How to download the latest macOS

Published: 25th of January, 2023

As of today the newest macOS version is 13.2 and you can always download the latest using either the App Store or your Mac's Software Update function which can be found in System Settings.

Today, I'll show you a more interesting way to download the latest version of macOS as well as any other version of the OS that's supported by your Mac.

Why would you want to download an older version? Well a couple of reasons: you may have found bugs in the latest, or have compatibility issues with some of the apps or 3rd party hardware you use day to day.

No Spam, thank you very much!

You may think it's a good idea to just search the Mac App Store for the specific version of macOS you're looking for, but this isn't quite correct for a couple of reasons:
1. Apple tends to remove older versions of the OS from its storefront
2. The search results leave a lot to be desired, and that's putting it politely! Check out the screenshot below:

A quick and easy way to grab whichever version of macOS you prefer is to use your Mac's built-in Terminal app, which lives in Applications → Utilities.

Once you've got the Terminal window open, you can use this command to download the installer for the latest version of macOS:
softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer [Then hit the RETURN key]
Your screen should show something like this:

This will take some time. The time it takes depends on the speed of your Internet connection.

The "Installing" progress is a bit misleading, the OS is not actually being installed. The OS installer is being installed! 😀

Once this process has finished you will find the latest version of the macOS installer in your Applications folder. You can install from there in the usual ways.

Getting Previous Versions

Now that I've shown you how to get the latest version, it's time to talk about previous versions that are supported by your Mac's hardware.

To list all supported versions, type this command in your Terminal window:
softwareupdate --list-full-installers [Then hit the RETURN key]

Your screen might show something like this:

 charlie@Charlie-iMac ~ % softwareupdate --list-full-installers
 Finding available software
 Software Update found the following full installers:
 * Title: macOS Ventura, Version: 13.2, Size: 12261428KiB, Build: 22D49, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Ventura, Version: 13.1, Size: 11931164KiB, Build: 22C65, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Ventura, Version: 13.0.1, Size: 11866460KiB, Build: 22A400, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Ventura, Version: 13.0, Size: 11866804KiB, Build: 22A380, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Monterey, Version: 12.6.3, Size: 12115350KiB, Build: 21G419, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Monterey, Version: 12.6.2, Size: 12104568KiB, Build: 21G320, Deferred: NO
 * Title: macOS Monterey, Version: 12.6.1, Size: 12108491KiB, Build: 21G217, Deferred: NO
 charlie@Charlie-iMac ~ %
				

Great! Now we can see which versions of macOS are available for our Mac.

If I wanted to grab a specific version, for example macOS Monterey 12.6.3 I would use the following Terminal command:
softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer --full-installer-version 12.6.3

To get any other version, just replace 12.6.3 in the above command with its version number as shown from the previous --list-full-installers command.

⚠️ If you want to downgrade your macOS you'll need to create a bootable USB, I'll write a post all about it soon but for the more technically minded the command is:
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Whatever.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USB --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Whatever.app

The macOS installers are pretty hefty downloads weighing in at over 12 gigabytes, so you might need to first free up some disk space.

My colleague Maria has written a blog post on how to do that manually, or if you don't want to mess around you could just use our app's Quick Clean feature. That Quick Clean feature is totally free and I'm told our users (who opt-in to sharing stats) have collectively saved petabytes of disk space. Think of how much Apple would charge for that upgrade!

  ✌ Charlie