My late father, who was a software developer by trade before his retirement, had a desktop machine set up running Windows 7 (probably?) that he used for checking email, and buying stuff online.
A few years later, when he had been diagnosed with cancer and was on chemo, it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent. It completely fucked up the install, and was unusable for him from then on. He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out, and was thus unable to book a vacation that he had intended to take to recover from that round of chemo.
Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process robbed him of his last holiday and I will not easily forgive them for it.
If a seasoned developer can be robbed of quality of life by this flavour of bullshit, what chance do the non-technical types stand?
This is the type of thing I imagined could happen, but hoped it never actually would happen.
The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted.
Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.
this is much more minor than a cancer patient missing his last damn holiday, but I have a device running android tv, and every few days it auto-redownloads “Android TV Home”, which is an advert-infested replacement home screen run by (I assume) Google.
every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how?
every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen.
the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
"When people had a choice in updates, too many would postpone them. This left our OS susceptible to attacks which made for some bad press for us. If we force updates, this won't happen."
- some exec, probably
I still regret that when Fall Creators Update came out, that I assumed that my active stylus (Staedtler Noris Digital, purchased as a bundle w/ my Samsung Galaxy Book 12) being used for scrolling and becoming unable to select text was a bug, so I simply rolled back, assuming it would be eventually be fixed.
If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine.
I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates.
I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display.
Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has:
- a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR)
- a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more)
- decent battery life
- reasonable size/thinness
- reasonable price
- access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff
I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
I worked for the computer store on my University's campus during the initial rollout of Win 10. Many such cases. There were also TOO many instances of Dell computers doing a BIOS update in the background and booting to bitlocker because the drives come from factory encrypted.
Not that I want to defend MS, but the longest I have ever seen it take to update is a couple of hours. Annoying, yes. Should it be user postponable? Yes.
Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
I hate bringing this up, because that loss should never have happened. But I ensure all such data lives on the cloud as well as locally because there could be a catastrophic hardware failure, natural disaster, or other external cause of that same problem regardless of Microsoft’s obvious negligence.
> it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent.
it's bs how they can just do this. Microsoft thinks that just because they aren't legally liable for their software breaking a user's system, that they can just do anything like these automatic updates.
I think it's really high time that there be regulation on software and their reliability - that is, some sort of consumer protection, where an update such as this breaking becomes a liability for microsoft. And of course, this doesn't just apply to microsoft, but apple and google and any other software manufacturer.
We're actually lucky that the current global political & economic system allows governments to enforce this. Companies can weasel out of paying taxes to the country in which they operate, but they generally can't escape the local country's regulation with regards to how they render their services.
All we need is political momentum to enact the regulation - and that's easier said than done.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I went through chemo less than two years ago, and while I don't use windows, quite a bit of technology became outright hostile to me. I even fell for a scam on Instagram and lost $40 trying to buy a gift for my son.
I keep day dreaming about designing systems that focus on stable, simple, consistent interfaces. That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface. Where service providers aren't even tempted to become user-interface developers. If I could afford to take a year or two off, this is what I would work on.
>That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface.
Then you get the crowd of “indie developers” crying about how the platform has taken away user choice and that they should be able to use every API of the OS to do whatever they want, user-be-damned.
Apple doesn’t go nearly far enough and every “indie developer” working in adtech constantly cries about the entire OS should be accessible to every application developer on the planet.
> Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process
Fortune 1000-first, themselves second, and customers last.
Thankfully, Apple has recognized that their devices and software are -- at least philosophically -- designed for people, not companies. A phone is a distinctly personal device. I think the reason Windows Phone flopped is that it was ultimately designed to deploy in corporate fleets, with all the usual "the company owns your device and everything on it" experience that most of us have with the corporate laptop. You can say that Microsoft's monopoly in businesses pushed Apple in this direction, but at least they have capitalized on the distinction, and didn't sacrifice user experience to try to court the "corporate purchaser."
This is why I HATE Gartner "market share" numbers. It lumps in corporate purchases (to Microsoft's overwhelming benefit), which completely distorts the view of how people are using operating systems "on the ground." It's my gut-level impression that Apple is leading at least 4-to-1 in individual purchases, and Windows is something everyone but gamers just put up with to do their jobs.
I installed Teams on my personal PC last week, and as part of the install Microsoft managed to change my whole windows install to use my Microsoft account to login, rather than my local account. It took me a while to work out what had happened and unfuck it all.
Microsoft accounts are the biggest clusterfuck they've produced in recent history. I hate them with a passion, and they keep pushing them no matter how much you keep rejecting them. You need to jump through lots of hoops to simply get a local account in Win 10, and then they keep harassing you about upgrading.
When my son was ready for his own laptop, I originally set it up with a Microsoft Family account. That was a terrible mistake. Microsoft Family causes only pain and misery and completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and recently forced everybody to migrate from perfectly functional Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts, which makes everything more complicated. My son's Minecraft account ended up on my wife's Microsoft account, and suddenly I'm called UnshavenFiber (though not entirely incorrectly, I've got to admit).
During the Windows 10 install they make it look like you needed to login with your MS account. They option to use a normal local login is right there but it’s named in some funny way so you don’t think that it’s the normal login. At first I thought this was just for the main admin account and let it slide, because I was only intending to use Windows for games (it’s not good for anything else). But when you want to create a second account, it tries to trick you into creating a new MS account.
For me, because I know this is subjective, fucking with Linux to make it work how I want is less of a hassle now than fucking with Windows to make it work how I want (again).
Removing windows and putting a user friendly Linux distro changed everything. No more invasive software in her way and her aging PC was brought back to life. At first we were a bit scared that there might be technical challenges with Linux that might appear but so far nothing of that sort.
And yet you'll still get technical folks parroting mindlessly "Updates are good! Make sure you always update! Muh security!"
No, updates are objectively not all good. Updates frequently break things. This is colloquially referred to as your user experience being "enhanced." Any solution begins with an honest appraisal of these realities.
Very sorry to hear about your father's illness, and how the situation was made even the worse by such brazen disrespect for user experience. My parents also have to regularly go through what I think amounts to violence by their electronic devices, but nothing as horrifying as this.
This terrifies me, TBH. I'm almost 50 and a little bit technical (used to admin Solaris boxen), and I just know the day will come when I haven't a damned clue how any of this works any more. For the time being, I'm happy using Linux as a bootloader for Emacs; will that be enough to see me through to my personal end? I sadly doubt it.
