I help seniors with technology issues
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
My father uses a Windows 10 laptop, and a Samsung Android phone.
The biggest pain point is that Windows sometimes decides to do an update, and upon restart, shows a splash screen with a wizard which wants you to make decisions and read/understand a few things. He has no idea what going on or if something will break, or if he actually did something wrong. I solve this via WhatsApp video calls "quickly", and then have to explain to him for 5-10 minutes how it's not his fault.
When it comes to the phone, all he essentially uses it for is YouTube and WhatsApp. When I visited a while back an OTA update had showed up and I promptly started to install it. While it downloaded i found ELEVEN registry cleaner derivatives installed on his phone. He couldn't have gotten this from anywhere other than YouTube.
Again I have to hear this; "I'm so sorry son, you know we have no idea what's going on, please forgive us for causing you so much trouble."
I know they feel guilty for not knowing how to handle this stuff themselves and wish they didn't have to "bother" me so much. In my eyes everyday tech took a gigantic leap from having a TV with a remote to requiring people to be super users in tremendously more complex software/hardware.
They don't even stand a chance...
> They think it's their fault! They think they're not capable of doing things BECAUSE they keep getting fucked with by this user-hostile crap
So much this. I have similar conversations with my family all the time. My mom actually uses a hoke computer for business related stuff more than anybody. At one point a few years back after some Windows update that messed some things up I booted a vanilla linux mint off a USB and had her play around with it. She liked it because it was simple and easy to understand, so she's been with thay for a few years.
My brother bought her a "better" laptop with standard issue Windows bloatware. She hated it and kept asking for Linux Mint. She said that the Windows UI was too confusing.
When I still worked as a sysadmin/support person, the ritual for preparing a new PC for use included replacing the preinstalled Windows 8/8.1 with a fresh install of Windows 7 from a vanilla installation medium. This was in part because the software our SCADA people used required Windows 7, but we did it to all PCs just to get rid of the useless crap vendors would ship with their machines.
Fortunately, the Windows 8/8.1 Pro license allowed us to do that. But I don't know if the Home license does, and frankly, you cannot expect non-tech people to do that.
As a long-time Linux/BSD user on my private machines, I am glad I don't have to deal with these problems in my spare time, but I am part of a pretty small minority in this regard.
I remember reading a story about the development of the Apple Macintosh and its OS, and one developer talked about how Steve Jobs gave him a hard time about the time it took the machine to boot. Even if you shave off just one second, he argued, imagine how much time that saves all the users over the lifetime of their computers. And now imagine how much time is wasted, in total, because of hardware vendors sabotaging their own products.
Personally I have one of these Lenovo’s and a default install of windows helped tremendously. I also went with linux mint on it to just completely get out of that s** show. So much lighter weight, fast. Not completely stable though, Vivaldi and firefox have some crashing and high CPU issues on it.
Their lack of bloat shows in their hardware specs. I've worked on Dell laptops and they were spec'd out at 64GB. My latest MacBook Pro has 16GB and its feels MORE responsive than the Dell computer.
Each MacBook Pro and MacBook Air I've purchased has also lasted many more years than my friends HP, Dell or Lenovo laptops. Honestly, the only reason I typically upgrade my laptop every 4 or 5 years is because I just want something new.
Apple products cost more, but given their full lifecycle, I think they're cheaper to own than most other brands.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/02/19/super... https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/product_security/ps500066-s...
Within a few months of her using it she complained it’s slow, takes ages to turn on etc. After removing almost everything from the manufacturer it was usable. But even now she barely uses the machine and never installs anything and it’s unusable slow with essentially zero usage after a couple of years. She’s not even ran any updates. It wouldn’t surprise me if these machines are built to die.
But, to be honest, the guy that sold it put some super bare Win10 on it and that also felt pretty fast.
In any event, for email and web-browsing I think Ubuntu is just perfect. I have it on our HTPC and the whole family uses it without thinking twice. And it stays fast.
Oh, our family laptop (the one the kids use, and I do on occasion) is a Dell Latitude E5450, first introduced in 2015(!), I got it 2nd hands in 2019, it looked barely used. I put Ubuntu on it (but recently I installed Arch, when I regularly use a machine myself I prefer it), the thing still feels like a fast new laptop, the kids went through Covid with it, using Teams (for Linux) and doing online homework. I use it for dev work on the side. Love the machine.
