Apple to release Mac OS X Lion through Mac App Store
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
Even the most minor update requires it download the entire 4.5GB "Install Xcode.app" again. Further, you have to keep that installer around or you'll stop being notified of subsequent updates.
Despite that, I do agree, seems an incredibly wasteful thing to do.
The article is a year old, but 3.9mbps makes for a bit longer than 20 minutes. Downloading something near 4.5GB again and again would be OK if there weren't alternatives, but I feel like they could do much better.
N.B. - for those having problems, I used this[1] script to download via wget, then after having downloaded everything minus 100megs before the dl failed, I was able to hand the script the -c flag for wget and continue. Lifesaver.
N.B. II - this script isn't written by me, but rather the awesome 'derencius'. All credit to him :)
Maybe your ISP is pulling one of those speedboost scams where the first N megs are at a high speed and then everything afterwards is throttled down?
Maybe they should put it out as a torrent + simply seed the thing? Seems a perfect fit, given the size of the download + the number of people getting it.
On a baseline MB Air (64GB), 4.5GB is not cheap. On most broadband connections, 4.5GB is a non-trivial % of your broadband cap.
At least for Apple's apps there should be a way to download incrementals (with a choice to DL the whole thing if something broke).
edit: I know that when you back up your hard drive, you back up your OS as well. Having said that, if my computer gets corrupted, I don't want to lose everything.
And I guess the days of sharing OS X discs are over.
http://www.9to5mac.com/53844/os-x-10-7-lions-recovery-partit...