adobe = slow, apple = fast

I decided to upgrade my copy of Indesign before embarking on the layout of the latest Chin Music Press Book, Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans. Wow, Adobe's servers are slow.

I regularly download upgrades, TV shows, music, etc from Apple. They are blazing. Here in Tokyo we have 100mbs fiber connections which are relatively ubiquitous. On my $40/mo connection I usually pull a good 3-5MB/s on my downloads from Apple servers. What this means is almost instantaneous software upgrades and < 5min waits to download hour long TV shows.

And so, with a relatively modest file size for the Adobe Indesign upgrade software before me, I naively assumed I could grab the file in about 10 mins, install it and be out the door for some Italian lunch in Mejiro. Well, Adobe could use some help from Apple because their servers are like wounded monkeys. I'm getting about 250k/s right now which means the whole download is going to take another 2 hours. Considering I get the same throughput on a $4.00/month economy web-hosting package, this is just sad.

Isn't this supposed to be the age of streaming everything? And yet one of the biggest media software suppliers delivers its goods like we were all shackled to broken DSL connections of yesteryear.

Update: Not only is the Adobe download connection slow, the software they wrote for it is horribly inefficient. Since when does a small window which, basically, acts as a mini ftp-client need 60% of my CPU? Ohh Adobe, I like your software but your whole online sales apparatus needs a good cleanup!