My advice: Get a second hand business model from a good source (some local trader that gets good reviews, or you can visit, we have a lot of local IT people gathering on a website here that sell older business hardware [0, Dutch website]). Plus, it's nice to give stuff a second life instead of buying cheap throw-away shitware for cheap.
I'm really impressed with this distro and use it as my own daily driver. One of the few times where I do very little tweaking to get the UI/UX just right for my own preferences.
Starts instantly, not in 10 minutes. Great battery life. Automatic backups when properly enabled. Far less security and malware risks. Few to none resource hogs slowing down the entire system. Not really possible to get a corrupt system as seems inevitable on Windows.
Even then you'll have some support. Like that time my mum called to say it's completely broken, doesn't turn on.
It turned on just fine, she forgot her password.
People complain about Apple having a closed ecosystem, but doing so disables all the spying / crapware that plagues Windows and Android.
My last computer was a 32 core 128gb RAM Threadripper from ChillBlast.
Surprisingly the Threadripper had a slower single core performance than the Intel NUC.
I also use a Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox with Vagrant for development machines to do DevOps.
But I also use IntelliJ and it is fast enough on the NUC and it's SSD and 32GB RAM. I don't play games. But I write multithreaded software so I get 12 logical cores to play with. (6 physical cored and 12 hardware threads)
I think the innovators dilemma has occurred with mobile technology. Mobile chips such as my NUC and ARM chips in phones are good enough for development. (See apple silicon) I can run 6 virtual machines without slowdown.
Admittedly my IntelliJ is running on a small repository. I suspect it I was working on an employer's project it would slow down due to all the files.
Most of the time the computer is waiting for IO and the CPU can be different levels of idle. I recommend the Gist "latency numbers every developer should know"
https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
I would recommend people buy from manufacturers that don't preload stuff into their laptops. Such as Framework, System76, ChillBlast, Novatech.
EDIT: I had an ASUS but I installed Ubuntu on it and I cannot remember if the windows had lots of manufacturer software on it. I rarely booted into windows.
Pre-installed Office package just in case we will buy a license in the future?
They really just use the computer to browse the internet anyway. The fact that there's no room for malicious actors to install crap on that architecture to interfere with the user experience because the user experiences completely dominated by one megacorporation's notion of how the computer should work has been a Godsend for maintenance of their machine.
Now, the Android phone is an entirely different story, unfortunately.
I think this problem is more with the consumer line.
I've been in the same situation as OP before though with computers from parents and friends, and it's unbearable. A straight reinstall of Windows after buy is the only viable option. I had to diagnose a not-so-old pc sold with all kinds of crap installed, 4GB of RAM, Windows 10 and a rotating 5400HDD thrashing all the time.
That's my experience as well. So if you need a cheap Windows laptop, a used corporate class laptop is often a better path than a cheap new consumer class one.
Not even all of their consumer products are bad. It's often the cheap (sub $600) laptops that I suspect gets subsidised by the crapware that comes preinstalled.
When people ask me for recommendations for a laptop for around $400, I always say "second hand" or "save up a bit longer" because these days spending less than $600 is often a recipe for disaster.
This is the best advice you can give, but I'd include the option of an iPad/Chromebook. And even with a Chromebook anything <$300 is asking for trouble. Realistically, a decent laptop that will be performant and cheap that is well made doesn't exist. You're looking at ~$800 before you get get anything relyable.
https://www.asus.com/event/ASUS_PURE/fi/index.html https://www.asus.com/event/ASUS_PURE/se/index.html https://www.asus.com/event/ASUS_PURE/dk/index.html https://www.asus.com/event/ASUS_PURE/no/index.html
At least us, en, gb, es, it, and de versions the the URL did not work. Not sure why those are not available everywhere, but those are the only laptops I buy for my parents.
EDIT: The marketing material on those pages says:
"ASUS PURE comes without pre-installed third-party software, trial versions and apps. You choose what you install on your machine. ASUS PURE is designed for fast and optimal performance by freeing up memory and CPU power. The ASUS PURE laptop starts up faster and the machine feels like new for longer. Your computer is protected by Microsoft's Windows Defender antivirus program and a firewall that receives regular updates and does not include annual fees. Your ASUS PURE laptop is therefore always safe."
Like, why would anyone want to have it any other way? What's the benefit for us customers to have all that crapware installed when it does no good for us?
A cheaper laptop.