This is a good example of why there should always be an alternative way to access services besides a website or app. There's always an assumption that a computer or a phone is available to do things as simple as making an appointment right through to something as complex as planning and buying a vacation, which is fine up until it's not an option any more. In the past 20 years more and more companies have started to fail at this. It's practically impossible to do anything more complex than buying something from a local shop without access to tech now.
Conventional and unconventional behavior can both have unwanted consequences. We each pick our poison.
Another senior here.
As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adult judgment, I still don't wear belts half a century later, and I have a successful research career for which I partly thank this errant belt buckle. I lost a potential life as a rock God, but I've been protected from ever buying Microsoft products. This story horrifies me but it doesn't surprise me; I made a fair trade.
So you did not learn to weigh consequences correctly.
Wearing belt keeps you from a lot more inconvenience than scratching a guitar.
Besides unless it was IDK some kind of guitar that Jimmy Hendrix was playing I would not scold kid for scratching it - so much that he would stop touching guitars for life or stop wearing a belt for a life.
Buying Microsoft products save you a lot of inconvenience as well.
It really does seem that Microsoft is now in the business of trolling its users. The degradation of "Pro" with ads and uninstallables (like frikking Xbox) is beyond disgusting. When a post mortem of its lost os dominance is done in the (hopefully near) future, I have a feeling that these anti patterns will features prominently. Edit: I'm sorry for your loss.
Microsoft also decided to wipe my entire inbox because I didn't log into my hotmail account all the time.
This was the first time an email company this big pulled some shit like this in the internet era.
All my correspondence from my high school years to my mid-twenties were gone, including cherished back-and-forths with people that were now deceased. It felt like someone came and burned down my house while I was on vacation.
Just thinking about it continues to paralyze me with rage.
Sorry for your loss, such a horrible story. The small things really do make a difference and this isn't even small but a major nuisance.
But...
Are you really saying he didn't just buy a new laptop for his last holiday!? Just buy the new laptop, even if the plan was it'd immediately go to someone else in inheritance.
To quote the parent post, "He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out".
I don't know if you've ever been really sick (or just been around someone who's really sick or suffering from chronic pain), but being on chemo is a thing that completely shuts you down. I fully believe that going out to the store and buying a new laptop and getting it set up was beyond what the parent-poster's father felt capable of. Similarly, going out to the library and doing it all from a shared computer would be entirely too much. Anything that's not the well-worn familiar path would feel insurmountable.
what in the world could that upgrade have possibly fucked up for an "email and e-commerce" machine.
I completely understand how things get fucked up for engineers and serious tool users or users who have needs for very specific hardware that require very specific operating systems to run. but an email and e-commerce machine?
what could possibly have broken email and e-commerce?
also I'm very impressed that the very first comment I read on this article has twisted the topic of "value-add software that hardware vendors put on is garbage" blaming Microsoft in record time.
It's amazing how good the vocal HN commenters are about things like this.
I'm sorry to hear about this. I wonder if there was anything you could have done for him. Like, if you knew he was having such difficulties, why not drop by one day and book the vacation for him?
Everytime Microsoft forces its product upgrades (I'm not talking about security patches) on people and through shady dark UI patterns, it turns thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peoples' lives into shit.
The fact that they keep insisting on repeating this awful practice, year after year, even perfecting it at each iteration, can only be explained by a company being run by sociopaths, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft has absolutely no sense of responsibility when it comes to its retail market, its product owners would rather compromise the integrity of any senior's computer to make it unusable than just accept the fact that most people on earth don't need a new Windows every two years.
I don't get it. For a few more bucks they instantly get their brand connonated with slowness and being unreliable.
How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
I've moved to Mac but back in days I used Windows, the VERY FIRST thing I did was to install a fresh copy of Windows, then install any necessary drivers which are absolutely required for proper function (I remember just finding the driver files and installing them manually from add hardware dialog instead of installing bloatware of the manufacturer).
Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
And of course I'm tech savvy. I don't see any less-savvy senior being able to solve this problem; it should be regulated in a way that there should be a mandatory and ugly label showing all the crapware included with the device while buying, perhaps even extra taxing for each crapware included, discouraging manufacturers from including them.
You have to watch out these days even when installing a fresh copy of Windows as I found out recently, since some motherboards coughASUScough have software in the BIOS which can get automatically installed. There's an option that comes up on first boot and I clicked yes thinking it was some drivers, but it was the regular company branded bloatware more or less. Not going to make that mistake again.
It's called Windows Platform Binary Table, and lets the firmware provide an EXE for Windows to execute on boot. So even if you install a clean OS, this will run, and there is no mandatory prompt (if it's run through this approach and you see a prompt, then the software that was run was nice enough to ask, it was not Windows asking you to confirm whether that is OK).
I had the same experience recently. It's a rootkit installed by the BIOS to inject the crapware.
Immediately returned the ASUS board and got something else. It sucked to tear apart a computer I just built but I don't trust then hardware in my machine now.
> Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.
Toolbars we're a big mistake, but I understand why people thought they might be a good idea. Explorer context menu hooks (i.e. open in VS Code) are really useful, and without the benefit of hindsight those seem similar to toolbars.
Those "few more bucks" end up in the right manager's PnL who gets promoted, though. Nobody at Lenovo leadership cares about Lenovo beyond the next few years; that's the problem.
Would be interesting to develop an executive/managerial compensation structure that functions like a 10-year call option. Maybe it could feel a bit like TV show 'residuals' - even if you leave the company you'd still get a check in the mail for the company's longer term success.
So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
Exactly. A lot of boneheaded corporate decisions make a whole lot of sense when you think about the individual manager/exec who would've been empowered to make that call and which metrics might get that manager promoted or fired.
The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.
The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.
The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
I think this has generally been true of a lot of American companies for a while now. I would add it's not even "next few years", it's more like "next few quarters". If the CEO can juice the stock price for say, four quarters, he may walk away with several million in the bank and who cares what happens after that?
Being slow and crap is basically what consumers expect in a windows laptop. Which is why they largely moved to mobile or a work provided laptop without the crap ware.
I see this indeed, it is why some older people move almost entirely to an (entry level) iPad and are quite happy. The Windows laptop is something of a necessary evil to them, they use it from time to time but hate it (fear of virusses, nag ware, because they use it very little they always need to spend time updating, confusion because of Windows-S).
