| Why on earth does Apple put an INSTALLER that installs the macOS Installer on a disk image, rather than SIMPLY PUTTING the macOS Installer on the disk image????? So if you don't know how all this works, with I think macOS High Sierra and newer, you can download them through links on Apple's support site, and they'll download through the App Store. But for older versions, Sierra and previous, they are instead available via a .dmg disk image that downloads directly through the browser. Great - you would think. That makes the whole process so much simpler! Except Apple being Apple, it does not. Because instead of putting the macOS installer directly on the disk image, they put an installer .pkg on the disk image. And that .pkg installer, INSTALLS the macOS installer into your Applications folder. Now this might just sound like an extra step or two, and not that big a deal. HOWEVER the installer package can only run on an older version of macOS itself. So you need to already have an ancient macOS version installed somewhere, to get the installer out of it. Now I'm a Mac tech so I have plenty of old machines running all sorts of systems, and I have a whole army of virtual machines running almost any macOS version I'd ever need. But how is a normal person supposed to do this. Here, a scenario: Some kid sees an old intel iMac in the trash. He picks it and checks it out. Turns out the hard drive died but otherwise the Mac seems fine. So he buys a used, cheap SSD and throws it in. Everything is going great, but now he needs to install El Capitan, because it's lets say, a 2009 iMac. So he downloads the .dmg from Apple, but theres no sane, reasonable way for him to get the installer OUT of the .dmg to actually install the OS! He downloads the .dmg on some newer Mac, lets say for simplicity, a 2019 iMac running Sequioa. But when he tries to run the package installer to get the El Capitan macOS installer out of it, SOLELY for the purpose of making a USB installer for the old iMac, he gets the error that El Cap is too old for such a new Mac. I mean think about this, the ONLY REASON you make old macOS versions available, is to install them on old Macs! Well I guess and also a small percentage will be downloading them to make virtual machines (which is actually what I'm doing today), but its no better or easier on a VM, its the same thing. So I had to copy the whole .dmg file to an offsite server running el cap, run the installer, and now i'm copying the installer application BACK to my local, newer Mac, just so I can create my virtual machine. So I guess I have two basic questions here: 1) Am I missing something, is there some other reasonable way to get the installers out of the disk images that doesn't require 3rd party utilities like Pacifist, or using crazy terminal commands? 2) What is the benefit of this? What is the "upside" to such a ridiculous way to distribute software? Fun fact: I posted this to the Apple forum and they removed it for unspecified reasons, but suggested I read the etiquette rules. |
