Software updates delivered through the automatic updater are listed in an XML catalog file that anyone can parse to get the URL where the actual update package is hosted. The packages usually use the platform standard .pkg installer format.

(Note that the update check does not send information about your system to Apple.)

Apple still provides the `softwareupdate` command line tool to list, download, and apply updates and even whole OS installers of the last 4 years of releases. The OS installers contain tools that can produce bootable install media if you want to archive them.

Apple has also provided tools to mirror software updates on your own infrastructure---see the "Content Caching" option in the Sharing prefpane, for example. Not sure what the state of this is today.

I think the linked article makes good arguments for why it may be premature to discontinue the standalone updates. And I am critical of how difficult it is to obtain OS installers for older hardware and VMs. But it's not the end of macOS as a developer platform.

How is reducing the number of ways one can acquire or install something not further locking down a platform?

That's pretty much what 'locking down' a platform comes down to, reducing the number of ways you can install various kinds of software on said platform. An OS is still another piece of software.

Perhaps this is incrementally progressing towards constant security updates like Chrome has had for some time.

Reliability is only one axis. Focus too much on one aspect, and increasingly fewer people will be happy.

If the last week has been any indicator, this property of software product value is very hard to provide and its value greatly underestimated.

The effect is similar, unless you’re trying to find away around it.

Most users do not care.

How is sitting on social media ranting about such things productive?

This is how corporate works. Do something different politically if it matters.

From which we find the URL to the 11.1 standalone installer (11.4GB):

http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/00/55/001-86606-A_9...

> they just want to reduce the number of ways the OS can be installed and upgraded

Isn't that synonymous?

Ian: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no...no, no, not at all. I, I, I just think that the.. uh.. their appeal is becoming more selective.

If I have two URLs pointing to my website and then I remove one, users can just go to the other one. I have not "locked down" my website or limited access at all.

The impact on user freedom is negligible.

But even if we decide this particular situation is in fact locking down, what I said is still true. Locking down is a subset of removing options, not synonymous with it.

Apple has been practicing incrementalism. Each small step by itself doesn't seem very significant. But the slow march continues, and the pieces add up. Current people with technical ability may be able to modify their behavior to work around it, but the technical bar has been raise slightly-- people without technical ability have one more small speedbump.

If you're right and Apple stops here, then sure, no big deal, and I'd be happy to be wrong. This isn't the hill I'd die on for the issue. It's the trend I don't like. If a few years go by without Apple locking down the OS further, I'd be okay with the status quo. Looking at the trend of the past few years though, it seems like Apple is slowly taking MacOS towards the iOS model.

If this was a typical increment in Apple's incrementalism, then even the sum total would be something you could ignore for a hundred years.

If the scope is too large any company will fail, regardless of budget.

Apple historically was always removing features that add bulk but are not necessary (although some people need them).

To give some examples: - with one of the MacOS releases they announces there are no new features in the OS, just a cleanup of unnecessary stuff - they removed support for 32 bit apps a year ago - personally I found it painful as some stuff stopped working, but I understand this was done to streamline the system - and so on

Sure it’s sometimes irritating, but otherwise you risk ending up with a mess that Windows is.

As a side note - since they switched from physical medium it was weird to me personally that there even is a standalone installer - why not make it a system update? This year they finally did the switch.

It doesn't need to. Every Big Sur mac maintains a hardware-serial-linked TLS connection to Apple's push notification service (which exposes client IP, and thus the city you're in and your ISP) at all times when connected to the network. Also, opening the App Store app links your IP to your hardware serial number.

War is peace, freedom is slavery etc.

I could almost understand it if you were talking up Linux, at least there is some real difference there. Microsoft and Google? Give me a break.

I run Catalina in a VM because it's the oldest macOS version that supports the APIs I'm developing against. I used to use KVM for virtualizing macOS, but VirtualBox[3] is more portable despite being much slower, so I use that now.

If you can use KVM with Virtio and VFIO passthrough, it's really fast. Linux just got Virtio-fs[4], too. I've had to pass boot options to the kernel to get the IOMMU to play nicely on the Mac, though, and I just don't have patience for that these days.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172499

[3] https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

[4] https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/

Never bothered with GPU passthrough however.

