Hourly Check Limit Leaves Safari's Notify Me Short of Its Key Use Case, 9to5Mac Says

The feature works without user intervention once a page has been selected, with Apple Intelligence monitoring for updates and alerting the user when one occurs. Among the uses 9to5Mac cites are price drops and products returning to stock, cases where a shopper can wait for Safari to signal that it is time to buy rather than revisiting a site repeatedly.

The article describes ticket sales as the most tedious site-refreshing task it performs regularly. Some events sell out within minutes of tickets opening, and sales frequently do not begin at the advertised time, prompting buyers to load a page shortly before the stated hour and refresh it over and over. In some cases the sales window opens 20 or 30 minutes late, which the piece says makes the process extremely time-consuming.

With an hourly maximum, 9to5Mac writes, a Notify Me alert is likely to arrive after the tickets are gone, or at least after the seats the buyer wanted have been taken. Notify Me cannot currently serve that purpose.

The proposed change is narrow: allow the check frequency to be set to every minute, or even every 15 seconds. The article acknowledges that sustained high-frequency checks could effectively amount to a denial-of-service attack on a website, and says Apple would therefore have to place limits on the setting. One option it suggests is capping high-frequency checks at a maximum running period of 30 minutes; because the same site would rarely need such checking, the piece adds, Apple could impose a reset period of a month before the feature could be used that way again on the same website.

The piece frames the gap as an example of a broader frustration: computers were meant to automate boring tasks, yet users still perform many repetitive jobs that are not yet easily automated, and AI is beginning to change that. 9to5Mac also invited readers to take a poll and share their own suggestions for the feature.