I appreciate your point that not everyone has great internet but let’s also keep in mind that services like Netflix consume about 1GB/hr SD and 3GB/hour HD, and Netflix has over 200 million customers world wide. 1GB just isn’t what it used to be.
In the beginning of the pandemic, my living situation changed, and my family was dependent on mobile LTE for our internet connection due to being in a semi-rural area.
A 1 GB security update would find me at the public library parking lot with a pile of devices in my car, updating all of them on their WiFi some weekend morning.
There are still millions and millions of people in this world who need to change their physical behavior to work around issues of internet scarcity on a regular basis.
Do you think that 200 million Netflix users comprises the same set of people that are bandwidth constrained? I don't see how that's relevant to the point whatsoever.
A lot of people I know were using macs partly because you can still force them to only update at the library, Something you haven't been able to do with Windows for a long time.
I was just putting 1GB into context for 2021. My point is there is a substantial number of people that are perfectly fine using 1GB/hr for just one of the things they do online. So the requirement of a few GB every few months is not likely to even register for an even larger segment of the population, regardless of platform.
Of course there are those that this will matter to. And for those perhaps Apple, a premium brand, is not the best solution. But of course they will need to define “best” for their own context.
Edit: And of course there are contexts where the long upgrade time can matter a lot, like a help desk. They won’t care about the data but they may care about upgrade latency. Again I just don’t think the Magnitude of data is going to be an issue for Apple’s target demographic.
Well maybe then the problem is with the ISPs and the unusable service they provide. Maybe their customers deserve better. I'm sure macOS updates are not the only thing that will benefit from the proper internet connection. If you think about it – Apple is building for the future, not optimising for the past. On HN posts about crappy
ISPs are a regular occasion, but in this case the blame shifts on Apple for some reason. I agree, small delta updates would be the best, and I'm sure they'll get there, but let's be honest — 1, 2 or 3GBs is not a big difference with a proper connection.
