This is driving insane. I’m using a PC one with XP, one with Vista. They’re
both less than two years old.
Why! Please tell me why it takes so long to download Mac stuff (i.e. updates
for iTunes, Safari, etc.). I turn off all anti-virus software and it takes four
or five times as long to download as PC software. Is there something I can do
about this other than to buy a Mac?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #14, I talk about download times for popular Apple software and
updates and why Apple updates may seem to download slower than PC updates.
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Slow Apple downloads
My guess is buying a Mac won’t help.
Now, I don’t know what software you’re comparing it to. My experience with
Apple software, on the Windows platform, is that their downloads just tend to
be fairly large.
They tend to be bigger downloads
An update for iTunes or Safari tends to download more data than an update
for various other programs. That’s not to say it’s absolutely this way all the
time; it is not! There are definitely software packages under Windows for PCs
that also typically have very large downloads.
- My guess however is that you just don’t have any of those.
You may have common software packages that update themselves fairly
quickly.
Large files take longer to download
Like I said, I have just noticed that the downloads seem to be bigger. So
ultimately, they are probably downloading just as fast. It’s just that there is
that much more to download. Therefore, it takes more time.
I noticed in the question/comment the type of connection wasn’t mentioned. Dial-up seems like it takes forever.
Mac stuff takes longer than PC stuff. Hmm, I wonder if the computer is being snotty. (chuckle)