Tired of having to wait tens of minutes to update your Mac? With two simple commands to type in the Terminal you can cut waiting time
Over the past few years Apple engineers and developers have been working on it to improve it and make it more intuitive and immediate. Despite everything, however, the macOS update system is still undigested by a large portion of Apple computer owners.
Whether it’s an iMac or a Macbook, it doesn’t really matter: the time it takes to download the update from the App Store and to install it is often considered a waste of time that you can do without. As is also the case with Windows systems, the computer is unusable during the download and application of the update. Fortunately, however, users have discovered an update mode that allows you to save about 60% of the time needed to update the operating system Apple: just know the right commands to give via Terminal and that’s it.
How to update the Mac from the command line and save time
To realize the possibility of being able to update macOS directly from the command line were some users of the social/forum Reddit. In one of the many discussions on the platform, in fact, a user pointed out that from Terminal you can check and download updates to the operating system of the bitten apple without the need to stop what you were doing.
In particular, with the command
softwareupdate -l
you can check if updates are available, while the command
softwareupdate -i -a
allows you to download packages and install them. All this is done without any App Store window appearing and without closing any other running programs. In short, you can continue to work while your Apple computer downloads the updates, the only time you have to stop is when you reboot your computer system.
According to the reports of users who have tested this update mode for macOS, the time required for downloading and installation is greatly reduced. It goes from about 30 minutes required with the App Store to 10 minutes taken by updating the Mac from the command line. More interestingly, the “stop” time is reduced to just 2 minutes, the time it takes for the computer to shut down and restart after all the changes have been made.