Users label Apple OS download ‘dumb’

KitGuru is in love with the Japanese idea of maximum efficiency with minimum effort. It's something that permeates not only the universe as a whole, but the world if technology in particular. One of the first things that any computer science student learns is that, in life, remove repeating groups. Why doesn't this apply to the iPad?

Way back on 11th May, we ran a story about Apple's new iPad software update. Earlier, we were contacted by a reader to ask if their experience with the update was (a) normal or (b) totally bizarre.

Having seen our story, she had updated one of her iPads. The second iPad was being used by her kid, so she left it.

This morning, when she attached the second iPad to her PC, Apple not only told her that she needed a software update to 5.1.1 (which she had figured out already, when the same PC said the same thing the day before) – but it also insisted that she download a copy.

Both of the iPads are ‘synched' in the sense that they both install software with the same user name and password – so why the double download?

The use of the same user name and password, means that Apple automatically duplicated all of the software/purchases on both tablets – so the Jobs legacy knows that more than one tablet will need updating…  so why not keep the download instead of pressuring the interwibble for a second batch of around 770MB of data.

Surely this has to be viewed as a kind of ‘really dumb and totally unnecessary kind of spam' ?

It's possible that we'll now be contacted by an Apple guru to say that if only she's sacrificed a rabbit with a granite blade, thrown potassium iodide over her left shoulder and chanted the phrase Steve Krishna seventeen times in a row, then a copy would have been saved – but it would be nice to be asked.

KitGuru says: For a company that prides itself on (a) intelligence and (b) the user experience – you would have thought that iTunes would have downloaded the first copy of the OS and then asked, “We notice that you have more than one iPad – any chance you will want to update that one as well ?  The sofware is only 770MB and you have plenty of disk space, should we keep a copy locally for you?”

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

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