It's true that a smaller "delta" update would be doable over the air, but I think that the hookup to your PC makes the process much safer. Should your device up

It's true that a smaller "delta" update would be doable over the air, but I think that the hookup to your PC makes the process much safer. Should your device update fail, you have backups and a way to restore back to your previous state. We've seen what happens when an update goes awry (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/everything-that-can-go-wrong-with-windows-phone-7-update-does.ars http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/02/everything-tha...), and Apple is clearly playing it very, very safe and very, very slow, much to our geeky displeasure.