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Comment by kylelibra | Hacker News Reader

One guess would be that they didn't want a 3gb app constantly being downloaded by people who wouldn't use it for more than 30 seconds. I realize bandwidth is incredibly cheap, but we are always hearing talking of Apple trying to offset costs, maybe this factored into the thinking?

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Seems like a reasonable guess. However, considering how large the update downloads are for even minor upgrades of Apple software I always assumed Steve secretly owned stock in a CDN.

Steve (Apple) did... in Akamai.

http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/1999/press_0...

It was at one point worth about 2 billion dollars, but I'm guessing it all got washed out after the dot-com bust because word of it was never mentioned again. :-)

Anyways, they aren't doing this because of CDN costs, it's negligible -- they are Akamai's largest customer and are also building their own network as well.

Makes sense. Perhaps that's why OSX is the only modern Unix (sorry AIX, HP-UX) that has no package management system... ;-)

I am quite sure the number of Mac users who download Xcode is negligible compared to the number of Mac users who download movies from that very same CDN. And the size of Xcode is comparable to HD movies.

You think that Apple are the ones who want to lower the bandwidth? I'm the one who had to download 3.8GB for a whole IDE and development kit when all I wanted was gcc and a linker. If they cared about bandwidth more than making programmers download their own tools, they'd have made the command-line tools their own separate install.

So make it download by torrent transparently like (IIRC) Starcraft.

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