The irony behind this is that Upgrade as a word becomes scary once you've already lost ownership of said devices.

We have whole industries that have to rely on Windows 7 and self-built Windows 10 images because they can't upgrade into a shitty cloud-prioritizing OS. Microsoft just completely ignored them, essentially alienating whole industry branches.

Try justifying that a Candy Crush Saga download shut down a high oven, wasting millions of EUR in energy costs, for example. And yes, that happened at a steel factory here. They switched to open source afterwards and reimplemented everything from scratch.

Every industry around chemistry, energy, production, factories, debugging... heck, even the damn hospital ... They all switch away from Microsoft because it just doesn't work without internet. Honestly I don't know how a CEO can be so asleep and out of touch at the wheel. But I guess that's just collateral damage?

I disable auto-updates for apps on my phone. The Play Store sometimes notifies me about updates, and I ignore them. Today I hit "Update all". The app for my Sony headphones has now been changed, and has an EULA and opt-ins. Skimming through them, I think Sony now wants to upload titles and artist of music and videos that my phone plays... Oh how fucking wonderful.

My WH-1000XM4 is buggy as shit too, I had to disable power-saving (turn off if nothing is playing) because it would randomly switch off in the middle of music playback. And there's a touch gesture to enable "mute when speech is detected", which, when enabled, means when I say something in a Zoom call I can't hear anyone else anymore.. And I can't disable this single gesture, just all gestures in general.

The author of this piece, Cal Trillin, wrote a lovely, poignant, funny book that was a memorial to his wife (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95961.About_Alice) and also a really silly book about a man sitting in his car hogging parking spots as a form of obstinance/therapy. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/138993.Tepper_Isn_t_Goin...

Enjoyed them both very much!

I have a brother (iPhone user) and father (Android user) who both hate updating their phone operating systems.

I have a mother who uses a desktop to log into her MyChart and VA health systems, and I often have to help her figure out how to log in.

I'm adaptable, but I do lament when features are taken away or made worse.

It's like the phrase "user friendly" has been made into something to avoid.

Microsoft is perhaps the worst offender in this regard. Every update to Windows makes it worse in one way or another, and it's become quite exhausting.

FYI, it's one of the articles that does not even start scratching the title topic surface in the first 3 paragraphs.

Regarding upgrades. It always requires QA to exist (as some rumor says that for example MS went with telemetry only in win11 instead of a proper QA approach) for users to consider upgrading at all.

When my family would go shopping, the cashier would invariably ask "Did you find everything OK?" and my father deduced that this informal polling was actually so that they could figure out when a large percentage of people answered "Yes", they would then go and reconfigure ("upgrade") the store, rearranging all the shelves and products, so that the regular customers could not, in fact, "find everything OK".

Because for any store, or any shopping mall or city, for that matter, the worst kind of shopper is the one who knows what he wants, makes a beeline for that product, picks it off the shelf and checks out, without having any opportunity to get lost and see other aisles, other shelves, and other products that he doesn't need, but may decide to purchase nevertheless.