So Apple does a lot of things well, and, usually, Software Update is among those things. For instance, in preparing my venerable PowerBook G4 for its new owner, I wiped it and reinstalled with the original 10.4.2 retail DVDs. When I ran Software Update, it “just worked” and left me with OS 10.4.11.

However, subsequent attempts to update yielded a new Java update, to “Release 5,” an 81 MB download. After downloading and installing that, Software Update told me that an update for Java was available, “Release 6,” also an 81 MB download. And so on:

It finally gave out after Release 8, which also seems to be when the Java/Mac engineers figured out how to release a patch, instead of giving you the whole thing each time. Crazy.