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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

They certainly do – probably not for Apple but certainly for consumers. Apple currently only distributes Lion digitally. You can get it on a thumb drive in two months or so but it will cost you more than twice as much as the download. Apple wants consumers to download Lion.

3.7 GB (that’s the size of the download) are still a lot and keeping the size of downloads as small as possible is certainly a valid goal.

I think Apple shaved off about one GB or so compared to what they pressed on DVDs and that’s certainly noticeable for many people. My parents’ house (in Germany) has this really awful DSL connection, more than 4,000 kbit/s are just not possible. Having to download 1 GB less would save them over thirty minutes. (Downloading merely 3.7 GB would take them over two hours.)

Making stuff only few people use optional is still a great idea when you want people to download it. Not everyone has FIOS.

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IIRC The 3.7 Lion install is down from the 4.7 Snow Leopard install, which was the result of a crash diet that Leopard was put on, I believe, bringing it down from around 7GB originally.

Apple's been squeezing out the bloat for several years, I believe, with the intention of doing digital downloads of OS in the future.

This implies the Mac App Store has been in the planning stages since around 2007-2008 or so (when Snow Leopard development likely started.)

If I remember correctly, in Tiger the default install included a few gigabytes of printer drivers that were removed and downloaded on demand in later versions. The OS itself has remained fairly constant in size.

Heh, 4M is considered a "really awful" internet connection these days? I have 6M and am perfectly happy.

Then again, an apt-get upgrade once a week is a lot more efficient than a 4G monolith every year :)

My parents’ problem is more that those 4M are the limit for the house, their DSL line just isn’t any faster. The connection also seems somewhat flaky (this might be an illusion, though). My parents must be really far away from the next DSLAM, close to the limit of what’s possible.

It’s certainly noticeable, there are really annoying slowdowns when someone watches a YouTube video and someone else tries to browse the web. The problem is probably that in my parents’ house the internet connection is often used by more than one person. When I’m downloading something I can sort of deal with a video that takes longer to load, but when someone else causes my video to take longer to load, well that’s annoying.

Maybe they should switch to cable.

If we are talking about 4Mb/s, then yes, that's at least half of the slowest speeds you'd expect nowadays. The cheapest package my ISP offers is 10Mb/s, with the average priced one being 30Mb/s.

But that's cable, right? DSL is different; 15Mbps seems to be the high end of DSL connectivity. But, unlike with cable, you are not sharing that bandwidth with everyone else on your block: it's all yours. Hence, it's advantageous on occasion.

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