DISQUS

It seems like an OK ad to me. If I had to re-use a catheter and had this problem and saw this ad, I'd probably be really glad that such a service existed and that the ad was informing me about it.

I have Safari installed on all my Windows PCs at work. I DO want updates to Safari, but I don't want iTunes installed. Well, Software Update tries to push iTunes on me every time. So, it works both ways and although I am a big fan of both iTunes and Safari, I think that this sucks for the reasons you state.

The Newton's screen was glass and I only saw one break once and I was a professional Newton developer for years and we had hundreds of them in our offices.

Speaking as a software developer who writes for both Mac and PC, downloading a whole new version rather than a patch has many advantages. These are greater reliability and lower cost of development. The advantage to downloading a patch is that it uses less bandwidth. The disadvantage is that as a developer, I have to develop a patching mechanism, I have to test the patch, I have to test it against all previous copies of the program, etc. This is a lot of work - work that is better spent working on the product itself given that bandwidth is much cheaper these days. Most applications are not that large. For something like iTunes, downloading a new app is probably as much bandwidth as downloading maybe 2 songs?
So, it is much better from an engineering point of view to just concentrate on making the application very reliable and making sure it correctly installs over any older version that might be present. (On MacOS X, that is brain-dead easy.)
And if the app just points your browser to the download website, it is even better because then the developer doesn't have to write any download code or code to show you what new features the new version has, etc. Just check the verison and pop a website. Very simple, very reliable. Move on to other things.