On the laptops I've used with pre-installed Windows (which I reinstalled), the license key was in ACPI table "MSDM". I assume Windows gets it from there automatically. You can extract the license key from Linux with: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
Yes; your laptop should have the Windows license embedded in firmware. If it came with one, that is. You can download the Windows installer directly from MS.
Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
In general, I think, yes, as long as you're installing the same edition. Usually the license is somehow stored in the firmware.
However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807
You can install windows 10 for free and leave it like that forever if you can deal with the watermark and non-restrictions like not changing the wallpaper.
> How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop.
In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway.
- Running Linux (assuming they can deal with everything else that comes with that)
Even these aren't perfect, but everything else I assume to be hot garbage unless you're planning to install your own OS anyway. The problem, though, is that this mostly excludes the real budget-tier devices (at least for nontechnical folks), which is unfair to those who can't afford anything else
While this is covered under "first-party," I wanted to name the Chromebook category here. Getting my father a Chromebook totally eliminated the regular fix-it sessions that I'd gotten used to having with all his previous computers.
Yes. Technologists seem to have a blindspot around Chromebooks even though they are quite popular.
Related rant to OP: compute power is so ubiquitously affordable nowadays that there is no excuse for apps to be slow even on these cheapest new devices.
I recently made a 3D game in my custom engine for the Ludum Dare 51 game jam[0] and I was shocked to see it run at a solid 50fps on a $118 IdeaPad 3[1].
50fps means every _20ms_ the game does at least:
- builds an oct-tree and auxiliary data structures for 1000+ physics objects, traverse this to find collisions, solve all physics constraints, compute new transform matrices for each obj.
- serialize and upload each object, view, and scene data to the igpu (no dedicated gpu)
- do vertex transformations on ~25k vertices + rasterize 30k triangles TWICE: once for the main camera, once for the shadow camera; rendering to 5 textures/gbuffers
- run two post processing passes over 1,049,088 pixels, doing outline + concavity detection, vignette, and gamma correction (18 texture samples per pixel).
- all the game logic including: reading inputs, character controller, firing cannons, updating projectiles, splintering meshes, updating game state, audio, UI, custom ECS query engine, etc.
The whole payload, unminified code + 3D assets + sound + textures, is 1.2mb over the wire. This is an engine I built over the last ~year in javascript(!), so it's not had nearly as much optimization as Unity etc.
And yet every day I encounter websites and apps that fail to be responsive to even basic button clicks. There's no excuse for this.
Anecdotally, I purchased a surface pro 7 and the ridiculous number of unexpected automatic updates and reboots without warning (overnight) lost me a bunch of data. Luckily it wasn't work related, but it has continued my deep-seated hatred of the MS "user experience". Don't get me started on the tracking & surveillance crap built into Windows 10+.
It was okay after about a year of random reboots. It's a shame because MS was looking to become "better", but they're just better at increasing their bottom line at the expense of user data and their privacy.
Software development and everything feeding into it should have a code of ethics like other professions: medical, law, engineering. I don't know how it will survive long-term without losing trust. But then again it's been limping on from scandal to breach to incident to overreach for decades now.
A Surface device just gets you away from additional OEM crap (since most MS "OEM crap" is included in Windows anyway). You still have to deal with running an OS written by Microsoft.
Apple or MS Surface or Pixel are the only ones where there's some direct connection between quality (os quality, ux, physical build quality, etc) and the people actually building it. Every other player who is not first party can just point fingers, it seems.
A couple years ago, when there was an MS Store in a physical mall in the area, I got close to buying a surface book (or... surface pro, or ... I can't remember the naming). The build quality and specs seemed decent in person. It's been the only time I have been tempted to jump back in to the windows world in the past... 15+ years.
Even google - I bought what as a 'flagship' phone from them in ... 2010(?). About 2 weeks later, it was discontinued, and I couldn't get any updates a year later. And the experience of setting it up and using gmail was... abysmally slow and just BAD. And this was getting whatever their 'top of the line' was at that time (it cost north of $500 at that time).
I've dipped my toes in and out of Android over the years, needing to get devices for testing client projects, etc. Sometimes it's been OK, but never enough to make me trust it again. If the experience from google on their own device with their own service was subpar, I just don't have the time to dig in and 'make it work'. When I showed someone, they told me the problem was gmail was slow because I had 'too much email'. As if the selling point of gmail for the previous 4-5 years wasn't "we'll hold all your email".
100% agreed - but I'd also add Framework[1]. Completely unaffiliated with them, just a fan. They make an incredible product for a new company and the ability to repair and upgrade parts in the laptop form factor is incredible.
Is it any wonder why Apple has been so successful with the iPhone, iPad, and their services? I can't stand the iron grip they have on the App Store, but on the other hand - traditional, wide open computing environments have become so hostile to users in terms of data collection and tracking. If I was a non-technical person who had to use this Lenovo laptop mentioned in the tweet thread, being given an iPad would feel like water in a desert.
Thankfully, it is a laptop (presumably a Windows PC), not a phone or tablet.
It may be full of junk, but you can remove it, reinstall a fresh copy of Windows, and there is a good chance it can be fully functional on Linux too. I don't know how it is built but 10 years from now, there is a good chance it will continue to work as a useful computer, with OS security updates.
It doesn't mean there isn't a problem with Lenovo installing crapware, and not everyone is tech savvy, but that senior just had to hand out the computer to someone who is, and he solved his problem.
Now, with phones and tablets, you can't do that. You are stuck with the manufacturer's OS. Sometimes, when the manufacturer is nice enough and there is an active community, you can install third party ROMs, but often with significant loss of functionality: lower quality camera, some apps refusing to install, etc...
I am a bit worried about Apple right now, they are making their laptops more and more phone-like. Apple has a rather good UX, and a consistent ecosystem that their users love, so, fine. But once Apple starts to do something, other manufacturers (PC, Android, ...) have a nasty tendency to copy, even the worst parts, and do it poorly on top of that.
My grandma bought a mid-prized Android phone. All she does is lookup recipes on Youtube and Whatsapp her family.
After 2 months (!) she came to me with the phone. Somehow she now had ads on her lockscreen, her default browser was hijacked by some other browser app with ads, and multiple apps had persistent notifications and were running continuously. Among them AVG anti-virus, some cleanup tool...
I have no idea how they got there. Probably because they pop-up in Ads with texts like "YOU NEED TO INSTALL THIS".
My grandma can't differentiate between an Ad like that and a serious System update notification.
