iOS 5: No More PC, OTA Updates

Anyone who has owned an iOS device knows that upon out of the box, the first thing they see is their device asking them to tether it to their computer in order to set up synch with iTunes. Not necessarily a bad thing but what if the person’s computer was not well equipped enough to run iTunes properly or what if they didn’t know what all these synching meant?

With iOS 5 Apple is looking to do away with the tethering and instead rely on OTA updates and backup through their iCloud services.  Currently for iOS updates Apple requires users to download the entire update which means that it could range in the couple hundred megabytes meaning OTA updates would basically eat a big chunk of the users data plan. With this update Apple has said that they will now offer OTA updates and whatever is downloaded is only changes that have been made to the OS, not the entire OS itself, so that means downloads could be as small as a couple of megabytes or so. Not exactly a new feature as Android has had this feature a long time ago, but good to know that Apple has managed to play catch up.

This should sway a couple of on-the-fence buyers who have initially resisted the idea of an iPhone due to the troublesome nature of having to constantly tether their iPhone to their computer in order to receive updates and synching their device with their computers. Finally we can say that the cord has been cut.