Exactly that and then they announced their rapid security response updates with some hope for change but... nope, still needing a reboot for browser updates!

The reboot is required because Safari is managed through a signed security volume (SSV). Unfortunately the inconvenience of that security feature means that most users will avoid patching, which defeats the purpose.

The requirement to reboot is supposedly fixed in Sonoma, with discrete ‘cryptexes’.

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=3xpv8r2m

Sometimes you need a reboot for updating Safari, sometimes not. It depends on what components of it that are updated. Some of the stuff Safari uses are protected system resources that lie outside the application bundle itself, and I personally think the security scheme behind this is great.

Those 20 minutes combined with the (out-of-the-box) inability to schedule an update at a certain time is one of the more annoying aspects of macOS.

Let's just grab a coffee before my daily call and I get back to the dreaded update progress bar.

I don't understand how Apple have got this update process so wrong. I recently switched from a Ubuntu work laptop (that had live Kernel patching and occasional non-forced reboots) to big whole image OSX needing to update at the worst possible moment.

Just leave iterm open and auto magic updates will never catch by surprise again :)

Didn't the m1 mbp have an absurdly fast ssd as well? I always blamed my hackintosh's sata ssd for the slow updates but that's absurd

Not super fast, especially the smaller sized ones. My M2 MBP is slower than the 3 year old PCIE4 Sabrent rocket in my desktop.

" Apple's custom NVMes are amazingly fast – if you don't care about data integrity"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30370551

I remember when this was a huge issue on Windows. Lately for me, Windows updates take maybe one minute (managed with autoupdate on), while my Mac and iPhone regularly see 10+ min updates.

I had a gaming laptop idle for about 3 months. I decided to run some updates before we played some games on it one night and the updates took hours. They seem to always take hours

And then you reboot (because obviously that's necessary) and for some reason that means there's now 94 more updates available.

But your computer was usable for nearly the entire time, right? I don't care how long updates take if I can still keep doing things with it in the meantime. MacOS updates are the only thing that makes me sit and watch a progress bar for 20+ minutes.

I've never experienced anything similar with any of my Windows computers, nor Linux ones, nor ChromeOS ones. MacOS stands alone as having by far the shittiest and slowest update system imaginable. Even Android during its "recompile every installed app after an OTA" phase didn't take as long as MacOS does, and that's with massively slower CPU & storage!