[AndroTux]

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.

[jlokier]

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...

[voakbasda]

Shared medium will always have congestion. It will never get better. Technology can get faster, but congestion is forever.

[melonpan7]

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.

[frereubu]

On 5G, it depends. There are still plenty of people around the world who don't have unlimited data plans.

[AndroTux]

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.