Tedious Updates

bbh

When will the computational power of Apple's M chips reach the point that a System Update takes seconds rather than minutes to update? Are there more components at play than raw computational power? 

It seems to me we should be at that stage now, but we obviously aren't. I have an M3 iMac. What am I missing?

marvin

bbh said:

When will the computational power of Apple's M chips reach the point that a System Update takes seconds rather than minutes to update? Are there more components at play than raw computational power? 

It seems to me we should be at that stage now, but we obviously aren't. I have an M3 iMac. What am I missing?

Software updates are more filesystem-based than processing. They extract the files for the update and copy them into place on the drive. When it's a large update, it can have tens or hundreds of thousands of files in it. Although SSDs are very fast, that's usually for sequential transfer. They are much slower when moving lots of small files. Some updates will rebuild boot caches.

It would be faster if they could copy the update into place as a single file then update the paths of the files to the new location like how a symlink works. Mac updates in early versions used to not require reboots most of the time. In the last few systems, they have been needing reboots often.

It would be nice if they could install system updates in the background and then do a normal reboot to switch it e.g clone the entire system folder, copy the files in place in the background and then swap the old system folder with the new one during a standard reboot and if anything goes wrong with the update, it can swap back. If everything is ok, it can delete the old one.