Apple’s new Tethered Caching is so good you may want to buy some Macs

Tethered caching is a major new system from Apple to speed up device provisioning, app installs and app updates. It’s most helpful in places where many iPhones and iPads are clustered together, such as healthcare, retail, and hospitality. But it only works if you have updated iPhones and Macs (yes, Macs).

Tethered caching provides two separate but related features: tethered networking & app caching.

• Tethered Networking: When active, all network traffic from the iOS device will be routed through the USB connection and out the Mac’s Ethernet connection. This includes web pages, MDM instructions, and push notifications.
• App Caching: App Caching dramatically speeds up app installs if you are doing repetitive provisioning. As your tethered devices download apps, the Mac inserts itself as middleman, and will save copies of each installed app. Subsequent installs of the same apps (on the same or other tethered devices) are much quicker, since the apps load from the Mac’s hard drive instead of the Internet.

Continue reading our analysis at groundctl.com.