Apple released macOS Big Sur 11.1 on 14 December. Although yesterday it finally posted standalone installers for the two concomitant security updates to Catalina and Mojave, no standalone updaters for Big Sur have appeared yet. Neither has it made available a standalone updater for macOS 11.0.1, which was released over a month ago.
If you feel that you “have a need for individual downloads for Big Sur delta/combo updaters”, please let Apple know. In the strongest possible terms, via Feedback, Apple Support and any other means available.
The lockdown continues.
So I assume this means the end of Hackintoshes?
Between this and the move to M1 Macs, I’d say maybe. Perhaps some enterprising hacker out there will come up with a way to build standalone updates out of what Apple releases in the future, though I’m certainly not smart enough to fathom how. Either way, the next major OS release after Big Sur likely won’t work on x86_64 Apple machines, or will be restricted to the last generation of them and won’t work as well with COTS hardware.
They will get one more version after Big Sure, just like the PowerPC people got one more version after Tiger.
They will get more versions than that for sure. OSX has been running on x86 and has a far larger base than when it ran on PPC.
By comparaison with Apple, Windows looks like a Richard Stallman dream!!! Hahahahaha!!!
The publicly traded company dance continues. Postmortem Steve Jobs dreams are being realized.
BTW I assume Big Sur (the initial release) is still available as a standalone, right? Otherwise, if I replace the hard-drive on a Mac, where do I get the OS from?
I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. Microsoft hasn’t been providing standalone installers for every Windows update.
“Otherwise, if I replace the hard-drive on a Mac, where do I get the OS from?”
Hold option+command+R when booting to install the latest version straight from the internet. No local media needed, the installer downloader is in the EFI firmware.