It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
Apple isn't for everyone, but it's a lot more consumer focused than Android is.
It's one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market.
My parents both had Android tablets (Samsung iirc), but they didn't use them for very long, switched to iPads, and used them at the dinner table for years afterwards - just checking news, playing games, that kind of thing.
My dad bought a laptop the other day to play games and watch F1 with - at least the pre-installed shit wasn't too bad. Still had to talk him out of getting both AVG and some other virus scanner though, that would've bogged his system down and make him lose trust, because virus scanners these days are scareware - that is, if they don't pop up every once in a while pretending to be useful, people will get rid of them.
> one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market
Apple products do well on the second-hand market because Apple usually doesn’t cannibalize that market by selling low-end devices. By positioning themselves as a premium brand and ensuring that the low end of the market is not served with new products, they ensure that the low end will be served by the second-hand market. PC/Android can’t do this because they don’t control the hardware and there’s always some brand that will sell new low-end devices which compare favorably to any used device.
In the few cases where Apple has deviated from this strategy of not serving the low end, resale values have suffered. The iPhone 8 and iPhone X were released at basically the same time. But the X currently sells for roughy 25% of its original price whereas the 8 sells for closer to 15%. This is due to the introduction of the SE which is basically just a cheaper and better 8.
Similar story for my mom. She was used to windows because at work she used locked down, centrally managed, IBM thinkpads for many years. The trick is that those were secure and managed. If anything didn't work, they just got swapped by IT for another clean one.
But she always had problems with her private laptop, and no assistant or IT department to fix it. We thought she needed a windows one because that is what she knew, but the switch to a macbook air took maybe a week or so to adjust to.
It was a bit of a gamble, since I don't own a mac so supporting one via phone would be very tricky. But she has had the macbook now for years and I've had to do absolutely zero tech support on it. For emails, Word documents and some web browsing it really just works.
My dad had never used a Mac in his life until I helped him buy an M1 Air. He loves that thing. The only thing I did was install Brave and make it the default browser.
I think he gives Apple credit for how fast his internet is, when really it’s due to Brave. But the rest of the experience— no crap ware, no spyware, no ads in the system— that’s on Apple.
Edit: forgot the main point, which is that he needed no handholding. Given how often he had to replace his crapware-ridden netbooks in the past decade due to performance degradation or something physically breaking, I showed him the trivial math that made the MacBook look like an economic decision as much as a QoL decision.
The absolute worse for me was when I found myself trying to explain to my grandma that you must ALLOW cookie preferences, but you must absolutely DENY notification permissions. For trying to read some news online... The web is a harmful mess.
The shitty thing is, she'd probably be better served by denying cookie preferences... but despite whatever regulations say, companies find impressively difficult ways to keep the user from answering "no, please don't spy on me".
Every cookie banner that I've ever clicked "no" on has let me proceed to the main site. The user is still a potential viewer of ads, even if they can't be microtargeted, so it's worth it to the site to let them proceed.
I had the same thing with my mother. She plays Candy Crush, actively uses WhatsApp, Youtube, Facebook, takes photos to share with friends/family and not much else.
Tapping adds apparently lead to installing these things called "Launcher" which are essentially complete phone UI and those launchers have ads that lead to even more hideous apps. They also lie about the thing you are installing, she was trying to get some emojis and I checked back then, the launcher in question was disguised as emoji thingy. You need to carefully read the text to understand that you get the emojis together with complete phone UI replacement.
I can't stand the Android way of doing things. How it is possible to replace the main user interface of the device? I understand the desire to completely control your device and I do support it in principle but this sort of modifications should be possible only by going through scary screens that let only people know what they do achieve that sort of device modifications.
One has to grant permissions to install unknown software. That means going into settings and flipping a toggle. Are you saying these ads somehow bypassed that?
> It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
Be careful what you wish for. For many power users, overlays and replacing the default browser are 100% essential. Removing them just for the sake of user safety would be a grave mistake.
Google is already pushing to replace overlays with "bubbles" for example.
I'm not sure how much protection this affords, but I'm aiming to only buy phones that are on the LineageOS support list, and can have their bootloader unlocked.
Weird how things that the manufacturer would consider insecurities, eg unlocked bootloader, allow end users the kind of control that can increase security and privacy (admittedly, maybe conflating privacy and security). Highlighting the disconnect between industry security and user interest (even though users, by and large, aren't interested in their own interests).
I treat use of SafetyNet or attempting to detect root as actively malicious and give apps that do that 1-star ratings on Google Play.
I realize there's a theoretical risk the OS could be compromised or malware could have superuser permissions, but my previous attempts to find any significant data breaches or user harm caused that way have come up empty. If anybody knows of one, I'd be interested to read about it.
"expensive Apple device" I know it's a lot of money for some folks, but a new iPhone SE is $400, and old iPhones remain serviceable for an absurdly long time — the iPhone SE 1st gen was compatible with latest-versions on release date for seven freaking years.
How is a $400 device that lasts seven years more expensive than even $200 budget Androids that have to get replaced every two years?
My dad accepts every websites request to send notifications. His phone is just constant chime after chime. I went into his Chrome, removed them all, and disabled the option, but somehow it finds itself on and his phone loaded with them every couple months.
And yet every time mobile Safari comes up people on this site go off about how it's "broken" because it does not support notifications from websites. There are legit uses of website notifications, but 99% will be spam like this.
It's because people assume that these things are benevolent because they were made by people. Gen X on down are natural skeptics so we don't end up with as much garbage on our phones, it's still possible to accidentally click a pop up when you were getting ready to hit a link.
I find the best solution for people who accidentally click on ads is ad blockers.
Firefox for Android has AdBlock plus support now. The browser itself is somewhat slower than chrome on Android but totally worth it for the ad blocker.
That's why you should install an adblocker for any relative.
Brave will kill all ads, and many apps like Trackercontrol offer a local DNS server that will block any ad - related domain.
> It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device
It’s usually not even “expensive” when you consider the frequency with which people replace low-end hardware. All of my Android-using relatives replace their phones and tablets 2-3 times more frequently so they end up paying more for slower hardware and then having to spend time playing tech support instead of using their devices.
To be clear, that’s not Android’s fault in the sense that the market is broken: Apple is fine with you having a 6 year old device because you’re probably using the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, etc. There’s also some lesson about how consumers want the ability to install things outside of the App Store but statistically a large fraction of us can’t do that safely.
