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Running "update all" on my iPhone has been way more stable than "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" on my Linux servers over the years. It is a good model, but it is far from perfect. Could you just fire your sysadmin and put in a cron to auto update? I really don't think so.

Going through the phase of the DRM marketplace was necessary to get to the non-DRM marketplace that exists now. Politics, however unsightly, do exist. It is now more convenient to buy DRM-free music than to pirate it. That was honestly inconceivable in the Napster days.



Running "update all" on your iPhone is something almost completely different than running "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" on a Linux machine.

On the Linux machine this might even include kernel upgrades. iPhones didn't do OTA upgrades for the system until quite recently and then is obviously a different process than just a simple app upgrade.

iPhone apps don't have dependencies because Apple doesn't allow them to. So every app update is just a small box update without affecting any other applications.


> iPhone apps don't have dependencies because Apple doesn't allow them to. So every app update is just a small box update without affecting any other applications.

Which is exactly the point.


Yeah and now compare how limited an iPhone is compared to a general computing device where programs are allowed to talk to each other and rely on each other.

You only get the functionality a single app gives you. For many things this is sufficient or at least you can live with. For games it almost doesn't matter.

This only works because 99% of the people don't use iPhones for creating stuff but for consuming content.


Maybe not having dependencies is a good idea. The iPhone runs Unix, too.




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