I’ll throw my two cents into the pot. First, I found the logs by clicking on About This Mac, then System Report…, then Software > Installations. Was that the correct place to look?
Typically, I do my day-to-day stuff in a User account. About once a week, I will log out and log into an Admin account and then install any updates. Recently, I have begun to reboot the MacBook before logging into the Admin account. Perhaps I started this before the most recent Security Update, perhaps not.
It’s a MacBook; when I’m installing updates, I’m connected to an external display and using an external keyboard and mouse, obviously through the USB. All external drives are unmounted. Those that take external power are powered down but connected; those that are bus powered are disconnected. Almost always, at least one and more recently two ethernet networks are connected, again through the USB.
With all that said, I have installed five Security Updates since I installed Mojave. All five show as double installations, 7 to 14 minutes apart. (Two of them are shown as “Security Update : 10.14.6” and might be the same one; if so, the double installations were two months apart.)
Personally, I see the double installations as a much smaller issue than the lack of feedback from the Macintosh during installations. Whether the Mac is doing once, twice, or more, it should let me know that it’s doing something.
iMac (Retina 4K, 21.5-inch, Late 2015)
Mohave 10.14.6
Wow. I’ve never noticed anything amiss with the installation of Security Updates, but curiosity prompted me to look at the About This Mac > System Report > Software > Installations ‘log’ and I see that all system updates going back to at least 2018 show up as having been installed twice on the order of 10 minutes apart. There’s no way to tell in this view of the ‘logs’ if there was an installation failure, or if this is normal behavior.
Is this just an indication of a two part installation process where the system reboots in the middle?
I’ll reiterate that I have not had to reinitiate any of these installations/updates after a failure. It just appears in this version of ‘logs’ that something is happening twice each time.
My MacPro 2010 just got a new EFI 580 Radeon this week when it came on the market because I wanted to see the Apple start-up screen and updated to Mojave from High Sierra. The problem Apple and I couldn’t fix with Apple Mail after hours of trying was fixed. Even Safari was working better and things are looking good.
I just installed Security Update 2020-004 and my seasonally fast system (I’m on a Late 2013 iMac with Mojave) turned into a slow mess. When I tried to do anything - spinning beach ball despite neither the CPU or the RAM being taxed (45% for CPU and 65% of the 8 GB RAM). I tried to fix it but the system was so slow that the only thing I could really do was a Time Machine restore to before I did the update. I seem to remember an update on a previous system being so bad it had to be recalled - this seems to be on par with that.
There is such an issue with Security Update 2020-005 when installed after installing Safari 14, so it’s possible the same issues exist with 2020-004. What version of Safari did you have before running the Security Update?