Comment by AndroTux
9 hours ago
This one drives me nuts. Not just on Mac, also on iPhone/iPad. It's 2026, and 5G is the killer feature advertised everywhere. There's no reason to default to downloading gigabytes of audio files if they could be streamed with no issue whatsoever.
I'm on 5G right now and it just struggled to load the HN front page due to local network congestion. At times of day when it's not congested it reaches 60-90Mbyte/s in the same physical location
Spotify just gave up while trying to show me my podcasts. I can't listen to anything not already downloaded right now.
Yet at 3am I'll be able to download a 100GB LLM without difficulty onto the same device that can't stream a podcast right now.
Unfortunately I don't think 5G is the streaming panacea you have in mind. Maybe one day...
Only reason I still download from Apple Music to device is for lossless and hi-res lossless, which would otherwise use a lot of cellular data.
On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.
Then they can enable downloads in the settings. I’m not saying they should remove the feature. I’m saying setting this as a default on a non-budget device is a bad design choice.