At this point, the best thing for a "typical" user is a Chromebook, or better yet one of the few Chrome desktop boxes. For $600 you can have a very functional Chrome machine with a giant monitor. And remote-management + screen sharing is baked in.
The worst is visiting a Best Buy (or similar electronics store) and hearing a neophyte go up to a sales clerk and say, "I want to buy a computer". I can't stay near, because the discussion I will hear will kill me.
Great quote
The machine itself feels really solid, I was expecting a few rough edges from a first-time manufacturer, but it feels as good as my old Macbook Air did. I just love it, and I am really enjoying how repairable it is. All the stuff has stickers and QR codes internally to explain what components are and link you to how-to videos.
Well worth whatever premium I paid for it, if it ensures that the company continues to make products.
If they are reading this thread, an option with no numberpad and hardware buttons on the touchpad. I'm paying an extra for that. The language of the keyboard is much less important. Thanks.
I recently tried helping my aunt switch internet providers to one 50% cheaper, I called, set everything up, it was all finalized they just needed to come switch the connection over. After I left, she made a call to the company to switch the appointment and ended up getting the contract cancelled, then stuck in limbo and a month later I still haven’t been able to get it fixed. It’s impressive how if someone doesn’t know the right phrases and things to say, you end up in digital purgatory where no one can help you.
I've long believed that most computers sold cheap as consumer devices simply aren't fit for purpose, sure, most people here could take one and make the changes required to remove bloat and spyware, but it's out of the reach of a typical consumer
> Add/Remove Programs, in Windows. Then I found everything from Lenovo and uninstalled.
These days you can usually get at the oem license key for windows - I would recommend just doing a clean install of windows 10 (possibly 7) from Microsoft install media. Just make sure to make a backup of user data.
IMNHO that's easier and better than playing wack-a-mole.
And if the user can afford it - just upgrade to a pro license while you're at it.
For users on a budget - I would probably recommend Ubuntu LTS or another stable desktop distro.
The hardware is great* but the software kneecaps it. I'm sure most people buying a gaming laptop aren't doing a full windows re-install on it and are losing out on noticeable performance amounts.
* It could definitely use more ventilation, they're aiming too much for the macbook look but on factory overlcocked i7 that doesn't work well.
But in the 1990s many developers hated it and actually used and contributed to alternatives, which eventually brought other options, from Linux to Firefox.
I see no such work now, as big tech got better at buying competing tech and engineering talent, so I am not very optimistic. Maybe if the next generation is not so smartphone obsessed.
- skeumorphic icons - familiar light colours - large fonts - emphasis on storage and management of images and videos, archiving service - a support app that goes right to a irc channel. - journaling for remote support, wonder what else.
Kind of like android was intended to be before google's ecosystem became a landfill. They didn't invent poverty for the internet, but they scaled it as a service for people who prey on those who are less advantaged.
I tried volunteering to help a few years ago, just with a group of seniors in my mother's circle, and it just became too depressing for me. It was a never-ending battle against adware/bloatware/crapware that I just couldn't keep up with. I spent more time telling them what not to do with their laptops/smart-phones than showing them all the things they could do.
Free and Open Source Software.
This is the baseline. I get that it's hard and there are issues. But if this isn't the baseline, there's no chance elsewhere.
My question is, why does a monitor even need firmware updates? I didn't gain any features, nor did I get an update report.
Crap like this is one of the main reasons my household went 100% Apple well over a decade ago. Apple isn't perfect, but after doing software all day at work, the last thing I want is to spend time debugging shitty software on a $500 Windows laptop.
The Lenovo technician that showed up was 19 years old and said "wow that must be an old laptop!" And proceeded to replace the wrong part, breaking something else in the process.
The Lenovo laptop is a 2021 model. Now I'm scared that future generations will regard technology as branded magic. This was his job.
Never. Literally had broken trackpad drivers on Lenovo for years. They were aware of the issue, it was "normal" on the model I had. This was around 2013.
I will never ever again recommend anything from Lenovo. Trackpad was a minor issue compared to other problems that I had with that same laptop.
I managed to fix wifi issues with extra dongle, but how sad is that? Trackpad was always an issue.
You think I’m speaking badly of Lenovo just for fun?
They are malware resistant, and easy to remotely support. They are difficult to really mess up, and you don't need to worry about data loss. Migration to a new chromebook is trivial.