I honestly don't even know why you'd do that. I certainly have never heard of anyone doing that until now.

I'm not personally affected, and my Apple outrage cup is already filled up with their sustained anti-repair pro-landfill stance.

My priors tell me that to a close approximation, this will prevent 0 people from installing MacOS. It's just "outrage porn".

If you actually do care about the environmental impact of your electronics, Greenpeace are the real deal. They look into the details from renewable energy use, eliminating toxic materials, average device lifetimes to reduce device churn and recyclability, there's one clear option out of the big device manufacturers and it's not even close.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40561811/greenpeace-to-apple-for...

My one criticism of the a Greenpeace report I think is that they don’t really put enough weight on average device working lifetime. It’s a direct multiplier on every other factor.

Not exactly, because other phones can be repaired which extends their life.

Apple's doesn't do board repair themselves, and blocks others from doing it as well. This means more components end up in land fills. Apple's own extended warranty program makes billions of dollars. And the repair industry itself is quite large - millions maybe hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Apple products clearly fail and need repair at some point or another.

I hope you'll join everyone else in demanding Apple stop opposing right to repair legislation.

“..researchers found that brand, an intangible property, is more important than repairability or memory size in extending the life of a product.”[0]

The article found that Apple phones last on average a year longer than Samsung’s.

[0]https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181016142434.h...

Another estimate puts Apple device lifespans at 4 years 3 months.[1]

[1]https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-ipad-mac-heres-how-long...

The average for all smartphones is estimated as from 2 to 3 years, but bear in mind that includes many Apple devices, so non Apple devices must average the low end of that.[2]

[2]https://www.coolblue.nl/en/advice/lifespan-smartphone.html

The fact is repairability simply isn’t a significant factor in environmental impact overall. I do completely accept that wanting it as an individual right is entirely reasonable. There are plenty of solid arguments in favour of repairability, but environmentalism isn’t one of them. If you care about the environment more than right to repair, Apple devices win by a very large margin.

>The fact is repairability simply isn’t a significant factor in environmental impact overall.

This is not a fact. Every single environmental group on this planet agrees that repair is significant component in reducing environmental impact. By definition it means fewer devices need to be re-purchased, fewer devices end up in landfills, more local repair jobs, more support-economy jobs, etc. I don't think I will be able to convince you otherwise. I will let you have the last word. Have a nice day :)

Not swayed by studies. Sheesh. If the best you can do is “Laaa, Laaa, I’m not listening”, I’m done.

While it can be argued that such a service model can have benefits for both the provider and the consumer, Apple has historically engaged in anti-consumer behavior and continues to do so.

So no, this sort of thing is not to improve anything for anyone but Apple.

I think you just repeated yourself.

- Apple hasn't officially said anything about this. The linked rantpost is verklempt because it's been 4 weeks since the release of a major OS revision supporting a new processor architecture and a standalone installer hasn't been provided (yet).

And here are his given arguments for the Collapse of American Way and Civilization in General if this situation continues:

- It's hard to reinstall Safari.

This basically happens ... never. I've been running OS X since the beta and have never had to reinstall Safari.

- It would make it difficult to recreate a specific point release in the future.

This is valid, but also a rare use case and this doesn't prevent you from doing it, you just have to apply the incrementals from Apple.

- It would eliminate "An effective panacea for some system problems."

I think I applied a combo update to fix some hosed up printer drivers after an HP update screwed the pooch one time but I could have just loaded an earlier version. This goes into the general category of "zapping the PRAM" to fix issues which originated from a real problem this actually corrected 20 years ago and morphed into a mystical incantation to utter when you have no idea wtf is wrong with the computer and don't feel like praying the rosary over it.

Quote from the thread

"Apple finally has shown their true colours and no form of hardware or software advancement will push me to use their products. Can you imagine the world without Linux or BSD alternatives? What a nightmare."

It would be a fun project to run an sentiment classifier against Apple related comments to see what the ratio actually is.

Run:

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Big\ Sur.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume

Here is the support link:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

I just did it and it works just fine.

UPDATE - I missed the fact it was the point release updates for some reason. Sorry. Leaving post as it is helpful for those that want to make a boot USB.

