The more ingrained procedures are in everyday life, the more traditional we seem to have become about them. Eating, for instance, may have shifted to trays or laps, but the cutlery that we use has changed little for several millennia. Forks predate classical Greek culture, Pompeians died alongside hoards of spoons, and there are many beautifully crafted stone knives from the dawn of mankind.

A few of us have discovered the delights of the spork (portmanteau spoon and fork) when travelling light, but the combination of all three major types of cutlery, officially dubbed a sporf, is far rarer and considerably less successful despite Australian marketing effort.

I remember fabricating one for myself, only to discover the extreme care required when bringing its cutting edge into contact with my mouth. Fresh blood may add a piquancy to some dishes, but even vampires try to avoid consuming their own. Sometimes combining multiple functions results in a tool that is too ungainly to perform well in any of its single roles. Sadly, that is often the case with software.

I am sure that you too had become fed up with the profusion of different updating systems that we had to use: Software Update for OS X and major Apple products, the (Mac) App Store for products purchased through that portal, and dozens of other vendor- and product-specific updaters.

Checking for and installing updates was starting to become a significant part of the Mac user’s workload, and if you had sufficient apps, keeping them all updated was the ultimate displacement activity.

Furthermore most of the updates were inefficient, as you ended up downloading entire replacement applications when relatively little had changed within them. The App Store should be different, in that most of the updates that it applies consist of only those parts of the app that have actually changed; the notable exceptions to that seem to be Apple’s own products and most particularly Xcode, which always weighs in at more than a gigabyte, no matter how scant its release notes.

At first, Mountain Lion’s attempted fusing of Software Update and the App Store’ Updates just seemed a tad redundant in parts. But as time passed, the combination suffered more glitches than any other component in Mountain Lion, and I suspect gave rise to more cursing and infuriation too. I have seen it offer me a small update, download and apply that successfully, only to rebuff me with a second update for the same app that is far larger. When I tried to download that, it threw an error and stuck in the same hissy fit for weeks.

Now, more than three years down the line, El Capitan has cleared away Software Update, leaving just the App Store and its System Preferences pane. But updating through the App Store app remains a game of Russian roulette with as much user feedback. Click on the Update or Update All button and you might, if lucky, see some informative response, such as the spinning busy icon at the top left.

Quite often, little or nothing changes and you see no progress bar or other indication that anything is being downloaded. The Update button remains active, tempting you to click again on it. Sometimes checking the app listing in the Finder shows a progress bar, although that now seems increasingly rare. You then have to guess whether the app is doing anything about obtaining your update(s), and probably click on the Update button again in the hope that might spur it into action.

We have had some updates which took countless attempts to obtain before they finally took. OS X Server updates usually require you to open the Server app up afterwards to complete the update, or you may get further offers of the update until you do. Most recently I seem to have been plagued by Service Unavailable errors which come and go out of the blue.

And we still have so many different ways of updating: the App Store, Adobe’s various schemes, individual apps which may or may not be able to check for updates, Flash (need I say more), Java…

App Store updates do not currently live up to Apple’s reputation for ease of use or reliability. There is no excuse for its current mess. Each time I click on Updates in the App Store app I feel like I am opening my mouth ready to thrust my old home-made sporf into it – any second now I will taste blood and feel the pain of metal slicing through delicate body parts.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 29 issue 2, 2013.