I personally remember returning a Lenovo Yoga family had (primarily due to windows 8 accessibility issues with font sizes) and switching to a mac.
Years later when I visited in Japan again, I wanted to buy another sony vaio, and asked the people to give me one with clean windows system. They did not have one with clean system, but they showed me that there were only a few harmless pre-installed apps, and they were easy to remove.
I use the Lenovo Vantage update app that I think the thread is talking about on my own dual boot Thinkpad. It's a particularly slow app with pointless animations to look good. It makes warranty info prominent to try to sell customers on an extended one, and has some other 'useless to power user' features. However it only runs when I run it, and I'm just there for the firmware updates.
I expect the consumer line also includes other bloat beyond that though, or enables mis-features to 'protect' the user.
I think the bigger issue is the lack of quality control. If you want to put crapware on a device and sell it to people, at least make sure it is moderately efficient and test that the final product is usable. If the final product is not fit for function, it should not be sold (or alternatively no one should buy it).
In this specific case, it’s really impressive how they’ve made surveillance software (which shouldn’t need to do THAT much) so resource hungry.
I don’t think selling utter shit that’s not fit for purpose is a software/hardware industry thing though.
These days he has an iPhone and iPad that I got him because of accessibility and ease of use, a Windows PC, and a Roku (he used the Hulu local tv service instead of cable). On all of those devices he can only do the basics and is completely helpless if something unexpected happens. Just a few days ago he was watching a show on Prime Video, accidentally skipped to the next episode, and couldn’t figure out how to navigate back. On his iDevices he routinely gets confused trying trying to look at messages, i think because he’s used to seeing/answering them through notifications and doesn’t understand the layout of the messages app. He also has a lot of frustration with the iDevices due to arthritis in his hands. On his PC he’s been using Quicken to track his finances for probably two decades, and last year he ask me to help set up online download of his accounts to make the reconciliation easier. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but every month or two now I have to sit down with him and spend an hour unravelling a mess he created due to getting confused about Quicken’s process for matching downloaded transactions with those he manually entered in the register.
I could go on and on with examples, but the question I ponder over is whether or not there’s a fundamental difference between his generation that didn’t grow up with technology and the younger generations that did. Will technology move on and change so that even those of us who a tech savvy today are hopelessly outclassed in 30-40 years? Or are have our brains been wired differently to make us more adaptable? I don’t have answers and I’m rambling at this point, but I feel like something has to give. For seniors today technology is mostly a convenience (they can choose to largely ignore it if they want to) but by the time we reach their age I don’t think that will be the case.
Computers, on the other hand, are wildly more complex, and thus their interfaces need to do a lot more. Finding what you want to do involves some level of exploring the interface, which comes naturally to, say a child introduced to a computer, but grates against the learned behavior of someone who's only interacted with a much simpler world.
Sometimes I have to switch to my windows partition to use some software and it will sometimes update, completely messing up my bootloader until I get off my behind and load grub from a USB stick.
I have a late 2013 15” MBP with 16GB RAM as my daily driver, and it was great till it had Mojave on it. In a moment of insanity I decided to update it to Big Sur , since it was no longer getting security updates.
And guess what, it massively effed it up. It became much slower, services started taking unnecessary CPU and memory pressure running into yellow more frequently.
Run GrapheneOS on your phone.
Buy hardware from people working to make it open, like Purism, Frame.work, Pine64, or Star Labs.
I know I'm privileged and so is my family, because I can insist that my elder relatives opt for Apple, where such issues are far, far more rare. For most of the last 6 or 7 years, my 82 year old mom has done nearly all her computing on an iPad. She only needs her Air when -- no kidding -- she needs to transfer embroidery patterns to the USB stick her sewing machine uses (about which: yes, sewing machines have gotten HELLA COMPLICATED).
No bloatware. No marketing software. No problems. But also: only possible because we can afford Apple hardware, and because she has someone in her family (me) that knows to send her there.
It's still largely a Windows world. That Windows machines are so routinely loaded with ALL THIS CRAP is completely unacceptable. MSFT could do something about it if they wanted to. I remember joking, in the 90s, that MSFT's greatest crime would end up being how much they lowered everyone's expectations about what was possible in computing, and that's definitely turning out to be true.
A fellow co-worker offered to help me and showed me many things, but the best advice he gave me was to buy some books and study up on computers. As I studied, I brought him plenty of questions! Years later I marveled to him how he was so patient with all the questions. He told me if I hadn't used the books to learn what to ask, he would have cut me off for not really trying. I've always treasured this. I'm about to retire now after 30 years and have seen many changes with many machines, I've never regretted learning any if it!