I needed to run Migration Assistant to copy files from a Mac Mini with 10.15.7 to another Mac Mini, originally with 10.11.

Time Machine couldn't restore. The APFS drive wouldn't mount. Carbon Copy Cloner couldn't clone the drive either. I started to dd, but realised it wouldn't update the BootROM. I made a Catalina installer with createinstallmedia, to install 10.15.

Migration Assistant still failed to copy over the keychain, because I'd installed 10.15.3 or something on the destination, instead of 10.15.7 (the source Mac Mini). Most files worked, but without the keychain, many passwords and software licence keys weren't available.

I needed the standalone updaters to make both computer run 10.15.7, so I could run Migration Assistant and get the files over (finally!)

It would be a big problem if Apple stop making these available.

It's also good to not need to connect to the App Store, with all the 2FA involved. That would associate my Apple account with that computer, and save my password in the keychain. (Yes, I know I can delete it, but I want to leave the migration running overnight and just tell the user to reboot when it's done).

My biggest pain point was that the downloader portion of the updater is so low quality. It corrupts downloads or restarts with tiny network blips, can't resume most of the time and often much slower to download than available bandwidth (that might a bad routing issue on my country). Overall it's often a painful experience.

It was one-off project for dedicated purpose, not a desktop replacement, but I will probably build another one and see if it's any usable as an actual workstation, because I merely need anything else than browser & terminals. (Well, probably also a dedicated headless server running docker for heavier stuff.)

(Context: I've been a die-hard Mac user since 2006, when I ditched Linux desktop, which I had used exclusively since 1998.)

If you where to write about this in more detail I would certainly read it (hint hint). I have been toying with a similar idea. Alpine Linux might also be an interesting OS for something like this.

(From a hobby perspective it's a bit sad that some of the older APIs such as dispmanx/openvg are being phased out IIRC, because those are extremely powerful and useful for embedded-style applications, i.e. running something else than a destop.)

This is misleading otherwise.

Seriously,who are the Apple users that are shocked by more and more locking down, less repairability, fewer ports and cross-brand compatibility etc? Anyone who cares about that stuff in my environment is already on Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.

Apple has its own universe and its fans like it that way. Software and hardware tightly coupled and designed together, apps highly vetted and filtered in a walled garden, compatibility among Apple devices is ensured, you can do fewer things and are kept between guardrails but are less likely to screw something up or run into bugs and untested territory etc. Seems like there's a market for this. The problem is when people have the wrong expectations and don't use existing alternatives that are better suited to their preferences.

Every damn android phone I had, within a year or 2 max, the updates stopped, I would be multiple major versions behind. Android is a disaster as there's so many hardware variations and screen sizes. Developing great apps that work on all phones is a pain.

Don't get me started on Linux where the graphics drivers are just shit. Every thinkpad and other laptop I had always had some issue recognizing external monitors on boot and bugging out. One monitor would work, another wouldn't, then the actual laptop display wouldn't but a monitor would.

Even as a developer and tinker, I got tired of having to spend countless hours fixing bugs and shortcomings of products that should just work.

I'd never own anything but a macbook pro for software development.

Apple does it right.

When I was a teen, I was annoyed by how locked down iOS was, so I participated heavily in the jailbreak community. Jailbreak exploits, apps, mods, themes, repos – you name it, I got involved. So every time Apple made iOS harder to jailbreak, I'd get annoyed. I'd swear eventually I'd give up on iOS altogether and move somewhere else.

But in the end, the opposite happened. I got older, and I realized that really, truly, if I was being honest with myself, I didn't need all the "openness" that I was spending so many hours working towards. As time went on, the fiddling I was doing in deeper levels of the OS became more and more unnecessary. All the openness did was make my device less stable and less secure (except in the case of comex's JBM2/PDF exploit, which was patched by jailbreakers before Apple had released 4.0.2, but I think that is the exception that makes the rule).

And I guess maybe that is why I'm not as worried about these changes as other hackers are. Apple started out with a locked-down iPhoneOS that didn't even have a 3rd party App Store. You couldn't get more closed. Time went on and Apple made it harder and harder to open, but added more and more functionality. I was worried about the trajectory when I was younger, but now I've just bought an iPhone 12 Pro and it's the best phone I've ever owned, and I don't even care enough about jailbreaking to check if I can. So I'm not worried about macOS either.

