Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Mac Software Updates -- 2007-03-21

Apple has released two recent upgrades. OS X Tiger v 10.4.9 is now available (74.4 MB) and iTunes 7.1 (27.5 MB). Get them through Software Update under the Apple menu, as usual.

If you launch iTunes before doing Software Update, you might also get notified of its new version that way. Also, launching iTunes on the PC will likely provoke the same message -- it did for me, anyway. But you'll need to run Software Update for the OS upgrade.

The OS upgrade adds a bunch of stuff, including some security fixes. (Details here.) The update worked without a hitch for me. One minor note: the required post-upgrade reboot seemed to take a bit longer than usual. This seems to have been a one-time thing, probably having to do with completing the installation; the next restart did not take as long. Just so you know.

The Firefox update that I mentioned earlier is also available for the Mac. The patch in this case is considerably larger than the one for the PC, for reasons beyond my understanding -- it's about 16 MB.

I'll not rant further about the bloatiness of Mac software updates. You're probably still reeling from the last time.

2 comments:

Alastair said...

That's wierd - my Firefox/Mac update was a *lot* smaller. Like a couple of hundred K.

Also I'm indifferent about OS bloat. Bandwidth and disk space is cheap.

bjkeefe said...

I mostly agree with you about the cheapness of bandwidth and disk space, Alastair. Disk space, certainly. Bandwidth, a bit less so -- I'm on a 256 kbps cheapo DSL plan, which boils down to about 2 MB/min when downloading. Real broadband goes for about US$40/month -- great compared to dial-up at US$20/month, but enough money that that I opted for the cheap new account special (US$15/month). That introductory plan is almost expired, so I'll probably bite the bullet and upgrade soon.

There's also the matter of elegance in software engineering, so my complaints are more along those lines than of a practical nature.

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