hardballs You only ever get updated to the latest release in the channel. It installs one update. In the general case, it downloads the entire latest OS release as an update package and installs it. There are delta updates from the past several weeks of releases which provide only the block-level firmware and OS image changes between the release you were on and the latest release so you only download the differences unless you fall more than around 2-4 weeks behind. We usually provide deltas going back around 3 weeks, so you end up downloading 2MB to 80MB instead of 1GB. Every user has bit-for-bit identical firmware and OS images, which are verified cryptographically with downgrade protection.