If a screen is connected that’s another thing, though even that can lead to overheating. For example, a lot of modern laptops suck in air through the keyboard and having the lid closed while working messes up their thermal performance, and heats up the screen to an unhealthy degree.

But having it wake up and try installing an update while sitting in a bag, closed and disconnected from a screen, is a straight up fire hazard, and it happened to me multiple times with windows laptops.

I haven’t used a mac for over a decade, but for the decade or so before that it never happened to me once, either on an iBook or MBP. Perhaps something changed in the meantime.

It absolutely isn’t. If a laptop lid is closed, it needs to be sleeping, period. No random updates, no search indexing. I’ve also had this happen after explicitly putting laptops into sleep AND closing the lid. No idea how Apple is the only company able to do this consistently.