As for bloatware, it is evil and unfair to the buyer/owner of the device. But let's not kid ourselves, they don't consider us owners.
The primary reason we did this was because if we didn't it was very likely customers would eventually bring the computer back and complain that it's running slow or that some software had stopped working (30-day office trial, etc).
It's kind of insane that companies ship computers with so much junk on them because it literally degrades their product for anyone who doesn't know how to service a computer. I always thought it would be easy win to just ship a computer without all the junk and just some useful freeware...
After changing the routers defaults to fixed channels everything worked like a charm and the printer had stable networking. He told me they apparently had the same problem with their old printer, which they assumed was broken and was disposed...
What a waste of money and resources, the other printer clearly suffered from the same issues caused by the default ISP router configuration and it would have been fixable...
Ostensibly in a "well-functioning" market, selling computers that become very slow would make people not buy them.
Is there no better competition? If there is better, why aren't they winning?
The user was a little hesitant to use Firefox, quickly adapted and I've not had any calls for help since.
Most likely the machine had not been wiped and reinstalled, and there was some real malware on it (probably a crypto-miner of some kind).
It makes no sense that Lenovo's dev teams would add bloatware to a machine to the point it literally crawls, and then say "yeah, this works great" and sign off on it for manufacturing.
My own experience of Lenovo is the opposite: snappy and fast even on low-end hardware with integrated graphics, many months between needed firmware updates, and the machines are always fairly priced for what you get.
1. Wipe Windows and install Linux
2. Wipe Windows, download the Windows .iso image or buy media from Microsoft and install that so there is no extra crap
3. Buy a Mac
I realize that it is ridiculous to buy a brand new windows PC and it is unusable and you have to do a bunch of stuff yourself to make it usable but that is the state of much of the PC industry. Vote with your wallet or find a technically capable friend to help.
1.) Don't need to be proven (i.e., no time to waste on "market fit" as what they want is already clear).
2.) Have low expectations in the form of "it just works."
If you're comfortable with jamming on "boring stuff," you can become a low-level tycoon just cleaning up messes over the next decade or two.
Enough said.
ie, that laptop would be more expensive without the junky pre-installed software.
Nothing new, and still a shame they don’t let consumers know what’s going on. It’s even more of a shame when expensive things do it too —- like cars.
Which leads me to a question: is virtual memory even a good idea with most PCs? Once your computer starts swapping heavily, it's over. I think I would prefer an informative kernel panic.
His last OS before Arch Linux was Windows Vista which didn't match those requirements.
... and he's the guy that just got promoted.
When you issue a computer for work IT will almost always, without fail, emulate this by installing a bunch of their own junk spyware and “security” software.
Reviewers of laptops do a fresh install of Windows before reviewing like that is normal consumer behavior.
My family has several 'copies' of a laptop from the same company, one of which is the newer model, by one year. The newer model is flimsy and has required multiple repairs to the display, hinges, keyboard, case, etc... Parts are easy to source for the newer model but impossible to find for the older one, although naturally we haven't needed any yet.
Reading stories makes you think how right that decision is.
I've been using self-built desktop PCs and Apple laptops for so long I've become out of touch. I'm - somehow - surprised this is still going on.
Most of the customers WANTS NEW laptop every couple of years even there is no real point to change.
I always wonder if I will still have these skills when I'm old, or will I be completely lost like most of the current old generation.
(And if large computer vendors would start preinstalling Linux they'd add their crapware there to "build their relationship" with the customer and selling a few ads or whatever)
I was saddened to see it wasn't.
I recommend only mac or chrome book for older people.
Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? I need a laptop, a table and a phone. I have been looking for over a year and I cannot find anything I like.
0. I don't want arbitrary software running on my personal devices, fullstop.
1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
2. I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities.
3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this.
RMS was right back then, but the problem has recently become much more serious. Back then it was only about laptops. Now I have to worry about my fridge spying on me.
Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ?
A free market relies on multiple points:
- consumers are rational
- consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives
- alternatives exist
- it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature
- consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want
None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone.
The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.
I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.
Just like the market is "failing" when people complain about bad airline experiences… but continue to buy the cheapest flights/seats they can find?
Why do you think the seats are so cheap?
Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw).
I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.
Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.
That part is I think selfish. I do want to pay a premium to be able to do all that, but that market doesn't really exist.
And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000
This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.
But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends.
Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.
This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.
How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.)
You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.
It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop).
Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.
In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation.
The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.
To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control.
Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?
It didn't. There are Apple stores all around the world, full of people ready to help seniors in person or over the phone, on a really nice computer.
Because the market is too free, and needs some additional,heavy and very restrictive regulation.
I hope the EU will do something in this sense, sooner or later.
I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button.
Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.
The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives.
The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?
Runaway capitalism has fucked the promotion of the interests of consumers.
I understand the OP’s concerns, and I feel the same way. Technology has, for my entire life, done nothing but throw more and more mud in my face. Without a doubt, there are people here on HN who are contributing to this problem; and, where no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood, we as a community are the ones complicit in this “make the little graph go up” scheme the money-bugs have beset upon the world. I see this stemming from the core issue, related to my GNU/Linux side-bar at the top of this post, is that there isn’t actually money to be made off custom software. If there was ever a time this was true, it is long over. Companies make money: 1)selling things, and software makes those things cheaper 2)selling things, and software makes selling those things cheaper 3)selling information, and software makes gathering that information cheaper 4)selling information, and software makes that information creation feasible 5)selling art, and software is the medium
Where 4&5 are in that realm of “selling custom software”, I believe that these are rank ordered in terms of profitability and that 4&5’s profitability is directly tied to the ability to properly exploit 3.
To restate the OP’s position, technology is not fun anymore. So, dare I say again that we all are complicit in this awful way of doing business. It’s not fun and it’s not fun because we have to make money. And it’s not fun because we can only make money if we’re doing one of these things I’ve listed (there may be more, but this is a comment, not an article). And, so, we have to make money by making life worse for people who use our technology. We have to make money to live. We have to make peoples lives worse… in order to live. We live off the suffering of others… This is the most sadistic realization. “But, isn’t that the natural order? Eating things to survive?” asked noone, because nobody reading a comment section would ever be so thoughtful. No, we don’t eat our fellow man. Instead, here, we torment the each other and the elderly with beeps-and-boops, pop-up adds for cheap consumer goods make by slaves, surveillance and targeted manipulations, and scary threats of scam artistry. And, as the OP says, we leave consumers to feel like it is their fault for not buying a $2,500 Apple, or accepting a 700-page EULA, or gasp not following ever god-damned detail of computing news and technology so that they can defend themselves for our injudiciousness onsLaUHTt Of EvER NeW WAyS TO SQUEEZE THEM FOR EVERY DAMNED PENNY!!!11 maniacal laughter continues for several moments, before awkwardly subsiding I could try to pretend that capitalism is ”the problem” or that we could “solve this” with better security and privacy laws. I’ve become to fatalist for that. If there’s a source of food, nature evolves something to consume it and if there’s a source of profit, the market “social evolution”s a way to extract it. So, I see no hope here. And, as is my experience working with software people over the last 30 years, we are truly awful social rejects anyway who do not exalt compassion or empathy as well as being a people who marvel in how dumb everyone else is and how masterfully we can create our techno-world better than God could
That's not to say a $250 Chromebook is the solution, but a $500 one (equal to the value of the laptop in the story) would be exceptional compared to any Windows experience with the same hardware.
It greatly irritates me that Apple is sharing profile information with Netflix. I have never used Netflix on my iPhone and don't even have the app installed. Worse, no matter how many times I respond to the notification, my account keeps getting suspended. I never had a Netflix problem before the iPhone.
So, giving up and buying an expensive Apple device does not protect you from life.
P.S. Please don't try to educate me on HN to recognize the difference between a system notification and a scam text message.
> It greatly irritates me that Apple is sharing profile information with Netflix
That’s not a thing.
Consider the options of the senior in question: 1) Find someone 'good with technology'. 2) Be very unhappy with the laptop, and tell everyone how he bought an €500 brick.
People listen to each other. They won't be fooled twice. Lenovo/Microsoft/.. would soon stop bundling this crap if there were no helpfull people.
As an analogy: You buy a car. It tops out at 5km/h because it is pulling a huge trailer that either bleeps ads or worse is just a dump for useless rocks. Do you expect tech savy helpers to decouple the trailer and accept that as how things are, or blame the manufacturers for their stupidity and greed.