Some who updated to 26.2 reported their downloads were over 10 GB in size, rather than the expected 3.78 GB for Apple silicon Macs. Why was that, and why didn’t Apple release an earlier BSI?
cryptex
A mystery volume mounts from nowhere, and its name starts with Creedence. This is a cryptex, also favoured in Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Is it a ghost of the past, or harbinger of the future?
Apple silicon Macs (and iPhones and iPads) with AI enabled load 23 cryptexes to support that. This explains how that works, and how you might see an odd volume named Creedence….
There are substantial differences in the structure of the internal disks in macOS, iPadOS and iOS, as shown here. And there are at least 24 cryptexes now used to support AI.
How the immutable system of the SSV, the firmlinked Data volume, and cryptexes ‘grafted’ into the directory tree combine to form the boot volume group of Intel and Apple silicon Macs running macOS 15.
Safari and its supporting frameworks and components, used to be installed in the Data volume, but now come in cryptexes. These also account for the larger macOS updates for Apple silicon.
How large were Sonoma’s updates? How many were unscheduled patches? Why were there no RSRs? What does Sequoia hold in store?
Sometimes Apple silicon Macs refuse to boot from a bootable system. How to use bputil to check LocalPolicy and work out what’s gone wrong.
Big Sur ended up with a total of 50 GB of updates on Apple silicon Macs. While Ventura did much better, its smallest update was still just under 2 GB. Now Sonoma is doing much better.
Look for Safari in /System/Applications and it’s not there any more. And an inactive boot volume group has no bundled apps in its main Applications folder.
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