This must be the third time now that a friend has messaged me saying "the computer says 20 minutes remaining and it's said that for hours straight".<p>Look it up, and sure enough that laptop won't run the OS version Apple is trying to automatically update their computer to.<p>Surely Apple must be able to tell that hardware that they created cannot run an OS that they created?<p>How is there not a class action lawsuit over this practice yet?
I have seen Windows machines destroyed by an update.<p>It isn't just a hardware-software mismatch, it also happens because you have a failing hard drive. A failing hard drive might be compensating for it's problems but then when you do an OS update it does a huge volume of writes that overwhelms the bad block table and then your machine is trashed.<p>Unfortunately you don't get good error messages in this situation.<p>You have to replace the drive and reinstall the OS in that case. I had it happen to a Windows machine circa 2009 also it happened to a 2011 Mac Mini Server that had two magnetic drives. When the drives died I put in SSDs and I have run both Windows and MacOS X since.<p>Also I think if the filesystem is corrupted the same thing can happen.
Planned obsolescence...<p>One of the reasons you should try to avoid running commercial OSs IMHO.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence</a>