But aren't they able to do incremental builds and separated x64/arm64?
During the PowerPC to Intel transition, they did stuff like that; perhaps at their current scale, there's reasons why they don't.
Supporting both architectures enables a macOS install to boot an Intel Mac or an Apple Silicon Mac, which is useful in a dual-architecture environment.
It's easy to check for dual architecture support; just use the file command:
Comments
An update to macOS 26.5 contains all the necessary code to update a Mac from 26.0 to 26.5 for both x86_64 and arm64 architectures.
But aren't they able to do incremental builds and separated x64/arm64?
They know which OS version is requesting an update, at least the version number part.
During the PowerPC to Intel transition, they did stuff like that; perhaps at their current scale, there's reasons why they don't.
Supporting both architectures enables a macOS install to boot an Intel Mac or an Apple Silicon Mac, which is useful in a dual-architecture environment.
It's easy to check for dual architecture support; just use the file command:
Is that an over the air update? Lol.