Mac App Store apps cached on Airport hardware/network? [INCREDIBLE DOWNLOAD SPEED!]

[J.C]

I recently purchased a new MacBook Air for myself and one for my wife. I setup my MBA downloading 4 or 5 apps from the Mac App Store as well as iLife updates. I then started to setup my wife's MBA similarly. I found that Mac App Store apps/updates downloaded MUCH MUCH faster. I was getting up to 4-6 MB/second which is MUCH faster that I've ever download ANYTHING before. Normally I don't get much over 1MB/second even from Apple. I've never had download speeds anywhere near that.

It's as if the Airport Extreme or one of the other machines on my network has saved my downloads or something similar. I assume there is no storage on the Airport Extreme however (as distinct from the Time Machine hardware).

How is that possible?

 

[blipmusic]

Was wondering the same. I have a wireless connection and while it's relatively speedy the download speeds on the Mac AppStore didn't make sense.

Only reason I can come up with is that they have begun with incremental/delta updates, rather than downloading the whole app over and over again and that is still shows the whole download procedure from scratch.

 

[Kyle Jones]

I'm seeing the same insanely high download speeds and I don't use an Airport Extreme. There's no caching going on. I ran Activity Monitor and watched network activity while a download was happening and found that the download speed was around my DSL maximum, like normal. I can only conclude that the app store is lying about the download speed, probably due to a coding mistake.