How to Update Your Mac Faster
There is never a good time when it comes to updating your Mac. Aside from the intrusive and constant annoyance of being reminded to update (which, thankfully, you can turn off ), it often seems boring instead of taking a few minutes of processing and restarting. If you are tired of waiting for the App Store with its slow interface, here’s how you can speed up the process.
Use Terminal to update
This update procedure, as described by MacRumors , involves using the Terminal application to change how updates are downloaded to your Mac. This trick will not update third-party apps from the App Store, and it will not take care of Apple apps that you downloaded to your Mac, such as Xcode. It will update your operating system to the latest supported version of macOS along with the apps included with macOS from the beginning.
In Terminal, enter the command “softwareupdate -l” to tell your Mac to search for any available updates for macOS. If it is available, you will see the update displayed on the command line with the option to install it.
You can install each update right away by typing “softwareupdate -i -a” and letting the Terminal do its work in the background while you browse the web or make any changes. You will need to restart your computer manually when Terminal finishes downloading and installing the downloaded updates.
While the amount of time saved can vary based on factors such as the age of your Mac or the size of the software update, skipping the App Store not only speeds up the update speed, it also takes away the pain of staring longingly at a stationary progress bar.
You are not alone wondering why the glowing bar reported there were 2 minutes remaining in this software update in the last 15 minutes, and this Techquickie video identifies the culprit: the progress bar can only measure so far ahead, not the ability to predict when other processes such as updates or apps will require more power. File size also plays a role, especially when using hard drives with fragmented files or when working with several small files.