I have the exact same issue with mine. As a workaround I set a password to install apps from the play store and it works, she never download new apps so it's not an issue.
An iPhone SE isn't "expensive" if you value your time at all.
I got all of my older relatives and in-laws to buy one (eventually) and they've been 99% problem free ever since. With Androids it was even worse than trying to get their "got it from the store on sale" Windows-laptops cleaned up.
My mother is on her second iPhone SE, she used the first one until it didn't get software updates (5 years IIRC). If everything goes as usual, she'll be using it until 2025.
what's messed up is these apps are in the play store, rated e for everybody (so parental controls can't filter them) and have 5 star ratings from thousands of users.
Have you used one? I know someone who bought one because she wanted an easy-to-use device, and it was nearly unusable. The thing one had like 1 or 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage which was quickly filled by photos (on crap quality camera). The thing somehow became slower than molasses to operate.
Thankfully I was able to copy off the pictures, and I bought her a Pixel 4a, installed a tempered glass screen protector and thin/minimal TPU case, went through the settings with her, and even showed her screenshots of more user-friendly third party launchers. She opted to keep the default launcher, and it's been smooth sailing since. (I also installed Firefox and uBlock Origin on it.)
My father, who is now 76, introduced an Apple II into the home. He wrote a number of programs himself for a business he started (that lasted 30 years). Followed by a series of PCs, the first of which had the pre-Windows 95 GeOS on it.
These days, he fumbles with his phone; half of the time hanging up while trying to answer it. His texts messages are usually unintelligible as he totally relies on voice to text. This can mostly be attributed to cognitive decline following a major heart attack which was accompanied by an undiagnosed stroke, a minor heart attack, and a diagnosed stroke. He still dabbles with Kodi and VPNs but is always at least a year behind the curve, and new technology thoroughly confuses him.
That's left me wondering: will there be a point at which I struggle, after having spent decades writing code that powers the web?
>That's left me wondering: will there be a point at which I struggle, after having spent decades writing code that powers the web?
I'd say it's not that tech will become too difficult to use, but the constant and frequent changes will start to annoy you to a point where you just don't invest as much time into learning how the new stuff works. YMMV, but I am less than half your dad's age and I'm already starting to feel it.
I used to spend hours customizing everything I used to make them "just right" and updates to software would always inevitibly break them, and I'd repeat the cycle. As I've gotten older with less free time, I've just started changing my own preferences and workflows to fit the defaults. Even that doesn't always seem to be the way as UI/UX changes mean disruptions for disruptions sakes rather than changes that make my life easier...
I'm 50 and I start to struggle. Not because I can't keep up with the tech but because I refuse to. No smart tv or doorbell, a 2004 unconnected car, physical light switches etc. I spend too much time figuring out what printer will not DRM me into buying branded ink. I wonder how much longer I can keep up with this, because everything is becoming smart and "as a service". It seems the perfect products for me are the products from 15 years ago that I can hardly buy any more.
Well, my dad wrote sophisticated engineering programs for mini's, and taught me to program BASIC, but now he needs me to get his new laptop to print on wifi, and install a weather app on his Android phone. The world is quite a bit different from 40 years ago, and you do have to put in some effort to keep up with the changing paradigms, but I think that effort is up to each of us. What I worry about is being able to see the screen, and type. As long as I can still do both, I will probably never retire.
Apple IIc was our first family computer (Really mine since I used it most). I loved that I could carry it around and plug it into the TV and have a color monitor.
Readit News
A few years later, when he had been diagnosed with cancer and was on chemo, it updated itself to Windows 10 without his explicit consent. It completely fucked up the install, and was unusable for him from then on. He was too tired to go through the process of getting it sorted out, and was thus unable to book a vacation that he had intended to take to recover from that round of chemo.
Microsoft's unfriendly us-first, customers-second process robbed him of his last holiday and I will not easily forgive them for it.
If a seasoned developer can be robbed of quality of life by this flavour of bullshit, what chance do the non-technical types stand?
The worst example I had heard until today was an update that caused a friend to lose a good chunk of her dissertation. Windows 10 decided that final week was an excellent time for an update. She had no option of saying "no" and was just looking to use Word uninterrupted.
Software is too important now for this level of user hostility.
every time, I have to go into the Play Store and uninstall it again. uninstall the home screen! how illogical is that? and how would I have known how to do that if I wasn’t tech-savvy enough to find a reddit post telling me how?
every time, this resets my normal home screen, and I have to set it all back up again, removing the semi-advertising “channels” that are already in the less-bad default home screen.
the device this is on cost more than £500, and yet I’m still paying out in attention because greedy Google wants to please their shareholders
If I'd realized that that was a feature which would be pervasive for all future versions of Windows, I would have returned the machine.
I've rolled back to 1703 twice now, and am managing to stay there by the expedient of keeping my hard drive too full for Microsoft to download any further updates.
I despair of replacing this device --- it wasn't quite the replacement I wanted for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4110 --- no daylight-viewable transflective display.
Why is it so hard to purchase a device which has:
- a good quality stylus (Wacom EMR) - a high-resolution display (the 2160x1440 on a 12.something inch display is fine, though I'd love more) - decent battery life - reasonable size/thinness - reasonable price - access to the file system and the ability to install arbitrary software, esp. opensource stuff
I'd also like a daylight viewable display, but that's probably not happening.
Actually, it is user postponable, you can tell the update to wait up to 5 days by default. It should still allow you to wait unlimited time of course, but you can always press that button once.
I learned to let the users pick the right time for update on my first job. ( by having to drive and fix my mess )
But we were a tiny software shop. No MS I guess.
There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.
It's massively reduced the amount of tech support I need to do, and when it does come up, it's much more straightforward for me to deal with.
...and then even claim that Linux requires more effort. For power users, sure, but for basic users it's a different thing.
EDIT: no point in dogpiling comments listing your favorite windows-only software. It is entirely besides the point of this comment.
that's like moving underground because you once got a sunburn.
it's bs how they can just do this. Microsoft thinks that just because they aren't legally liable for their software breaking a user's system, that they can just do anything like these automatic updates.
I think it's really high time that there be regulation on software and their reliability - that is, some sort of consumer protection, where an update such as this breaking becomes a liability for microsoft. And of course, this doesn't just apply to microsoft, but apple and google and any other software manufacturer.
All we need is political momentum to enact the regulation - and that's easier said than done.
