I don't get the "without consent" part. If you have automatic updates on you consent to them automatically downloading things.
It's great the MS wants everyone on their latest OS. But "latest" doesn't mean "best." Taking away user choice subverts the economic principles that encourage improvement -- that "best" is decided by the consumer, not the producer.
It would be ideal for developers if we all just used one OS. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for the customers, the economy, or society.
1. continue fixing bugs in their prior products. 2. create new features in new products.
People who buy something, e.g. an original iPad, no longer get OS updates even though the item was advertised as being safe to use to access content on the internet. This is provably false and while EULA shenanigans provide a fig leaf of propriety, the reality is what was sold was defective and if it's possible to fix it they should.
Opting out of updates means that you don't get fixes. The argument that you agree to these kinds of changes in fundamental behavior because you are receiving new features is B.S. The company sold me a defective product and certain documented behaviors. I'm ok with those behaviors but I want the product to work for the features advertised. I should have to tolerate excessive data collection simply to get a functional product.
It should be possible to fix bugs without having to add in new features. E.g. I shouldn't need to upgrade to floating icons with a parallax background to get a fix for PDF parsing problems.
It's like how putting "this EULA can change at any time" doesn't allow you to change the EULA to do subversive things. People agree to them under reasonable expectations. Using the terms and settings as a Trojan Horse is not respectful of those expectations.
But I also can't fathom how so many on this thread are willing to conclude that users consented to this by enabling automatic updates. Because, of course, you don't just consent to have Windows download any old "thing" when you enable automatic updates. You only consent to have it download updates!
While the definition of "update" is surely ambiguous and not set in stone, it should surely be guided (I would think) by the sorts of things Microsoft has called "Windows Updates" in the past. And I don't think there is a good argument that this would include a 6 GB download of an entirely new version of the OS.
People in Redmond or Silicon Valley with good internet connections need to remember that a lot of people don't have that luxury. Extremely low bandwidth connections are still very common in the US, and metered connections are an unfortunate reality for many people around the world.
I never claimed this.
> I don't have a 2gb cap.
Good. That doesn't mean everybody else does. Stop projecting your situation onto everybody else.
> I certainly wouldn't enable automatic updates
As you're posting to HN, I can assume you are very familiar with computers and understand how to do that. Everybody else just wanted the small security patches that Windows Update provided for years, with minimal impact on data caps.
Even just that can be a problem, since it is quite common these days for people to have a small SSD boot drive, and put everything else in a secondary hard drive.
The download could use all remaining space on the SSD, which could cause a variety of problems unless/until the user figured out the problem and deleted the 6 GB download.
But it hardly matters, since it's well known that storage needs always exceed available capacity, and 500gb is tiny compared with with today's needs, which may be represented by a reasonable hard disk capacity of 3TB or so.
So even a 500 GB drive won't fit all of the desired 3 TB in the first place, so it's already under pressure even before Microsoft randomly decides it's ok to use up over 1% of it.
And for the much more common 64 GB SSDs, this is 10% of their total capacity.
Which means that 6 GB can never just be assumed to be so trivially small that it won't have a really negative effect on anyone.
You picked a terribly contrafactual way to be a Microsoft apologist.