There’s Always Another Update (Premium)

Sometimes I feel like I spend much of my time just keeping my so-called smart devices up-to-date. The problem is particularly acute with PCs, in part because I manage so many of them.

Oddly, I predicted this. I recall someone excitedly describing a coming wave of smart TVs 20ish years ago that would include lightweight OSes and app stores, and how this would make our lives easier by removing the need for external streaming devices and the messiness of HDMI switching. But that's not how I saw this change. Having already suffered through years of problems keeping Windows and apps up-to-date on PCs--this was before mobile devices really took off--I was curious why anyone would want to bring those problems to such a simple device.

But the impact was even worse than I'd imagined. Smart TVs and displays now boot up over time instead of turning on instantly, and they need to be unplugged or reset from time-to-time. Those OSes are never well-supported and quickly become bogged down by the low-end processors on which they run. The apps are terrible and not as full-featured as those on dedicated streamers like Apple TV and Roku. TV remotes are typically horrible as well. And smart TV makers use all this technology to annoy customers with online account sign-ins so they can advertise upgrades. Accounts that may or may not be vulnerable to electronic attack. The whole thing is a mess.

Tech enthusiasts were quick to fall for this trap, which is somewhat amusing, just as they gravitated to Teslas, as much for their computer-like innards and apps as for the benefits of electric power. I admire the acceleration power of these vehicles, and I also admire their Spartan interiors. But the electronics--the huge screen, the apps, the online services--is just cringe. We just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. How much better would these vehicles be if we could just use Apple CarPlay or Android Auto?

I don't own a Tesla, and I never will. This isn't a statement of any kind, unless that statement is that I hope to never have to buy another car, and if I do, it will be much less expensive than that. But when the inevitable day comes, my wife and I are far more concerned with phone connectivity than we are with anything else. Our car is over 10 years old and it has a tiny, non-color display with just a basic Bluetooth connection. I hate it.

Each time we come back to Mexico, I pull the PCs I keep here out of storage, power them up, and set about updating them. There are three of them, all refurbished HP laptops, and each was configured a bit differently thanks to the local account and Microsoft Work and School account testing I was doing during our last trip in a bid to see whether some configuration might help with easing the enshittification. But in each case, I signed in, opened Windows Update to install whatever had accumulated over the previous two months and the Microsoft Store to update the apps.

It's no longer surprising to me...