Apple iMac's and data usage on limited data?

[joshrocker]

I'm looking at going Mac for the first time and have a question about data usage. We unfortunately rely on Satelite Internet for our home internet (currently our only choice) and are limited to 15 gigs of data a month. We do get unlimited data between the hours of midnight-5am.

How is the iMac at consuming data? I'm well aware of what things like what the cloud can do to your data cap but I'm mostly looking at general day to day usage. Can you manually choose when to update OS updates? Or are they auto downloaded? Is there a download manager where you can automatically have it check for updates after a certain time (in our case midnight) and have it download updates without any further interaction from us?

From my research app updates can be manually updated just like on my iPhone and iPad. Correct?

I'm coming from Windows 10 which was quite leaky with data. It took a lot of fine tuning but I've finally got most everything configured now where it's not using that much more data than previous versions were. I'm hoping the Mac is much easier and won't need hours of trial and error like Windows latest OS did.

I'm looking at the late 2015 27in iMac if that makes a difference. Thank you!

 

[anon(9602380)]

The iMac can be pretty easy on data if you are careful. But data usage really comes down to what you are doing on the computer. But I am sure you are more than aware of that with your plan.

You can choose to have updates done automatically or manually as shown below. You can schedule updates to happen at specified times either through iCal or with an Apple Script. I have not done it in some time as I have unlimited data so I no longer need to schedule a time. You can always post that question here again when you get the iMac or PM me and I will happily get you the answer.

 

[joshrocker]

Sounds like I shouldn't have any surprises then. With Windows I found, at least out of the box, that it was constantly connecting to the Internet for "things". The live tiles might be great if you need the information they're displaying but for me I found them as wastes of data. There were lots of data leaks like that in Windows and I'm hoping Mac is a little more restrained.

Thank you for the answer.