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1:05:39

Got me, Kai. I’m the head of product at Adegy. We’ve got Tom Bridge. He is the amazing face of founder of the MacAdmins Foundation. And we’ve got Bryce, who is one of our amazing senior product managers and the person that I think knows the most about this topic that I’ve ever met. So he is a tremendous resource and a guy to go to with questions. So I’ll let you guys take, you know, a couple seconds as we’re waiting for people and just say a quick hi.

Introduction

Sure. Hello. It’s great to be with everybody today. So I’m Tom Bridge. I’m the chair emeritus of the Mac and Mins Foundation, one of the founding co-chairs, but not the founder. There were a whole bunch of us who were working on this project together at the time. But it’s a great pleasure to be here with Atigee who’s a major sponsor of the MacAdmins Foundation. And, you know, we’re here today to talk about a subject near and dear to every MacAdmins heart, and that is operating system updates. There is nothing that’s a big that that’s a better party than a a good operating system update except for bad operating system updates, which we all know about.

Overview of Topics

So today, what are we going to be talking about? Well, declarative and operating system updates. But, specifically, we’re gonna be going through a brief history of updates through the ages. I’ll be taking us through that super speed because, you know, we firmly believe that understanding the evolution of how we got to where we are today and how Apple has changed over the years is important to knowing how things might change in the future and why things are the way they are.

The History of Operating System Updates

Then we’ll be going into the updating experience. Again, from the admin and end-user perspective, there’s a bunch of different ways that we can do different things, and we’ll kinda talk about some of the pros and cons and why you might choose one or the other or why everyone should use automated actions.

Then we’ll dig into a little bit of debugging. This is where Bryce really gets to shine for if any of you have any questions because when things go sideways and they always inevitably do with this topic, unfortunately, troubleshooting can sometimes be tricky. So we definitely want to make sure that you have all the tools you need. And then we’ll talk about giving feedback to both MDM providers and Apple.

A Brief History of macOS Updates

As promised, I’m going to speedrun through a history of operating system updates through the ages with macOS. So we step way back in time to when my family had their first Mac running Cheetah. It was macOS ten point o. Personally, without explicitly telling everyone how old I am, I was in middle school and did not care at all about OS updates over it.

Now I do, and the history is worth knowing. So there were a couple different ways at this point in time where you could do updates in these early versions. You could use, like, system preferences, the software update command line, or combo update packages. That would do everything kind of over the top for you.

Then we’ll jump ahead, and we’ll go to Snow Leopard, which was the last version that was shipped on a disc. That was a long time ago. And then we have Lion, which was the version that was out when I personally started as an admin. But more importantly, it’s the first version where the only way that you could get it was from the App Store with that full installer.

MDM Updates

Now we’ll jump forward to twenty fifteen with El Capitan. And with it, we have our first MDM updates using the schedule OS update, available OS update, and the OS update status commands.

From there, we go into having the system preferences pane or the App Store or the software update command line installers, and you could still use the combo update packages. So, basically, we’re just adding more and more and more ways to do these OS updates.

Changes in Update Functionality

As the operating system starts to get more complicated, we wind up running into issues where you have to start kind of getting rid of some of the old ones. Otherwise, you’re gonna run into bad times. So this happens really with Catalina, and this is where we have the end of the road for those combo updaters.

Another fun thing with Big Sur is a great one for MacAdmins because it’s the first version that required local authentication for those updates or upgrades from the volume owner. So you needed an authenticated reboot using the Bootstrap via an MDM command. Big Sur caused some confusion in the updates world by taking away some functionality, but there are reasons behind it.

The Current Era and Sonoma

And then with macOS fifteen, we got the Pro Plus Max trademark, which I love saying the whole thing because it just feels extra. This was a big win for the community who wanted granular controls around their update settings.

Now, I think only fourteen slides in. We’re finally at current era. With WWDC of twenty twenty-five, Apple stated that software update management using mobile device management command restrictions and the aforementioned profile payloads and its queries is deprecated.

Going forward, organizations will be able to manage and enforce software updates only using declarative management. This is pretty big news and something we definitely wanna start taking into consideration.

Tools for Managing Updates

So today, we have three types of managed updates and upgrades. MDM updates, enforcement specific declarations, and the software update settings. We’re going to go through kind of what are the differences.

User Experience

To the point that Tom was making there, we have the looping animated video there in the bottom with that sixty second countdown. End user experience feedback is essential to improving OS update processes.

Debugging Updates

I think the part that I personally am most excited about with all of this is the debugging aspect because this is a tricky subject for a lot of people, and we get a lot of questions on it.

Conclusion

So the community working together to provide feedback is super important because it benefits all of us. Thank you for listening to this presentation, and please reach out if you have any further questions.