I keep day dreaming about designing systems that focus on stable, simple, consistent interfaces. That don't even give application developers a choice in the interface. Where service providers aren't even tempted to become user-interface developers. If I could afford to take a year or two off, this is what I would work on.
Then you get the crowd of “indie developers” crying about how the platform has taken away user choice and that they should be able to use every API of the OS to do whatever they want, user-be-damned.
Apple doesn’t go nearly far enough and every “indie developer” working in adtech constantly cries about the entire OS should be accessible to every application developer on the planet.
Fortune 1000-first, themselves second, and customers last.
Thankfully, Apple has recognized that their devices and software are -- at least philosophically -- designed for people, not companies. A phone is a distinctly personal device. I think the reason Windows Phone flopped is that it was ultimately designed to deploy in corporate fleets, with all the usual "the company owns your device and everything on it" experience that most of us have with the corporate laptop. You can say that Microsoft's monopoly in businesses pushed Apple in this direction, but at least they have capitalized on the distinction, and didn't sacrifice user experience to try to court the "corporate purchaser."
This is why I HATE Gartner "market share" numbers. It lumps in corporate purchases (to Microsoft's overwhelming benefit), which completely distorts the view of how people are using operating systems "on the ground." It's my gut-level impression that Apple is leading at least 4-to-1 in individual purchases, and Windows is something everyone but gamers just put up with to do their jobs.
W11 is going to lose a lot of people, and some of those will be in that category.
When my son was ready for his own laptop, I originally set it up with a Microsoft Family account. That was a terrible mistake. Microsoft Family causes only pain and misery and completely fails at what it's supposed to do.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and recently forced everybody to migrate from perfectly functional Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts, which makes everything more complicated. My son's Minecraft account ended up on my wife's Microsoft account, and suddenly I'm called UnshavenFiber (though not entirely incorrectly, I've got to admit).
What a flaming POS.
Removing windows and putting a user friendly Linux distro changed everything. No more invasive software in her way and her aging PC was brought back to life. At first we were a bit scared that there might be technical challenges with Linux that might appear but so far nothing of that sort.
No, updates are objectively not all good. Updates frequently break things. This is colloquially referred to as your user experience being "enhanced." Any solution begins with an honest appraisal of these realities.
Another senior here.
As a child I scratched my father's guitar with a belt buckle I had been told to wear. I learned to distrust adult judgment, I still don't wear belts half a century later, and I have a successful research career for which I partly thank this errant belt buckle. I lost a potential life as a rock God, but I've been protected from ever buying Microsoft products. This story horrifies me but it doesn't surprise me; I made a fair trade.
Wearing belt keeps you from a lot more inconvenience than scratching a guitar.
Besides unless it was IDK some kind of guitar that Jimmy Hendrix was playing I would not scold kid for scratching it - so much that he would stop touching guitars for life or stop wearing a belt for a life.
Buying Microsoft products save you a lot of inconvenience as well.
This was the first time an email company this big pulled some shit like this in the internet era.
All my correspondence from my high school years to my mid-twenties were gone, including cherished back-and-forths with people that were now deceased. It felt like someone came and burned down my house while I was on vacation.
Just thinking about it continues to paralyze me with rage.
Why wasn’t someone able to help get the vacay scheduled on his behalf? Did he just not tell anyone until after it was too late?
But...
Are you really saying he didn't just buy a new laptop for his last holiday!? Just buy the new laptop, even if the plan was it'd immediately go to someone else in inheritance.
I don't know if you've ever been really sick (or just been around someone who's really sick or suffering from chronic pain), but being on chemo is a thing that completely shuts you down. I fully believe that going out to the store and buying a new laptop and getting it set up was beyond what the parent-poster's father felt capable of. Similarly, going out to the library and doing it all from a shared computer would be entirely too much. Anything that's not the well-worn familiar path would feel insurmountable.
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I completely understand how things get fucked up for engineers and serious tool users or users who have needs for very specific hardware that require very specific operating systems to run. but an email and e-commerce machine?
what could possibly have broken email and e-commerce?
also I'm very impressed that the very first comment I read on this article has twisted the topic of "value-add software that hardware vendors put on is garbage" blaming Microsoft in record time.
It's amazing how good the vocal HN commenters are about things like this.
Everytime Microsoft forces its product upgrades (I'm not talking about security patches) on people and through shady dark UI patterns, it turns thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of peoples' lives into shit.
The fact that they keep insisting on repeating this awful practice, year after year, even perfecting it at each iteration, can only be explained by a company being run by sociopaths, in my humble opinion.
Microsoft has absolutely no sense of responsibility when it comes to its retail market, its product owners would rather compromise the integrity of any senior's computer to make it unusable than just accept the fact that most people on earth don't need a new Windows every two years.
How do manufacturers throw in all the crapware and expect a good user experience and happy customers? Oh of course, they don't care.
I've moved to Mac but back in days I used Windows, the VERY FIRST thing I did was to install a fresh copy of Windows, then install any necessary drivers which are absolutely required for proper function (I remember just finding the driver files and installing them manually from add hardware dialog instead of installing bloatware of the manufacturer).
Wish things have changed in 10 years... apparently it didn't.
And of course I'm tech savvy. I don't see any less-savvy senior being able to solve this problem; it should be regulated in a way that there should be a mandatory and ugly label showing all the crapware included with the device while buying, perhaps even extra taxing for each crapware included, discouraging manufacturers from including them.
It's called Windows Platform Binary Table, and lets the firmware provide an EXE for Windows to execute on boot. So even if you install a clean OS, this will run, and there is no mandatory prompt (if it's run through this approach and you see a prompt, then the software that was run was nice enough to ask, it was not Windows asking you to confirm whether that is OK).
Immediately returned the ASUS board and got something else. It sucked to tear apart a computer I just built but I don't trust then hardware in my machine now.
We no longer have browser toolbars. I remember a time when I had customers come in with 4, 5, or even 6 different browser toolbars. The Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, the McAfee toolbar, the Because-We-Fucking-Can toolbar, etc. Most laptops came with at least one toolbar pre-installed.
So much of the societal harm of corporate america comes from short term optimization at the expense of long term value. Would be great if businesses recognized this and found a good way to attract talent that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
How many CEOs dump all their stock right after leaving a company?
The guy at Facebook who decided to randomly resort your feeds and emphasize a rotating set of "like if you like kittens or hate Obama" posts at the cost of your friend's messages wasn't thinking of the long term success of Facebook. They were clearly aiming to increase "like" clicks on a graph.
