I tried to wake up my OS 10.8.3 MacBook Pro Retina from a deep sleep and got the endlessly spinning beach ball. I hit the power button. I went to software updates, and it found Mavericks (I can’t see that name without thinking of Tina Fey’s 2008 Sarah Palin SNL bit). I logged in to the Apple Store, and the OS started to download, all 5.29 GB of it.
The download hung after 25.6 MB. I looked at the firewall real-time monitor. There was hardly any traffic. Problems with the Apple servers? Maybe something closer to home. I looked at the Activity Monitor, and it showed the net traffic fallen off from 3 Mb/s, but it had stopped refreshing its screen, and the beach ball was back. The system would let me switch windows, but not close them or launch programs. I pressed Control/Power, and picked Shutdown. The machine refused to shut down. It also would no longer respond to Control/Power. I pressed Control/Command/Power, and it shut down and rebooted. When I came back up, I went to Software Updates again, and under Maverick, next to the Download button, it said “an error has occurred”. I pressed the Download button anyway. I logged into the Apple Store again. It said it was downloading. I checked the Activity Monitor, and it said the download was proceeding at 3 Mb/s. I checked the firewall, and it said the same thing. Seven and a half hours to go, by the downloader apps count.
It doesn’t seem like so long ago that a T1 line was a big honkin’ Internet connection, and I’ve got two of them. Funny how it no longer feels like a First Class ride; it’s more like steerage these days.
There’s a Parkinson’s Law corollary in play here, kind of like the one for CPU cycles (Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away), and program memory requirements (back in the days when, if you really wanted the code to be tight, you wrote it in assembler, who could live long enough to write a 200 MB program?). As an Internet bandwidth have-not, I’ve watched in fear as normal program updates go from a few hundred MB to a few GB in three or four years. Is that all new code? Or is it a complete new image, just ‘cause it’s simpler to not have to keep track of all the modules that got touched? I suspect the latter.
After four hours I checked on the download. It had ceased, but not completed.
Note that the upgrader was also offering me the option of upgrading to 10.8.5, but that I hadn’t picked that option.
I clicked on the Download button again. I logged in to the Apple Store again. I saw the download start with 2+ GB already in the bag.
I checked the download speed. Looking good:
I double checked the sleep settings.
And so, to bed For me, anyway; I told the computer that it wouldn’t get any sleep tonight.
In the morning, I had a message saying that the App Store quit unexpectedly:
I sent the report to Apple. However, in the upper right of the screen was a message offering to restart:
I said OK. I agreed to the license. The system threw up a an error window that said that “Install OS X Mavericks” can’t be open during the installation.
The installation of what? Of OS X Mavericks? I scratched my head, and told the system to go ahead and close “Install OS X Mavericks” so that it could install what I thought was OS X Mavericks. It asked me to log in to the Apple Store. Is that three times, or four? Then it wanted to restart. I said OK.
After the restart, I went to “About this Mac” and it said it was on OS 10.8.5:
What gives? I never asked it to upgrade me to 10.8.5. Mavericks is 10.9. I went to “software updates” and, under Mavericks, it said it was paused, that I had 0 bytes downloaded, and asked me if I wanted to resume.
I said OK. I signed into the Apple Store. Again.
It’s looking like it’s going to redownload the whole thing:
I surmise that the computer decided on its own to upgrade itself silently to 10.8.5, ignoring the fact that there was an ongoing update to 10.9 taking place. The message that I got to terminate the 10.9 installer must have been from the 10.8.5 installer. Thus the 10.8.5 installer killed the 10.9 installer. And the 10.9 installer wasn’t resumable, in spite of the fact that it had probably downloaded the entirety of Mavericks overnight.
Is this any way to design an upgrade system?
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