Apple releases macOS High Sierra 10.13 Supplemental Update with bug fixes for Adobe InDesign, Mail

This may be a minor update but it's addressing very specific issues that have been bothering me. I had a very difficult time installing High Sierra on my late 2012 iMac 27" with 3 TB Fusion drive. The solution to the multiple installation failures turned out to require totally erasing the two Fusion drive components (SSD and HDD) and recreating the Fusion drive after booting in Internet Recovery Mode, as described in the second part of this support document: https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/apfsfusion. The fact that the installation failures would occur after at least an hour of downloading and installation processing and with the progress indicator at "less than one minute remaining" and a "please try again" error message made this a particularly infuriating failure. Wiping the Fusion drive required migrating all of my data from a Time Machine backup, which worked pretty much as expected, except that iTunes popped up in the middle of the migration process, required me to log into iCloud, and then indicated that it had run out of disk space trying to restore my iTunes content - which is absurd considering I have > 2 TB free. Quitting the iTunes interloper allowed the migration to continue and everything related to iTunes was exactly where it should be when the machine booted for the first time in High Sierra. 

I don't think I've ever seen such a massive update in size that didn't warrant even a tertiary point update. In the past, we saw security-focused updates that weren't point updates, but now that's done frequently in the background as signatures get updated to combat potential threats.

Soli said:

I don't think I've ever seen such a massive update in size that didn't warrant even a tertiary point update. In the past, we saw security-focused updates that weren't point updates, but now that's done frequently in the background as signatures get updated to combat potential threats.

Right, but Apple doesn't do 4-levels of version for the OS (do they?), so they either would have had to change the upcoming 10.13.1 to be 10.13.2  or hold off on this update.  For example, in About This Mac, mine says "macOS 10.12.6 (16G29)".  I suppose they just didn't want to release something called 10.13.0.1.

Soli said:

I don't think I've ever seen such a massive update in size that didn't warrant even a tertiary point update. In the past, we saw security-focused updates that weren't point updates, but now that's done frequently in the background as signatures get updated to combat potential threats.

Agreed. The fact that this little incognito update ties up your Mac for at least 20-30 minutes is also a head scratcher. Apple must have committed the 10.13.1 version number before they realized the needed a more immediate update prior to 10.13.1. This one should have been given a unique version number given the size and complexity. From a version control perspective this is a stealth version. I’m sure the support people will let the development team know how they feel about this type of behavior. 

randominternetperson said:

Soli said:

I don't think I've ever seen such a massive update in size that didn't warrant even a tertiary point update. In the past, we saw security-focused updates that weren't point updates, but now that's done frequently in the background as signatures get updated to combat potential threats.

Right, but Apple doesn't do 4-levels of version for the OS (do they?), so they either would have had to change the upcoming 10.13.1 to be 10.13.2  or hold off on this update.  For example, in About This Mac, mine says "macOS 10.12.6 (16G29)".  I suppose they just didn't want to release something called 10.13.0.1.

dewme said:

Soli said:

I don't think I've ever seen such a massive update in size that didn't warrant even a tertiary point update. In the past, we saw security-focused updates that weren't point updates, but now that's done frequently in the background as signatures get updated to combat potential threats.

Agreed. The fact that this little incognito update ties up your Mac for at least 20-30 minutes is also a head scratcher. Apple must have committed the 10.13.1 version number before they realized the needed a more immediate update prior to 10.13.1. This one should have been given a unique version number given the size and complexity. From a version control perspective this is a stealth version. I’m sure the support people will let the development team know how they feel about this type of behavior. 

I'm leaning towards @dewme 's statement that 10.13.1 is already committed, but I also can't wrap my head around why it would be committed. Why not just make that update 10.13.2. For its size, the build ID's sequential increase is quite low—17A365 to 17A405 on my Mac, which seems more inline with what I've noticed in early Beta updates.

To your point, @randominternetperson, Apple has used additional digits when they issued an update to an update. Examples include, but are not limited to:

• 10.5.8 (9L30) on August 5, 2009 to 10.5.8 v1.1 (9L34) on August 31, 2009
• 10.6.3 (10D573) on March 29, 2010 to 10.6.3 v1.1 (10D578) on April 13, 2010
• 10.6.8 (10K540) on June 23, 2011 to 10.6.8 v1.1 (10K549) on July 25, 2011

edit:  No idea of the size of these supplemental updates, but my research found that Apple has been doing this as far back as 5 years ago:

• 10.7.5 (11G56) on September 19, 2012 to 10.7.5 Supplemental Update (11G63) on October 4, 2012
• 10.8.2 (12C54) on September 19, 2012 to 10.8.2 Supplemental Update (12C60) on October 4, 2012
• 10.8.5 (12F37) on September 12, 2013 to 10.8.5 Supplemental Update (12F45) on October 3, 2013

I'd say that Supplemental Update was less confusing than #.#.# v#.#.