A friend got in touch with me a few days ago. He wrote: 

I finally had the opportunity to apply the latest Security Update 2019-007 on my 2015 iMac with High Sierra. The update was taking longer than usual. I know I have to let it do its thing. I usually grab a coffee and do other stuff while the Mac updates.

This time, after 30 minutes it just seemed stuck. On the screen, just the Apple logo and the progress bar, I’d say it was at about 80% or something. At that point I did something stupid: I force-rebooted the iMac. 

As I laid my eyes on those words, I winced. He concluded:

The good news is that my iMac didn’t get bricked in the process. The bad news is that I had to restore from a backup, and the most recent was from 5 days ago. I lost some work updates. I know this was mostly my fault, so don’t get mad at me… But man, what you see on the screen during a system update is really terse… I wish I had more clues as to what the Mac is doing… A way to understand if it’s working or stuck. 

Every time I update my Macs (or iOS devices), I never touch them, no matter how long it takes, no matter how frozen they look during the update process. And this is usually the advice I give others.

Having said that, I agree with my friend on that last point: visual feedback during a lengthy software update could be improved.

When installing older versions of Mac OS X, I remember the Installer going through different stages, telling you which system components it was installing and what it was doing during each stage, with progress displayed with an animated progress bar and measured in percentage. 

Today we have a black screen, an Apple logo, an iOS-style thin flat monochrome progress bar and sometimes you’ll see something like “Installing [or Installation in progress]: About n minutes remaining.” Just this.

It’s not unusual that during a major update the Mac will restart on its own once or twice. But since the boot chime was removed a few years back, you don’t even have an auditory clue — sometimes you just see the screen go black, then the Apple logo and progress bar reappear. 

And the progress bar is at a different point than before. You see it go away when, say, it’s at about 65%, and it reappears at about 20%. Expert users understand that behind the scenes there is more than one thing being updated, so the progress bar doesn’t really indicate the absolute progress of the update process as a whole. There are stages, but what appears on screen is so little as to be confusing. The bar so small that you really have to look at it closely to detect movement during the slowest stretches of an update.

I don’t get Apple’s choice of such a minimalistic interface in a situation (a system software update) where ‘how it works’ is a bit more important than ‘how it looks’, especially when looks can be deceiving (Is it ‘doing its thing’ or is it stuck?)

My friend isn’t a Mac power user, but he is not a novice, either. If he decided to act, force-rebooting his iMac, I’m sure it was because he honestly thought that the machine was frozen, that too much time had passed without any indication of progress. I don’t think he acted hastily. And we still don’t know what was happening. Maybe his iMac did actually freeze.

I think a first step to improve things could be to revert to a more descriptive interface. Keep showing the black screen with the Apple logo and the thin progress bar, but make the text below describe what’s happening. It doesn’t matter if it’s technical jargon some people won’t understand — they will understand more clearly that the Mac is performing a series of tasks. It will convey the idea of progress in a less ambiguous way. And if a certain stage of the process needs a restart when complete, display something like Stage 1 of 3 – Updating firmware. The Mac will restart and continue with the security update.

Or have at least the Mac display a permanent warning during the whole update, like: There will be times when the update process could appear frozen. Please do not power off your Mac or force a restart.

We can debate the wording of the message, but I think you’ll agree it’s better than, literally, nothing.