I always connect my iPhone via a cable and drive the update from my Mac (after backing it up and synching it). I’d held off on this one until now and I was only offered iOS 16. I had to go into the iPhone settings itself to get offered iOS 15.7.
When I did the update on my iPhone 13, the phone default was 15.7 but it offered an update to 16.0 below that. I don’t think 16.0 showed up on my Mac.
David
Yes, normally I wait several months to a year before installing a major iOS update.
I switched from via USB to my Mac to via OTA updates years ago when I realized the OTA was vastly faster than via USB.
But also less reliable. Hence, the need for USB-C in iPhone asap.
That won’t help very much as the delay is in the download, not the actual install. It takes longer to download to my iMac via WiFi, then is does to download via WiFi directly to my iDevices. I consider WiFi as an OTA since there isn’t a cable required.
??? First you claim OTA is much faster than USB, but then you claim OTA is the bottleneck because your download is slow compared to the install. I’m confused.
My Gigabit download rates mean the actual download takes max 1 min. But then the installer takes much longer to do its work. Same on macOS. The actual install is painfully slow compared to the download itself and that has to do with all the stuff the installer is doing, not the b/w of the pipe to the device in my case. Nevertheless, I don’t want time wasted. In a world where I download 50 MB/s real-world and USB ports on my MBP easily do 50 MB/s, I cannot stand the fact that my my current iPhone leaves me with these two options:
a) wi-fi which routinely fails to do a reliable daily backup/sync
b) USB2 resulting in perhaps 5 MB/s real-world.
A modern iPad with USB-C shows vastly superior wired transfer. That’s what I want on iPhone. And that’s regardless of the iOS installer and the eternity it takes that thing to run. Which BTW wouldn’t be such an issue if it weren’t for the fact that lately it feels like that needs to run 2+ times a month because supposedly “… xyz has been exploited in the wild”.
I’ll make it as simple as I can: As I recall, it takes longer for the updates to download to the iMac then it takes for the update to download directly to the iDevices.
However, it has been years since I did an iDevice update by connecting it to my iMac with a cable so I may have it backwards. It may be that it is the actual install that takes longer. I just remember it taking about an hour to do an iOS update via my iMac and it takes about half the the time.
I do agree that going from USB-C to USB-C would be faster than USB-A to Lightning. However, I doubt that USB-A to USB-C is much faster than USB-A to Lightning on my iMac.
BTW, I just ran a Speedtest on my connection: 106 Mbps download, 20 Mbps upload and this is with my iMac only 1 meter away from the router (though the printer is in between so it may physically block/attenuate the WiFi signal).
It’s also been a while since I did a USB upgrade. And I also think it takes longer.
I think this is because when you upgrade over USB, iTunes (and later the Finder) creates a backup before beginning the upgrade.
Additionally, if there isn’t enough storage on the iDevice, it will wipe your phone, perform the upgrade, and then restore from the backup.
With an OTA upgrade, if there isn’t enough storage, the upgrade simply doesn’t happen until you manually delete or offload some apps. Yes, iOS can supposedly auto-offload apps during an upgrade, but that never worked for me - I always had to do it manually for some reason.
My point here is that when you upgrade OTA, you are probably only thinking of the time it takes to perform the upgrade. You are probably not counting the time needed to make a backup (if you make one), to offload apps, and then to reload them after the upgrade.
But when you do a USB upgrade, you tend to think of all those steps as a part of the upgrade process, because it all happens automatically once you click the button to begin the upgrade.
The connector type shouldn’t matter. Only the speed. Lightening is (for nearly all use-cases) USB 2.0 and as such is limited to those speeds. A type-A or type-C connection could be 2.0 or it could be 3.0.
A device with USB 3 (no matter what connector you have) will almost certainly transfer data faster than USB 2 (again, no matter what the connector is). But if you run USB 2 over a type-A or a type-C or over a Lightening connector, I doubt you’ll see much difference between them.
Just a note to say that this did work for me on my old iPhone X when I upgraded from 14 to 15. It asked to offload some apps, I confirmed, and it successfully performed the upgrade and then added the apps back. Pretty slick.
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I always sync and backup my iDevices before I update the iOS (I also sync and backup weekly). Syncing usually takes less than a minute, backing up takes about 2 - 3 minutes (my iPad Mini 5 is the slowest). Even adding 5 minutes to the time it takes to install directly to the iDevice, doesn’t come even close to the time it took via a cable connection to my iMac.
This Apple Discussions thread reports many Homekit issues with iOS 16:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254199872