Apple Stops Offering Standalone Update Packages in macOS Big Sur

[CarlJ]

This article is getting a bit confused between full and delta installers. Standalone installers are still available via the Mac App Store or via the "softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer" command (new: "softwareupdate --list-full-installers" shows you what you can download with "softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version X.Y").

It's the standalone delta updaters that are no longer being made available by Apple, so you have to download the full 12-13GB each time.

Thank you. The article made it sound like the standalone “combo” updaters were what was disappearing, and I know a lot of people in the past have reached for those when something went awry with the normal delta updates.

 

[cupcakes2000]

Yes, in the United States there are data caps on the Internet by Internet providers like AT@T, Xfinity and Charter communications. They give you like 1000gb's for the month.

Oh, right - so it’s a massive cap then. That’s more bearable. I detected a sarcastic tone in your reply, my apologies if I somehow offended you. I’m not from your part of the world and so I wouldn’t know whats normal or not.

 

[ElectricPotato]

...you cannot bass all of your assumptions

I agree with the tenor of this statement. 🙃

 

[redcaptrickster]

Why read when one can react to keywords that trigger them? /s

 

[blackcrayon]

WOW this sucks. I can tell this will be the last Intel OS I will be interested in and will probably stay on.

The arm Macs will all be setup like the Microsoft surfaces which sucks.

How do they expect or call ARM Macs PRO MACHINES?

Mission critical HEAVY digital creators are not going to use ARM Macs if you can't even keep a copy of the OS around.

What A joke. Apple heading in the wrong direction.

ARM Macs are no longer for PRO use. Their are multiple articles on this.

No dedicated GPU. All crappy system on a chip. That blows

Yes, heavy digital creators won't be able to function if they can't keep a copy of the OS around... Imagine having to use Photoshop or Final Cut without a macOS installer or updater icon on the desktop. It just doesn't seem possible!

What do you mean ARM Macs are no longer for PRO use? Were they for the first couple of weeks, and then Apple pushed out a change and now they aren't any time after that? 🙄 I'd better run some benchmarks...

 

[mrchinchilla]

Where is that? The US? I live between the UK and France mostly, and have broadband packages in both countries, neither are capped, neither are fiber. If capped packages exist, they’re rare! Even mobile packages whilst capped are still huge, my French plan has 100gb. At least that’s a little more understandable. I’d be pretty annoyed if my broadband package was capped I have to say.

There's actually no such thing as truly uncapped internet anywhere really, if you look into your ISP's terms and conditions they'll have a fair use clause with the amount of data you can actually download/upload per month (it's usually in the terabytes), which if you do go over, they'll either throttle your connection, strongly encourage you to upgrade to a "business" plan, cut you off completely, or in extreme cases report you to the police for investigation.

 

[cupcakes2000]

There's actually no such thing as truly uncapped internet anywhere really, if you look into your ISP's terms and conditions they'll have a fair use clause with the amount of data you can actually download/upload per month (it's usually in the terabytes), which if you do go over, they'll either throttle your connection, strongly encourage you to upgrade to a "business" plan, cut you off completely, or in extreme cases report you to the police for investigation.

Well, yeah. That concept is true of lots of things. But anyway - I was responding to someone who was worried an OS update could take them over their cap, (which is ridiculous)but i have since been told the caps that exist on a capped plan are very large anyway.

 

[chrfr]

What would also be nice is local iCloud Documents caching.

That is built into Apple's caching server and enabled by default.

 

[MaxinMusicCity]

WOW this sucks. I can tell this will be the last Intel OS I will be interested in and will probably stay on.

The arm Macs will all be setup like the Microsoft surfaces which sucks.

How do they expect or call ARM Macs PRO MACHINES?

Mission critical HEAVY digital creators are not going to use ARM Macs if you can't even keep a copy of the OS around.

What A joke. Apple heading in the wrong direction.

ARM Macs are no longer for PRO use. Their are multiple articles on this.

No dedicated GPU. All crappy system on a chip. That blows

Yes, I guess I'm ultimately going to have to go back to Windows and PCs. Just can't afford to keep up with Apple anymore. And to think I liked the system.

 

[!!!]

It's not specific to the M1. The update system in Big Sur has changed to be much more like that of iOS/iPadOS, and as we know, Apple doesn't release incremental updaters for those platforms, either.

Yep, if you look at the actual Big Sur installer, it's basically just a larger (way, way too large IMO) iOS Update. Gone are the days of simple .pkg updates.

 

[Maconplasma]

Not good. I have a very slow internet connection at home (less than 1 Mbps) and it can take multiple hours to download these updates. However, at work (where the internet speed is orders of magnitude faster) I can download the updates in a couple of minutes on my PC and then transfer them to a USB thumb drive to load into my Mac. But it looks as though this will end when I update to Big Sur.