No, it only means that any vulnerability present in the system stays on your phone forever.

> If you are a developer then Linux should be you choice unless you are iOS developer.

Listen up folks! All of you doing Mac native apps, Windows native apps, embedded stuff on windows-only tool chains and millions of other things, this guy says you're doing it wrong.

I can use bash or other shells in macos and it's perfect. I rely heavily on the command line when developing, but I also appreciate a nice UI and operating system interface with great graphics drivers.

From my point of view, the people that complain usually only got into the platform post OS X introduction, many of them only care about BSD/Homebrew with a pretty face and aren't at all interested into developer ecosystem of what actually makes a Mac a Mac.

When I first got into Macs, my first experiences of dabbling with the system was being able to edit literally anything on the computer with ResEdit, renaming key system-related files and menu items, or the shutdown message, or change key-commands of menu items in programs I used. I felt like I could do anything. This sense of control and ownership over my computer has slowly decreased as they become more abstract and DRM/gatekeeping/security seeps into every inch of their architecture.

The iso downloader you can find on windows site is actually a assembler that assemble the iso on your disk from files on mincrosft server.

And the windows update also use the same server except it uses a different file list.

So it is no really surprise that apple also do that. It is more surprise that apple didn't do it until now.

You can actually still get an iso, but you have to be using or spoofing a non-windows operating system (I've only tested Linux, but I would assume Mac/*BSD as well)

BTW, There is some third party assembler allow you to generate iso for whatever version you want(even some microsoft unsurpportrd versions).

At home, I usually use something from the-eye.eu

Apple was always been like that, they just used their newly NeXTSTEP based OS to sell themselves to the UNIX crowd as a question of survival.

Copland didn't had anything UNIX related, and BeOS just had some kind of minimal POSIX support, as it wasn't their goal to be a UNIX clone anyway.

Copland having been a success, or going BeOS instead, are two possible not taken paths that would have given a very different outcome.

You can download any distro and then build a USB for mediainstall.

I had to install an old xcode version, grab a folder, install new xcode, and paste the folder in

took a few tries to understand this, so it's a day + 20GB of downloads later before I had a working build

this was caused by a weird race condition between ios + swift versions and is probably not typical, but my takeaway was that having users who must use your stuff sorely tempts companies to ship crappy software

I currently work at a repair shop, and it's not infrequent that we have apple products in for software based errors.

Similarly, every Catalina machine should be running 10.15.7 + the Supplemental Update from a couple of days ago, and every Mojave machine 10.14.6 + the relevant security updates.

Now, users or administrators may have valid reasons to sit on a point release for a few days, for example to schedule it when it's less disruptive, or to wait to see whether there it has caused problems as a recent Mojave one did. (But not for much longer, because the act of releasing an update gives black hats something to look at, and Apple themselves usually publish details of the exploits a couple of days after the release that closes them, to give people time to update.) The thing is, they are also not going to install your new software in that window either; almost the only people running your software on other than the latest point release are people who already installed an older version of it, that you tested when that point release was current. Most normal people will either let your app and the OS auto-update on their own schedule, or manually update both at the same time.

This all reduces the problem to having available copies of the last few major versions. You can't go back all that many versions because Apple's Xcode development suite stops supporting them, and you don't want to because the APIs change.

It's a very different philosophy from the Windows "test against everything", but it's self-consistent, and is not unique to Apple operating systems.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-cach...

Edit: apologies for the unsubstantive comment

2) I agree Apple's decision is stupid.

It's especially interesting to see the swarm of critics arrive proclaiming the end of the world when it turns out to be a pretty minor thing. Yeah we can still download standalone installers.

I can’t even get linux to install. It won’t seem to boot to a usb.

Some versions of Linux will work with the 32-bit EFI, but maybe not the latest versions. Try burning Ubuntu 10 to a CD, and you can probably get it to boot (holding option and choosing the disk, or holding C to boot from CD).

Install rEFInd and look for Linux images that will boot on machines with 32-bit EFI. Debian has one.