Open Radar

 
Summary:

Enable Mac OS X Server to cache iOS 5 OTA system software updates.

Notes:

I run a school with 100+ iPads. At the moment, updating iOS involves plugging 100 iPads into a Mac and updating them, so I'm excited about iOS 5's OTA updating. It will really help us keep the iPads up to date.

Our only problem is the school's bandwidth which is (a) not all that fast and (b) metered.

Currently, we download the iOS update once and use the "Option-Click Restore" trick in iTunes to select the update file from a local server. This saves us about 60GB of bandwidth and dozens of hours of waiting for each iOS update. Now, iOS 5 delta updates will be smaller but they're still non-trivial when you have 100+ devices to update.

Please would you consider extending Lion's Software Update Server (which we love and depend on for our Macs) to allow it to cache iOS OTA updates?

This would:

1. Save me a huge amount of time on each release.
2. Make it easier to keep devices up to date.
3. Save the school a significant amount of money on bandwidth.

Thanks for your attention.