You may have noticed that Apple recently moved all software updates to the App Store and they are treated like purchases. While it makes sense as part of another step in their quest to fully integrate iOS and OS X, this particular choice can be inconvenient if you don’t have an existing Apple ID or if you run into a problem with your iTunes account. Unfortunately, in the Service department, we have been running into all kinds of problems running non-system updates for customers.
Recently, I found another way to do system updates using the application Terminal. I should explain further — this tip will only work with Apple system updates, which means basically anything you didn’t pay for. So it will not work with iLife updates or updates for any other apps you purchased. Updating those apps still requires an Apple ID and password.
That said, I found that the updates downloaded much faster than they did through the App Store, so when you can take advantage, it can be worth it — system updates are routinely several hundred MB in size, and over a GB in total isn’t unusual.
Here we go with the usual caveat that damaging your system severely is pretty easy in Terminal, so go boldly but carefully.
- Open Terminal
- At the prompt exactly as follows: sudo softwareupdate -l
- Hit enter. You will be asked to enter your admin password. After that, the argument -l will ask the softwareupdate command to list all available updates.
- Assuming you want to install all of the available updates, type: sudo softwareupdate -a
- Hit enter. Alternatively if you only want to install recommended updates you can change the argument to -r: sudo softwareupdate -r
- Changing the argument to -h will list all the possible commands you can use with software update.