5 ms·
It might seem strange, but they are using a change/build/deploy mechanism designed to deliver updates to any and all parts of an OS across a range of hardware d
by jmull 6y ago
It might seem strange, but they are using a change/build/deploy mechanism designed to deliver updates to any and all parts of an OS across a range of hardware devices.
I'm pretty sure the mechanism, from end-to-end, is complex, and providing an optimized path for small changes would require resources, introduce more risk, and come at the expense of something else.
Sucks, though, for everyone who doesn't have a reasonably fast or reliable internet connection.
- joshocar 6y agoI work on a ship part of the year. Satellite internet shared between 50 people. These Apple updates would saturate the network and grind it to a halt before we started blocking them on the firewall. iMessage got caught in the crossfire and now sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago^ This is why you should always be able to turn off automatic downloading of updates.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoActually, my iphone won't update unless it's being connected via WLAN rather than WWLAN. Makes me kindof of a persona non grata at friends where I have a WLAN password, and the first thing happening if I'm on a visit is that my iphone updates itself. Though it's not as bad as people with Windows notebooks exhausting my mobile plan when they're at my place.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoAnd you can. Doesn't mean all your users' personal devices comply with the request to do so.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoOn iOS? iPhones don't update automatically (if you tell them not to), but I'm not aware of a way to stop them from downloading updates, other than weird workarounds like installing a tvOS beta profile.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoI forget that perhaps Apple's intent is to do what people complain about: download the update anyway, regardless of the setting. My anecdotal experience (I have yet to have an iOS device actually download the update when I have automatic updates turned off) allows me to forget.
- snazz 6y agoIf you're all on the same LAN, then you can configure one device to download it from Apple and share it with the rest.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIf you have at least one Mac, you can use Content Caching: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-caching-on-mac-mchl9388ba1b/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac... It works for iCloud content, too.
- baggy_trough 6y agoI tried to make that work, but it didn't seem to do anything. Repeat downloads took just as long as before.
- rexfm 6y agoyou can verify if Content Cache is working in a couple ways... first, while installing the update, you should see a CPU usage spike in Activity Monitor for the process "AssetCache". secondly, you can run this command on the machine you want to upgrade, to verify that it can see your Content Caching Server (it should report the local IP address of the machine you set up Content Caching on) "AssetCacheLocatorUtil"
- baggy_trough 6y agogreat info, thanks. Looks like if the machine is asleep it won't use it for a content cache, even if "wake for network access" is turned on. So a pretty useless feature if you have a machine that's allowed to sleep.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIf you've just turned on Content Caching, or the machine running it has rebooted, client devices will not discover the server immediately. You need to wait a while, or reboot the client devices, which will force them to discover it.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI apologize if this is a stupid question, but, is there a reason they can't do a diff patch on the binary? Would it end up not introducing savings?
- hu3 6y agoIncompetence. A private company can deliver two human beings alive to a point in space with millimeter precision. Meanwhile another can't deliver Operating Systems without gross bugs or smaller updates with binary diff patching.
- nitrogen 6y agoI want to point out that software and space are quite different problems. Much of the engineering for space appears to be mathematically differentiable and continuous -- a small change in inputs usually results in a predictable change in outputs. It's hard work, but relatively intuitive. Software is more chaotic though. A small change in inputs can change behavior drastically, like stepping a tiny bit to the right on a branch of the Mandelbrot set. It's sometimes easier work, but often relatively counterintuitive.
- hu3 6y agoThere's no amount of handwaving that will excuse Apple for messing up their signin authentication, mobile throttling, faulty keyboards being delivered for years despite customer outcry or allowing anyone to login as root with blank password on macos. Those things should get caught in basic QA. It's not rocket science. I repeat: it's incompetence.
- rurban 6y agoI rather would point out management. This is what changed in this timeframe.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoThat’s not an axiomatic truth. Binary diff algorithms exist (ask me, I’ve written several) that can identify and isolate changes across versions even when content is changed at non-block boundaries, non-contiguously, etc and while they are computationally expensive patches to create, they are trivial to unpack/apply. But generally the software industry has moved to a model where diffs are shunned and “recreate from scratch” is embraced for reasons that range from reproducibility to speed of development to architectural purity and everything in between.
- jfindley 6y agoThat's not universally true. Android makes significant use of binary diffs for patching to reduce OTA upgrade sizes, for example. However they're not appropriate for all situations, and there's a bunch of legitimate reasons Apple may have chosen not to pursue this for kernel updates.
- saagarjha 6y agoChrome does too, I hear.
- greggman3 6y agohttps://blog.chromium.org/2009/07/smaller-is-faster-and-safer-too.html https://blog.chromium.org/2009/07/smaller-is-faster-and-safe... Yes, and smaller updates is arguable better security for users because they'll actually update. A 3gig download and a 15 to 45 minute down time is a huge incentive to NOT update.
- machello13 6y agoIt's funny how rarely you see a reasonable response to a question about "why doesn't my software do X" on a site full of software developers.
- igreulich 6y agoI would venture to guess that often it is because the answer is 'business reasons', which is often not reasonable.
- clairity 6y agothat's a flippant guess. the underlying reasons or the reasoning for others' decisions may not be apparent to you (i.e., under-explained). beyond that, if decisions others make often seem not reasonable, it's probable that you disagree with the values on which those decisions are based, rather than those business decisions being without reason. you may be entirely justified in your disagreement, but that's a different animal from unreasonableness. also, most business decisions are made under uncertainty and with imperfect information (under-informed), and many can seem less reasonable in hindsight as a result. in any case, it's really unlikely that decision makers are chaos monkeys even if it seems that way from your vantage point.
- minedwiz 6y agoI just wish it didn't take 30 minutes to install, even on modern Macs with PCIe drives.
- nnx 6y agoIt’s indeed infuriating than any small-ish kernel patch takes so long to install. I wonder what the update system is doing.
- cozzyd 6y agoSure but Fedora and RHEL (for example) manage to do this for all updates on a small fraction of the budget.