Apple EFi & SMC Firmware Updates

This isn't necessarily a sophos safeguard caused error. These are combination updates and part of ONE package in the update MAY need to run at an early EFI booting stage where SafeGuard may cause an issue, or something else that was done to the system in which case the whole update would fail. I haven't had this issue the updates you mention, however I have had this issue with other updates where they wouldn't install correctly for some reason and the apple updates kept feeding me the same updates. The way I fixed it is instead of using the automatic apple updates I downloaded the pkg files it wanted manually and installed them that way. I had two updates with this issue, one installed just fine and the other wouldn't update at all, it was a keyboard firmware update. If you drop to the bash shell command line and do a manual pkg/dmg install from there it will often give you errors you normally wouldn't see otherwise. Also check the system and dmesg log for errors during the install. The keyboard firmware install error was caused by a permissions issue with one of the kernel modules in the pkg dependencies.

This isn't necessarily a sophos safeguard caused error. These are combination updates and part of ONE package in the update MAY need to run at an early EFI booting stage where SafeGuard may cause an issue, or something else that was done to the system in which case the whole update would fail. I haven't had this issue the updates you mention, however I have had this issue with other updates where they wouldn't install correctly for some reason and the apple updates kept feeding me the same updates. The way I fixed it is instead of using the automatic apple updates I downloaded the pkg files it wanted manually and installed them that way. I had two updates with this issue, one installed just fine and the other wouldn't update at all, it was a keyboard firmware update. If you drop to the bash shell command line and do a manual pkg/dmg install from there it will often give you errors you normally wouldn't see otherwise. Also check the system and dmesg log for errors during the install. The keyboard firmware install error was caused by a permissions issue with one of the kernel modules in the pkg dependencies.