Upgrade a single machine: The main people affected by this are those who, like myself, either have no broadband access at home or have a data cap on their service. So already we’re behind the 8-ball.Įven if you do have broadband service at home, if you want to do any of these things, this “download only” OS makes them much more difficult:

A large download like this can eat up a good portion of your allotted data. Furthermore, in many instances where you can get broadband, many telecoms are capping and/or throttling their data throughput as well. While possibly more prevalent than uncapped wireless data plans, broadband service is still not available everywhere, especially not in more rural areas and downloading a 4GB software update over dial-up does not sound like a good time. Unfortunately, Apple is extending this theory for OS distribution. Their new iCloud service is a testament to that there are going to be a lot of unhappy iPhone/iPad users discovering they’ve eaten up their data usage for the month when iOS 5 comes out.

It’s long been a beef of mine that Apple seems to market its iDevices under the assumption that everybody has a constant broadband connection without data caps. However, Apple did one thing to ensure I’ll likely never have Lion on my MacBook Pro. Gestures, Launchpad, full screen apps, the Mac App Store… to me, they were annoying extras, but they were easy enough to disable/avoid and didn’t offset some of the new, more useful features like Versions and Mission Control. All indications I’ve seen pointed to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion including many different aspects of iOS. I approached the WWDC Keynote with a bit of apprehension.

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