Select what macOS Updates you want to install

Select which macOS updates you want to install on the Mac through the Mac’s System Preferences.

Did you know you could select which macOS updates you want to install on the Mac? You can even have your Mac download any updates but not install them, or just have your Mac install security updates automatically while leaving any other updates for manual install. See how to select which updates you want to install in this video for the Mac.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can select what you want to update when you have a macOS update. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, when I’m talking about updates, I’m not talking about App Store updates, I’m talking about macOS updates. If I go to my System Preferences, let’s go up to my Apple menu, and then we go over to System Preferences. We have a preference pane here for Software Update. This is where we have all of our macOS updates, not App Store updates, but macOS updates. These could be security updates, it could be upgrades to a new operating system.

How do you select what you want to update? Well all you have to do is just open this up, and then it’s going to check for updates. To customize what it’s looking for, you just go over to Advance, and then you can select what you want to update.

You can have it automatically check for updates, which I would recommend leaving on. You can have it download new updates when they’re available, again, I would recommend leaving this on as well. It’s going to download them, but it will not install it. If you want it to install the update, then you would select install macOS updates. I like to install my updates, manually, so I leave this unchecked. So it’s going to check for updates, it’s going to download them, but it will not install them.

I would recommend that you install system data files and security updates, though. If we go down to the bottom here, you’re going to see that mine is selected. So what this means is that my Mac will not install any macOS updates, but it will install any security updates. Any Mac OS updates, I’m going to have to install myself.

And then last on our list here is install app updates from the App Store. If you want your Mac to automatically update any apps from the App Store, you’ll want to select us. I’m going to click on, OK.

How do we install it? Well, once it checks for updates, what you can then do is install that update.

But before we do that, we can even further fine tune that. I am using Safari Technology Preview. This is like a preview to what’s coming in Safari. There’s an update for it, you can see I have here two updates, macOS Big Sur and Safari Technology Preview. I only want to update Safari Technology Preview. I do not want to update to macOS Big Sur. I don’t want to download it and restart my computer. I’m working. This could take 20 minutes to half an hour. I only want to have the new Safari Technology Preview. All you have to do is just click on More Info, and from here you can select what you want to update. So I’m just going to de-select macOS Big Sur, and now when I click on Install, now what it’s going to do is only install or update my Safari Technology Preview. It will not install macOS Big Sur 11.6. So now I click on Install Now. And we can see it as downloading it and then it’ll install it.

So that’s how you can select what you want to install with a macOS update. All you have to do is just go to your System Preferences and then Software Update. Click on Advance, and you can select what you wanted to do with updates. Do you want it to download the update, but not install it? Do you want it to install that update once it’s downloaded? Do you want it to install App Store updates? And of course you always want it to install security updates. On top of that, when you’re looking at your updates, if there’s a link for More Info, click on that, and you’re able to select individual items to update.

So that’s how you can select what you want to update on the Mac.