The guy who decided to integrate Google+ into YouTube and Chrome and everything else didn't give a shit if YouTube or Chrome or Google succeeded. He cared whether or not Google+ membership/participation went up. Same with whoever made most of the decisions about Google Buzz.
The guy at Sony who decided to put rootkits onto music CDs didn't care whether people liked Sony. He cared about whether he could say that he'd done something to stop piracy, and presumably also had a goal of efficiently damning his soul to Hell.
Otherwise pure clean install on these machines, Windows is not slow. I mean, not fast, but not that slow either.
Those are usually slow as molasses thanks to mandatory <s>crapware</s> sorry antivirus.
Installing all the drivers needed is on you. They might or might not be downloaded from Windows Update.
I switched to Linux also for work laptop sometime after that so I wouldn't know when that stopped.
However, in any case, even with a separate, expensive "boxed" license, Windows helpfully provides a convenient way for the firmware to drop additional useful software (aka crap) onto your fresh clean install. As in, it actively checks whether the firmware would like something executed and if so, executes it without prompting. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800807
they have two customers:
- the people who pay them for the computers
- the crapware people who pay for the bundling
sometimes the profit from one or the other is unexpected.
for instance, in another area, visio makes more money from the snooping data than the tv sale
Edit: To be clear I'm not defending the companies, they shouldn't put all this crapware on there. I'm just saying most customers won't notice it on a new laptop.
In most cases on new laptops their crapware doesn't make a huge difference, because there is enough CPU headroom. The people who are doing so much that they would notice probably will reinstall fresh Windows anyway.
The problem here was that it was a used laptop.
How do you know this? I would expect a $500 used lenovo laptop to have decent-enough specs.
- An Apple device
- First-party (Microsoft Surface, Pixel phone, etc)
- Running Linux (assuming they can deal with everything else that comes with that)
Even these aren't perfect, but everything else I assume to be hot garbage unless you're planning to install your own OS anyway. The problem, though, is that this mostly excludes the real budget-tier devices (at least for nontechnical folks), which is unfair to those who can't afford anything else
Burn it all down
Related rant to OP: compute power is so ubiquitously affordable nowadays that there is no excuse for apps to be slow even on these cheapest new devices.
I recently made a 3D game in my custom engine for the Ludum Dare 51 game jam[0] and I was shocked to see it run at a solid 50fps on a $118 IdeaPad 3[1].
50fps means every _20ms_ the game does at least:
- builds an oct-tree and auxiliary data structures for 1000+ physics objects, traverse this to find collisions, solve all physics constraints, compute new transform matrices for each obj.
- serialize and upload each object, view, and scene data to the igpu (no dedicated gpu)
- do vertex transformations on ~25k vertices + rasterize 30k triangles TWICE: once for the main camera, once for the shadow camera; rendering to 5 textures/gbuffers
- run two post processing passes over 1,049,088 pixels, doing outline + concavity detection, vignette, and gamma correction (18 texture samples per pixel).
- all the game logic including: reading inputs, character controller, firing cannons, updating projectiles, splintering meshes, updating game state, audio, UI, custom ECS query engine, etc.
The whole payload, unminified code + 3D assets + sound + textures, is 1.2mb over the wire. This is an engine I built over the last ~year in javascript(!), so it's not had nearly as much optimization as Unity etc.
And yet every day I encounter websites and apps that fail to be responsive to even basic button clicks. There's no excuse for this.
[0] https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/darkstar-sailor
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B087YW8FQB/ref=ppx_od_dt_b...
It was okay after about a year of random reboots. It's a shame because MS was looking to become "better", but they're just better at increasing their bottom line at the expense of user data and their privacy.
Software development and everything feeding into it should have a code of ethics like other professions: medical, law, engineering. I don't know how it will survive long-term without losing trust. But then again it's been limping on from scandal to breach to incident to overreach for decades now.
[0]: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-c...
Doesn't MacOS have the same amount of telemetry? I guess it is rather hard to quantify, but MacOS still does collects a lot of data
A couple years ago, when there was an MS Store in a physical mall in the area, I got close to buying a surface book (or... surface pro, or ... I can't remember the naming). The build quality and specs seemed decent in person. It's been the only time I have been tempted to jump back in to the windows world in the past... 15+ years.
Even google - I bought what as a 'flagship' phone from them in ... 2010(?). About 2 weeks later, it was discontinued, and I couldn't get any updates a year later. And the experience of setting it up and using gmail was... abysmally slow and just BAD. And this was getting whatever their 'top of the line' was at that time (it cost north of $500 at that time).
I've dipped my toes in and out of Android over the years, needing to get devices for testing client projects, etc. Sometimes it's been OK, but never enough to make me trust it again. If the experience from google on their own device with their own service was subpar, I just don't have the time to dig in and 'make it work'. When I showed someone, they told me the problem was gmail was slow because I had 'too much email'. As if the selling point of gmail for the previous 4-5 years wasn't "we'll hold all your email".
1- https://frame.work/
It may be full of junk, but you can remove it, reinstall a fresh copy of Windows, and there is a good chance it can be fully functional on Linux too. I don't know how it is built but 10 years from now, there is a good chance it will continue to work as a useful computer, with OS security updates.
It doesn't mean there isn't a problem with Lenovo installing crapware, and not everyone is tech savvy, but that senior just had to hand out the computer to someone who is, and he solved his problem.
Now, with phones and tablets, you can't do that. You are stuck with the manufacturer's OS. Sometimes, when the manufacturer is nice enough and there is an active community, you can install third party ROMs, but often with significant loss of functionality: lower quality camera, some apps refusing to install, etc...
I am a bit worried about Apple right now, they are making their laptops more and more phone-like. Apple has a rather good UX, and a consistent ecosystem that their users love, so, fine. But once Apple starts to do something, other manufacturers (PC, Android, ...) have a nasty tendency to copy, even the worst parts, and do it poorly on top of that.
After 2 months (!) she came to me with the phone. Somehow she now had ads on her lockscreen, her default browser was hijacked by some other browser app with ads, and multiple apps had persistent notifications and were running continuously. Among them AVG anti-virus, some cleanup tool...
I have no idea how they got there. Probably because they pop-up in Ads with texts like "YOU NEED TO INSTALL THIS".
My grandma can't differentiate between an Ad like that and a serious System update notification.
