William Gallagher
A new Device Support Update is available for Mac via Software Update, and Apple says it addresses restoring and updating the iPhone and iPad.
Apple's Software Update, in the Mac's System Preferences, is now showing a new option alongside the familiar macOS Big Sur updates. Called "Device Support Update," it appears to be an additional fix for problems with devices being updated via Macs.
"This update ensures proper updating and restoring for iOS and iPadOS devices with a Mac," says Software Update.
Typically these features are part of a regular software update, rather than being released separately. Apple notes that the update requires 195.7 MB disk space.
While the overall description of the additions is clear, at present, there is no specific detail of what problems are fixed, or if this is a specific fix for new devices like the iPhone 13 and iPad mini given that macOS Monterey has yet to debut. AppleInsider has reached out to Apple for more details.
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6 Comments
This showed up on my Catalina iMac as well.
I already used my Big Sur machine to update my iPhone to iOS 15. Great... At least it seems to work fine.
I'm still running Mac OS 10.14.6 Mojave and it was available for installation.
The iOS 15 upgrade form my iPhone took forever using iTunes.
I got error messages saying I needed to Restore it to factory settings.
Kept tryin, 3 times, until finally it ran the upgrade.
Maybe this fixes the problem?
Finally I can back up my 5th generation iPad onto my Mac again. It's been a few versions of macOS since I was able to do this. I ended up changing to iCloud backup a few months ago (nothing really important on my iPad) but even after updating to iOS15 it still wouldn't back up to my Mac (gave error saying it couldn't). Installed this update and now it backs up again. Don't know what Apple did but it works for me!
Haven't had problems with any of my iPhones backing up locally, just my iPad.
I’ve had the beach ball of death during updates. Often I’ll download the update file first, then launch the update separately. The beach ball would spin during the download, and I’d have to force-quit/relaunch the finder app to make it go away. A couple days ago, I did an iPad download/update altogether letting the beach ball roll throughout and it completed the process, but it is disquieting. Hopefully this clears that up.