr 4y ago
  At much of it, the OS and even applications actually seem to be running. I remember a macOS update with the full-screen progress bar, where a few minutes in, a browser tab suddenly started playing music, with no way to turn it off...
- runjake 4y ago
  I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon quickly this morning and the entire upgrade took about 15 minutes on my M1 MBP 13". Presumably, you're experiencing the same download issues my work MBP is experiencing. It's been downloading for over an hour and is just barely past 50%. My Internet bandwidth is 10G real-world and un-busy, so presumably Apple's CDN is getting hit good.
  - davidf18 4y ago
- stalfosknight 4y ago
  EFI updates are sometimes included with new versions of macOS.
- gloosx 4y ago
  Other 58 minutes is collecting telemetry
derefr 4y ago
That doesn't imply it should be slow; that should imply it should be fast. At least, given that macOS is using a copy-on-write filesystem such that you can share blocks between multiple volumes/snapshots — which it is; and that the OS base-image is a sealed "everyone has the same cryptographic checksum" volume — which it is; and that Apple are using a binary-diff-based "create aside" OS-image update process, like ChromiumOS/CoreOS — which they are. They should only have to write out disk pages for the changes, and then just link the existing pages in to form the rest of the extents. Like a `btrfs receive`. But for some reason, despite all that fancy tech, it's still slow; and the install process still requires rebooting into a separate Recovery OS to do parts of the installation. Which, given the "create aside" part especially, is just ridiculous. You should be able to just run the installer in the background as you're using your device, and eventually be told "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS."
- wingworks 4y ago
  "when you reboot, it'll be into the new OS." Oh man, wouldn't that be amazing!
  - kaba0 4y ago
    NixOS then lives in the future, as that is exactly what it does!
    - nix23 4y ago
      Pff, FreeBSD and Illumos/Solaris have BE's (boot environments) since years
      - kaba0 4y ago
        Can you give your system’s declarative configuration to another machine and boot into an equivalent one? :D
        vermaden 4y ago
zamalek 4y ago
This isn't really a viable excuse. Silverblue is also immutable and updates are applied in under 10 seconds prior to reboot (which is never affected by updates). Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts.
- piva00 4y ago
  > Coming from Windows and Linux, macOS had been a very unpleasant experience for me. It's full of papercuts. The same could be said to the opposite transition, from macOS to Linux and/or Windows. All of these OSs are mature and old enough to have thousands of papercuts different from the thousands of papercuts of the other OSs, the impression is mostly based on what you are used to. I used to be staunchly anti-Apple/Mac up to 2010-ish, nowadays I simply can't work and feel productive with a Windows machine. Linux can be a bit more pleasant until I get to the edges of the Linux-on-desktop UX and the experience crumbles. Windows is definitely the most unpleasant experience I've ever had on desktop OSs, and I was a user all the way from Win3.11 to Windows 7 (latest iterations only on a gaming computer though).
Nextgrid 4y ago
Windows' updates got much less granular since Windows 10. It used to be that updates were delivered in individual packages that can be installed and uninstalled independently (within reason). Nowadays more and more updates come in a "rollup" package which is a bundle of many updates and it's take it or leave it. Even worse, some of the bigger feature updates are actually full OS reinstalls under the hood.
js2 4y ago
It's not how old the Mac is, but rather whether its running macOS Catalina or newer when Apple switched to a separate read-only system volume: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210650

ar_lan 4y ago

My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly. I used to game weekly with my friends, and because of the above problem, I would have to turn on my computer the night before and start the update so I would be able to reliably play a game the following day - otherwise, there was an extremely good chance that they would start gaming at 8pm and I wouldn't be able to join until roughly 10pm due to the Windows updates. At the time, this was Windows 10. I eventually just switch to an old Xbox (ironically, still Microsoft), which was far more reliable (although XBox updates take forever too), because we could cross-play Apex Legends. But that is an 8 year old XBox One and it finally has crapped out on me. I'm currently finishing up getting parts for a new PC build, which will have Windows 11, and I really dread it. I wish Apex was for Linux because I just want to have a Linux-based gaming environment. -- Anyway - all this to say... macOS major updates might be slow, but they happen so infrequently, that it's not nearly a big deal. Minor security patches are almost never that slow for me, especially compared to Windows.

ryan-allen 4y ago
Did you have an SSD on your PC ~3 years ago? I never found it to be that bad or for it to take that long! I kicked off the Ventura update today on the M1 Pro, went out to get lunch, it had finished by the time I got back. I've been on the 'insider preview' track on Windows 10 and 11 for around 18 months. You get big updates maybe 2-4 times per month and they do take around 20 minutes to install. Stick on the regular updates track, make sure you get an SSD, and your new Windows 11 experience will be fine just fine :) Check out WSL too, it is pretty good. I'm split on Linux vs Windows vs MacOS for development, it's all a game of tradeoffs. The trick is to have a few computers!
Scharkenberg 4y ago
> My previous experience with Windows (~3 years ago) was that every single update took ~2 hours to complete, and they were asking to update weekly. Unless you manually seek preview updates, Windows gets updates once per month, on Patch Tuesday (a twenty-year tradition now). Two hours for "every single update" sounds implausible for Windows 10 because Microsoft has implemented changes to minimize the "offline phase" of the updates to mere minutes - even on HDDs. Which brings to my last point. If updates were taking long, then your OS was most certainly installed on a HDD. Everyone knows HDDs are slow as hell. Seriously, what was the point of replying with complaints about Windows on slow hardware and comparing it to mac OS on fast hardware? It almost feels dishonest. And for the record, Ventura is installing on the Mac as I type this on my Windows machine. The 22H2 update for Windows 11 had an offline phase of under 10 minutes and I have a non-NMVe SSD here. The Mac has already been down for about 15 and it's not even done yet.

gw99 4y ago

Wait until you buy a NOS Windows PC for the first time. I had a T495 take nearly two hours to run all updates in. About 20 minutes of that was it fannying around working out what to do. My MBP took 10 mins to update earlier. That's fine.

g_p 4y ago

There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the slowness, but a reasonably good technical write-up on the update mechanism is available at [0]. The time spent rebooting does seem excessive, especially when using image-based updates. [0] https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/19/explainer-macos-updaters/ https://eclecticlight.co/2022/03/19/explainer-macos-updaters...

anigbrowl 4y ago

Windows does frequent incremental updates and makes them pretty painless, but has a bad habit of just letting the installation files pile up and fill your storage. If you or your PC supplier have the habit of having a small-medium boot disk (or partition) for just your OS and applications this can yield unwelcome surprises.

Razengan 4y ago

Windows updates when you don't want it to and does that often. Tons of horror stories out there. macOS updates much less frequently and never "surprises" you (at least it hasn't done to me)

acdha 4y ago

This is only about 5-10 minutes on modern hardware. Historically a lot of developers saw it as slow because it moved the contents of /usr/local in a naive loop which meant that systems using something like Homebrew spent 90% of the total time moving a million files one by one.

wyan 4y ago

Last time I checked the logs after an update, what I understood had happened was that the installer was installing the new files one by one, and logging each one of them. Which is a lot of files. I've no idea if this is still done this way, but I suspect it's part of the reason for the slowness.