It's stuff like this that leads people to just "give up" and buy an expensive Apple device. For all their faults at least they protect you from this kind of nonsense. The Lenovo is just the same, really. A profound disrespect for their own users and the usability of their own product.
It's one reason why Apple phones still do really well on the secondhand market.
My parents both had Android tablets (Samsung iirc), but they didn't use them for very long, switched to iPads, and used them at the dinner table for years afterwards - just checking news, playing games, that kind of thing.
My dad bought a laptop the other day to play games and watch F1 with - at least the pre-installed shit wasn't too bad. Still had to talk him out of getting both AVG and some other virus scanner though, that would've bogged his system down and make him lose trust, because virus scanners these days are scareware - that is, if they don't pop up every once in a while pretending to be useful, people will get rid of them.
Apple products UX is so much better than anything currently available on the market, but its slowly eroding due to lack of Steve Jobs.
He had a huge drive to make perfect UX. Newer designers lack this and you can just feel it from how new versions of iOS look like.
And how new iphones design is just small changes or bigger screen. They no longer have that spark like they used to with Jobs.
RIP Steve, visioners are not looked upon kindly.
Apple products do well on the second-hand market because Apple usually doesn’t cannibalize that market by selling low-end devices. By positioning themselves as a premium brand and ensuring that the low end of the market is not served with new products, they ensure that the low end will be served by the second-hand market. PC/Android can’t do this because they don’t control the hardware and there’s always some brand that will sell new low-end devices which compare favorably to any used device.
In the few cases where Apple has deviated from this strategy of not serving the low end, resale values have suffered. The iPhone 8 and iPhone X were released at basically the same time. But the X currently sells for roughy 25% of its original price whereas the 8 sells for closer to 15%. This is due to the introduction of the SE which is basically just a cheaper and better 8.
But she always had problems with her private laptop, and no assistant or IT department to fix it. We thought she needed a windows one because that is what she knew, but the switch to a macbook air took maybe a week or so to adjust to.
It was a bit of a gamble, since I don't own a mac so supporting one via phone would be very tricky. But she has had the macbook now for years and I've had to do absolutely zero tech support on it. For emails, Word documents and some web browsing it really just works.
I think he gives Apple credit for how fast his internet is, when really it’s due to Brave. But the rest of the experience— no crap ware, no spyware, no ads in the system— that’s on Apple.
Edit: forgot the main point, which is that he needed no handholding. Given how often he had to replace his crapware-ridden netbooks in the past decade due to performance degradation or something physically breaking, I showed him the trivial math that made the MacBook look like an economic decision as much as a QoL decision.
For the cookie thing you can just install “I don’t care about cookies”
Tapping adds apparently lead to installing these things called "Launcher" which are essentially complete phone UI and those launchers have ads that lead to even more hideous apps. They also lie about the thing you are installing, she was trying to get some emojis and I checked back then, the launcher in question was disguised as emoji thingy. You need to carefully read the text to understand that you get the emojis together with complete phone UI replacement.
I can't stand the Android way of doing things. How it is possible to replace the main user interface of the device? I understand the desire to completely control your device and I do support it in principle but this sort of modifications should be possible only by going through scary screens that let only people know what they do achieve that sort of device modifications.
It's a general-purpose computer like a PC, not an appliance like a game console. That's not for everyone, I guess.
Be careful what you wish for. For many power users, overlays and replacing the default browser are 100% essential. Removing them just for the sake of user safety would be a grave mistake.
Google is already pushing to replace overlays with "bubbles" for example.
Weird how things that the manufacturer would consider insecurities, eg unlocked bootloader, allow end users the kind of control that can increase security and privacy (admittedly, maybe conflating privacy and security). Highlighting the disconnect between industry security and user interest (even though users, by and large, aren't interested in their own interests).
I realize there's a theoretical risk the OS could be compromised or malware could have superuser permissions, but my previous attempts to find any significant data breaches or user harm caused that way have come up empty. If anybody knows of one, I'd be interested to read about it.
How is a $400 device that lasts seven years more expensive than even $200 budget Androids that have to get replaced every two years?
Firefox for Android has AdBlock plus support now. The browser itself is somewhat slower than chrome on Android but totally worth it for the ad blocker.
For YouTube there is YouTube Premium or NewPipe.
It’s usually not even “expensive” when you consider the frequency with which people replace low-end hardware. All of my Android-using relatives replace their phones and tablets 2-3 times more frequently so they end up paying more for slower hardware and then having to spend time playing tech support instead of using their devices.
To be clear, that’s not Android’s fault in the sense that the market is broken: Apple is fine with you having a 6 year old device because you’re probably using the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, etc. There’s also some lesson about how consumers want the ability to install things outside of the App Store but statistically a large fraction of us can’t do that safely.
Whenever I use a new platform with a new UI paradigm, I’m a little like that too.
Even first time on fresh iOS I installed a “lite” app with ads that was definitely not what I thought it was.
I got all of my older relatives and in-laws to buy one (eventually) and they've been 99% problem free ever since. With Androids it was even worse than trying to get their "got it from the store on sale" Windows-laptops cleaned up.
My mother is on her second iPhone SE, she used the first one until it didn't get software updates (5 years IIRC). If everything goes as usual, she'll be using it until 2025.
Complete and utter failure on Google's part.
Thankfully I was able to copy off the pictures, and I bought her a Pixel 4a, installed a tempered glass screen protector and thin/minimal TPU case, went through the settings with her, and even showed her screenshots of more user-friendly third party launchers. She opted to keep the default launcher, and it's been smooth sailing since. (I also installed Firefox and uBlock Origin on it.)
Yes.
To which I replied "It's the lack of control."
Sounds like I'm not the only one growing old who is feeling tired about having to treat every new hardware device as an adversary.
These days, he fumbles with his phone; half of the time hanging up while trying to answer it. His texts messages are usually unintelligible as he totally relies on voice to text. This can mostly be attributed to cognitive decline following a major heart attack which was accompanied by an undiagnosed stroke, a minor heart attack, and a diagnosed stroke. He still dabbles with Kodi and VPNs but is always at least a year behind the curve, and new technology thoroughly confuses him.
That's left me wondering: will there be a point at which I struggle, after having spent decades writing code that powers the web?
I'd say it's not that tech will become too difficult to use, but the constant and frequent changes will start to annoy you to a point where you just don't invest as much time into learning how the new stuff works. YMMV, but I am less than half your dad's age and I'm already starting to feel it.
Apple IIe was also used a bit in school.