Chris Wiegman
After almost a year back in the Apple ecosystem there is one feature I both love and hate more than any other, operating system updates.
Outside of the Apple ecosystem updates are a bit of a crap shoot. Every device updates at different times making it, in my opinion, that much harder to keep things up to date. In addition, whether Windows or Linux or Android, system updates tend to be far more questionable in quality, or at least compatibility, with any given device. Apple fixes this problem.
If I notice an update on one device (currently I have a laptop, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and 2 Apple TVs on my account) I can almost guarantee that each one of my devices will have one too. This is handy as it makes it real easy to go and update each device right there where I can be reasonably sure I won’t forget about them and that I can update them without interrupting too much work. Most of all, I don’t have to worry if they will break any given device, at least not as much as I had to with any other system.
On the flip side, to catch them all means all my devices will be down from 20-60 minutes (approximately) while the updates are installed. With a mix of other systems I never have them all down at the same time but, since coming back to Apple, I find it fairly common to update all of them together.
Yeah, the downsides could definitely be labeled a first-world problem but, it is still a noticeable annoyance particularly as they absolutely can take 30 minutes or more per device.
One day, perhaps, OS vendors will be able to better deploy rolling updates for their systems and keep the down time to a minimum. For now, though, I’m just grateful that everything I have receives updates at all.
The software utopia we’ve all been promised might not be here yet but, as annoying as it is things could be far worse.