Apple caches its entire website on your iPad
The image you see above is a screen shot from my iPad from last night when I was having WiFi issues immediately after updating to iOS 6. In retrospect, I should have taken more screenshots, but really didn’t think about it at the time. What was happening was that my iPad was trying to find a page on Apple’s website that wasn’t there – thus the error you see. Well, rather than simply closing out the browser and trying something else, I started clicking links on the page. Now, bear in mind that I was not in fact connected to the internet, so I had no internet access.
I was expecting to get a bunch more errors about not being able to find the pages, but instead got exactly the opposite. Every page I clicked on fully loaded with all the information that should have been there. I happened to click on the press release page and the latest one was dated a few days ago and was talking about the iPhone 5. Just for fun, I tried to click on the chat with a specialist option, and it even tried to connect me. Of course, it just hung on that page, but it still tried.
Now before you even mention it, there is no way that this info would be on my iPad because of me having been on Apple’s website. The only thing I ever do on the site is download iTunes onto a new computer. I have never spent any time on the site on any device, and so I know that there was no way it was cached previously. Additionally, I wasn’t actually viewing the website in Safari; it was in a separate settings browser, which is what you would use to sign into a hotspot. I wanted to check something, and so I turned off my WiFi and tried to go to Apple.com in Safari. Like expected, it errored out due to not being connected to the internet. This means that it is only cached for that special settings browser.
I don’t really see the point in doing this. There is no way to get to this browser that I know of, other than when you try to connect to a hotspot. So what’s the point of having their entire website on your device in a browser you can’t access? Why not cache it for Safari? Does anyone else find this the least bit interesting?