Started the day with a call from a client's intern, a bit full of himself: "Hey, you need to fix this... the network is pretty slow this morning, can you check?"
I take a look: lots of local IPs pulling heavy data from Apple servers. Me: "macOS 26.3 just dropped, are all your Macs updating at once?"
Him: "Well, obviously. It's an important update. We're doing our iPhones and iPads simultaneously too."
That’s 27 devices updating at the same time on a connection that caps out physically at 60 Mbps.
I explain the bottleneck.
His reply: "Can't you just ask Apple to use 'extra bandwidth' to push them through? They need to be done by 09:30 because that's when the real work starts and we want updated machines."
Me, confused: "No. However, I can prioritize work traffic and throttle the updates to use the leftover bandwidth. But they will definitely not be done by 09:30."
I broke his brain.
He kept insisting on "extra bandwidth" as if it were a premium feature to toggle on demand.
I explained that in their case, bandwidth is a physical limit (FTTC degraded to 60 Mbps), not a software cap, and certainly not controlled by Apple.
He finally understood, thanked me, and closed with a cryptic gem: "Sorry, I'm not an IT guy, but by now I've learned that tech products usually have limits imposed by price, not by physics, which are usually way ahead."
Basically, the technical limitations of the past have been overcome, only to be replaced by commercial ones.
And they call it evolution...
