

Not including the over 12 GB installer, it takes 35 GB to upgrade from a previous OS to Big Sur. Be sure to backup your Mac first, so that your data is preserved, and so that you can revert back if you need to.Like many of us during the pandemic, Big Sur has gotten a bit chonky. The easiest way to accomplish that is to download a MacOS installer for Monterey (or the release you want to install) and run that directly. If you’re running an earlier system software version of MacOS, like Catalina or Big Sur, and you want to upgrade to MacOS Monterey rather than MacOS Ventura, you can do that too. What if I want to upgrade from MacOS Catalina, Big Sur, to Monterey, and avoid Ventura? You can also install these updates via the command line with the softwareupdate command, if that interests you. In the example here, macOS Ventura is skipped to instead choose to install macOS Monterey 12.6.1 as a general software update, but this will work the same with future updates as well, whether that’s macOS Monterey 12.6.2, 12.6.3, 12.6.4, 12.6.5, macOS Monterey 12.7, or whatever else Apple puts out there for us. The Mac will reboot as usual when installing any system software update or point release, but assuming you followed the instructions correctly, you will simply install the currently available updates to the actively running MacOS release, rather than upgrading to macOS Ventura.

Choose the software updates you wish to install here, then click on “Install Now”.Find the tiny blue text that says “More Info…” under the tiny ‘Other updates are available’ text, located under the Ventura banner and click on that.

Go to the Apple menu in the upper left corner and select “System Preferences”.

You can install macOS updates and skip macOS Ventura for both MacOS Monterey and MacOS Big Sur: How to Install the Latest macOS Updates Without Upgrading to MacOS Ventura Both macOS Monterey and macOS Big Sur are continuing to get software updates from Apple for security patches and other major issues, so if you choose to stay on those system software releases (which is a perfectly reasonable decision if they’re working fine for you), then you’ll likely want to know how to update your system software while skipping macOS Ventura.
