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bill99

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 16, 2019
103
6
Hello forum,

I am wondering why people do buy bootable offline Catalina Installers on USB (e.g. from Ebay or Amazon)...

Do those USB-stick differ from Apple's recommended building approach (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201372)?


Thank's a lot for any feedback!

Bill
 
Perhaps for people who don't know any better or want the convenience, or those who do not have a supported Mac / stable enough internet connection to download and create the install media.
 
Hello forum,

I am wondering why people do buy bootable offline Catalina Installers on USB (e.g. from Ebay or Amazon)...

Do those USB-stick differ from Apple's recommended building approach (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201372)?


Thank's a lot for any feedback!

Bill
The link you posted, provides instructions to download the latest version of a software.
For example in my case, I'm running on Catalina 10.15, and my laptop came with El Cap.
If I want to follow the instructions of the link, it will prompt me to download Catalina 10.15.7 (because it looks for an update, not the OS itself), and then if I put that on an USB stick and try to install from there, it will tell me "in order to install Catalina 10.15.7 you need 10.15, etc etc".

Sadly Apple doesn't make it really easy for people to jump throughout distributions.
 
Would you really want to trust a USB drive from a third party to install an OS?
You don't HONESTLY think that the people who would buy such a thing, would actually have that occur to them?
 
The link you posted, provides instructions to download the latest version of a software.
For example in my case, I'm running on Catalina 10.15, and my laptop came with El Cap.
If I want to follow the instructions of the link, it will prompt me to download Catalina 10.15.7 (because it looks for an update, not the OS itself), and then if I put that on an USB stick and try to install from there, it will tell me "in order to install Catalina 10.15.7 you need 10.15, etc etc".
That's not what the posted link says and that's not how it works.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
That's not what the posted link says and that's not how it works.
Completely correct - the link from that Apple Support page takes you to the download page for Catalina (or whichever macOS system you need), and that will get you the current version of the complete 10.15.7 full system installer - the one which you would use when following the steps to create a bootable installer.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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