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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

Usually the automatic updates run at night when it’s plugged in and on WiFi. I’ve never seen my phone ask to do it during the day unless I ignored the update for a few days.

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.

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I really hate that they demand Wifi - I never have Wifi, but I have an unlimited data plan that is well good for multiple terabytes.

Yeah, that needs to change.

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.

How’s your battery usage though, with the cell radio on (compared to wifi)?

Battery crapping out is still a major taboo with iOS updates, I believe.

The battery can be checked before updating, after any downloading, so it's irrelevant.

It doesn't matter, it's plugged in at night.

Whoa! Where do you live?

Apple has many customers.

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.

Then perhaps they should make it be able to be sent during off peak hours at a lower bitrate when people are sleeping, they are signed by Apple anyway, so a carrier can distribute them at off-peak from edge nodes closest to the tower, avoiding backhaul, and using wasted spectrum that was not getting use anyway.

Rather than, you know, a vulnerable device behind on updates that isn't backupable to iCloud in any way.

Yeah, I currently don't have Wi-Fi so my devices have stopped backing up to iCloud. Backups required my device to be plugged into power, connected to power, & have a locked screen! If you do not have Wi-Fi at home, would these conditions ever be met?

No extra rate limiting required. With ~1.7 billion active iOS devices, the infra must be under a bit of a strain to deliver even a relatively tiny 50 Mb delta.

For this particular update, my iPhone downloaded over 100 Mb and MacBook over 1 Gb.

My iPhone 11 Pro downloaded over 900 Mb and it was up to date until now.

The scale of data involved in this crazy.

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+

> letting you update based on others local downloads

They do, you can set up a Mac as a content cache for system updates for other Macs on the same network.

Windows just does this out of the box which seems to work pretty good.

Until your home system starts sharing the update without explicit permission and you get a surprise bill for running over your monthly bandwidth cap?

Windows by default only shares within your local network. Optionally you can turn it on for the wider internet and it does not seem to use that much data in my experience.

That was not the case when Windows 10 shipped. It shared with the entire internet by default and many people got hit with surprise bills.

It also spammed literally dozens of network connections for downloading, with the result that almost all of your bandwidth would be hogged by the updates and everything else slowed to a crawl.

This is why these sorts of features should require explicit approval by the user before they become active.

Apple's been doing this for years with Content Cache on macOS - it used to be an osx server capability, but they rolled it into the regular macOS release a while back. You just turn it on for one of your Macs, and everyone on your subnet (or multiple subnets with a little extra work) can now use a local cache of updates.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...

> I wish they'd do the Microsoft thing of letting you update based on others local downloads

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.

Not when there’s an alarm clock set.

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