Is there a way to enable instant over the air updates for 0-day fixes, etc? I see my phone has "automatic updates" on but it still requires me to download and install manually.
I also believe Apple is doing some kind of rate limiting. Whenever I’ve upgraded iOS or MacOS on day one the download is painfully slow on my gigabit connection.
For this particular update, my iPhone downloaded over 100 Mb and MacBook over 1 Gb.
1GB/update * 1B devices potentially?
We are in exabyte range.
I've also noticed somewhat slower downloads on new updates on my 1GB connection.
Ideally their caching network really is everywhere. I wish they'd do the Microsoft thing of letting you update based on others local downloads. For campus networks some of these updates can really load things up.
I'm also at 900MB+
They do, you can set up a Mac as a content cache for system updates for other Macs on the same network.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...
Apple does let you do this! It just takes a little more work to enable.
You need a macOS device on your local network. Then in Preferences -> Sharing, enable “Content Caching”. This will transparently cache OS and app updates for all Apple devices on your local network. If any device requests an update your caching server doesn’t have, the caching server downloads it first and then serves it to the client. This can minorly speed up updates even when they're not already cached. It also caches shared iCloud file contents as well. (But with E2EE, so the server can’t see the content).
I keep a caching server running and really see the speed up. It's great if you’re setting up a new phone and installing lots of apps, making it particularly useful for corporate IT.
It should probably have to be turned on explicitly, because a lot of people are still on spendy OTA plans, but it should be an option.
Battery crapping out is still a major taboo with iOS updates, I believe.
The person who buys the phone is one customer. Another customer is the cell phone networks, who don't much want to use their airtime to distribute OS patches, which use a lot of bandwidth but are almost entirely invisible to users.
Rather than, you know, a vulnerable device behind on updates that isn't backupable to iCloud in any way.
It could be done in a p2p way like windows updates. By default they will share update files to other devices on the local network and can also work with other devices over the internet.
A bunch of plugged in iphones on wifi would be perfectly capable of distributing update files.
I'm not suggesting the whole thing become p2p, but that the p2p network assist the dedicated distribution servers. For me, just the local p2p would halve the number of updates pulled from Apples servers because there are 2 of the same apple product on the same local network.
Obviously Apple doesn't need to do this because they are flawlessly pushing out updates every week but if they were struggling with distribution, this is a proven working system that windows uses.
Imagine all the iPhones that aren't on Wi-Fi when they get such an emergency update request: they'll melt the mobile networks trying to download 2 GB each.
The idea doesn't work.
This is why Apple devices check for updates once a week, staggered. The load is therefore mostly constant, other than the hardcore ones who manually check for an update once they hear one is available.
As a side note, upload rates seem to be somewhat constant at all hours. I assume it must all be IoT security cameras.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...
All the devices after that will use the local copy of the update.