Less than 1Mbps? That’s not even fast enough to surf on Macrumors. What service do you pay for that offers less than 1Mbps? That doesn’t sound right.

 

[JoeInMilwaukee]

Less than 1Mbps? That’s not even fast enough to surf on Macrumors. What service do you pay for that offers less than 1Mbps? That doesn’t sound right.

It's AT&T U-verse (ADSL2+). Officially I pay for the lowest speed tier ("Up to 768 kbps") but it can sometimes get as "fast" as 1 Mbps. I can download about 400 MB per hour.

There are two higher tiers ("up to" 1.5 Mbps and 3.0 Mbps) but AT&T forces one to rent its wireless gateway at those levels (I own the gateway at the 768 kbps level).

 

[370zulu]

I don't understand why Apple cannot just create an app like Microsoft that fetches whatever latest OS version they have and automatically create an image or USB boot disk form it. I mean why make it so convoluted to get the OS?

I have wondered this myself.

 

[Maconplasma]

It's AT&T U-verse (ADSL2+). Officially I pay for the lowest speed tier ("Up to 768 kbps") but it can sometimes get as "fast" as 1 Mbps. I can download about 400 MB per hour.

There are two higher tiers ("up to" 1.5 Mbps and 3.0 Mbps) but AT&T forces one to rent its wireless gateway at those levels (I own the gateway at the 768 kbps level).

Wow that’s terrible. As soon as you mentioned AT&T U-verse it all made sense. I don’t know how they are still getting away with offering such slow speeds.

 

[MallardDuck]

Combo updates are a long time (and still useful) troubleshooting step. Couple that with the massive bandwidth requirements....yet another example of 'inside the bubble' thinking.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

How do they expect or call ARM Macs PRO MACHINES?

By using the word Pro. 🙂 Much in the same way that I can call a sumptuous and delicious 4 course mean “today’s trash”. Doesn’t change what it is, just changes the word I use to define it.

 

[uberzephyr]

Can’t be many users that still have a 56K modem at home. And I’m sure these people can download the update overnight.

I agree that 56k modems probably barely exist, but basic math says the rest of your argument is not the case.
13GB = 13,312MB = 13,631,488kB = 109,051,904kbits / 56kbps = 1,947,355 seconds = 541 hours.

So no, not overnight... 😵

 

[Heat_Fan89]

No surprise and as I have been saying for over a year just wait till Apple decides you can't downgrade your OS once they stop signing it just like they do with iOS and iPadOS. The switch to Apple Silicon will make this easier to pull off.

MacOS is now looking like iOS and sometime in the future it will probably share a similar update policy.

 

[redcaptrickster]

...just wait till Apple...

Wait until what?

Most people will continue on as normal, a small number of loud, annoying voices will threaten up and down to go to Windows or Linux but never will, and an even smaller number will actually put their money where their mouths are and move on.

Same as usual. Same every time Apple makes a big change. Same drama. Same flavor of popcorn.

Whatever. *shrug*

 

[IG88]

Guess I'll be spending the weekend trying to configure a DNS server

Dumb question, but can you not make your router handle the DNS requests from the clients on your LAN?

 

[Phil A.]

Dumb question, but can you not make your router handle the DNS requests from the clients on your LAN?

It does handle the DNS requests but it's a forwarder only and has no DNS capabilities of its own, unfortunately

 

[hofer]

Does this mean we will no longer be able to make a single USB installer, in case we would like to do a clean install of Big Sur? That appears to be the case, unless I misunderstood the article.

You can still make a single USB installer. I did it to do a clean install on my Mac Mini.

 

[Apple_Robert]

You can still make a single USB installer. I did it to do a clean install on my Mac Mini.

I did that when Big Sur first came out. I was concerned about moving forward with the article. Glad I was wrong about that aspect.

Does anyone know how long the install certificates last?

 

[ryanflanders256]

Even with the availability of content caching, I still don't understand the rationale behind this.

 

[JMStearnsX2]

Yeah, it certainly would - I really need to find a way to automatically update the DNS txt records that contain the public IP addresses. I'm sure Apple have a good reason for the way they've configured content caching but I don't understand why the public IP address matters so much!

If I switch it on with the defaults (which auto-detects your public IP address), it seems to work for a while but as soon as the mac connects to the internet by a different service provider through the load balancer, it falls over so the extra configuration is definitely needed.

Guess I'll be spending the weekend trying to configure a DNS server 🙂

I use dDNS Broker, from the App Store. Works well for me to keep my DNS records up to date automatically. I run it on my Mac mini server at home.