I understand why you might want to refresh your package cache independently of performing an update.
But why does Apt effectively force you to do two commands just to update?
If my package cache is three weeks old then I'm going to need to do an update before an upgrade, because otherwise packages aren't there. So an update on its own is pointless. It's just going to try and update to non-existent packages.
Yum, DNF and Zypper all have the sense to fetch the latest package list.
