Previous: How do you comparison shop in the App Store? Articles index Apple鈥檚 MacBook Pro DFU port documentation is wrong February 1 2026 According to the Apple support document How to identify the DFU port on Mac, the DFU (device firmware update) port location for MacBook Pro models with Apple silicon is as follows: This is wrong, a discovery that took me about a half dozen attempts to update macOS on an external disk. I have a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, specifically an M4 Pro chip, and the DFU port seems to be the USB-C port on the right side of the Mac, not on the left side. For some damn reason, it matters which port your external disk is plugged into when you install or update macOS, as described by the Apple support document How to use an external storage device as a Mac startup disk: Make sure that your storage device is plugged into the appropriate port on your Mac. If you're using a Mac with Apple silicon, plug your storage device into any compatible port except the DFU port. Learn how to identify the DFU port. After macOS installation is complete, you can connect your storage device to any compatible port, including the DFU port.If you鈥檙e using any other Mac, plug your storage device into any compatible port. Mac disk management was so much easier in the days of Intel and PowerPC! On an external SSD I had installed a macOS Sequoia boot volume (among others), which I鈥檝e used to take Mac App Store screenshots for my apps and which I鈥檇 now like to use to take a screen recording. The installed version was still macOS 15.2, because I don鈥檛 often boot into the disk to take new screenshots, and going through the software update process would occupy my MacBook Pro for annoyingly long. However, it appears that Safari 26 requires a version of macOS 15 higher than .2, so I needed to update macOS in order to update Safari from version 18. Over the past few days, every attempt I made to update the disk volume to macOS 15.7.3 failed inexplicably. I tried both ...
First seen: 2026-02-02 05:32
Last seen: 2026-02-02 07:45