I in no way want to absolve Google, but that's the case for so many app permissions on Android. Turn off notifications, and two weeks later the same app your turned off notifications for is once again sending you notifications. It's beyond a joke.

I recently bought a surface 5 for my parents, who need a windows machine for their accounting software.

My initial impression was, this is pretty cool. They’ve replicated to Apple unboxing experience, and it even tries to do a passable job of the Mac startup and setup experience.

Until:

- I can’t log in without a Microsoft account (apparently you can remove this later, but I still haven’t worked out how to do it, and I’m not about to set my parents up with another email/password combo, so they’re using mine to start

- it asks for a keyboard locale, which then relocated the @ symbol somewhere totally bizarre (why it would allow this instead of forcing the keyboard it is installed with is beyond me, and I just chose UK vs USA, as I am used to this choice being more important for autocorrect and AUS spelling is more UK than US. No - apparently there are a bunch of keyboard layout differences that will then mean you need to google in an external device to work out why the @ symbol has moved, which means you can’t log in with your Microsoft account

- there’s 45 minutes of software updates

- ‘New’ outlook is the default choice. My parents use Google workspaces. The message informing me that all their email would be mirrored on Microsoft servers was horrifying. It took me an hour to determine it still had ‘old’ outlook installed but it was not default.

- I was continually horrified at how it tried to sell me things or inject ads or data or news feeds into every component of the operating system

Bottom line, it’s going back to the store. It’s nice that in their move to compete with Apple they’ve also introduced a 60 day no questions return policy.