Ask Paul: October 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the fourth and penultimate edition of Ask Paul for October. Let’s kick off the weekend...
Office 365 wonkiness, Apple relationship
SherlockHolmes asks:

Hi Paul, for a few weeks now, I noticed some weird behavior with Office 365. For no special reason, Word and Outlook are opening very slowly and sometimes it needs two or more klicks to open at all. Do you know anything wrong about Office at this time?

No, sorry. I don’t use Outlook, but I do use Word every day and on multiple PCs and I’ve not seen any performance issues. I’d suspect the machine over the service, I guess.

And out of curiousity about your "special" relations with Apple: I can understand why someone finds Apple a bad company. But to be fair: Microsoft also made some bad choices in the past. And also Microsoft too does produce bad Updates for its OS. So how would you describe your relationship with Apple. Im curious because I recently made the switch to an iPhone and iPad.

My assessment of Apple, or any company, is based on what they’re doing now, not what they might have done in the past. But I hope it’s a sign of my objectivity that I can feel like Apple is a terrible company, with immoral and hypocritical values that directly contradict its advertising and chest-pounding, but still see the attraction of its hardware. There is so much wrong with Apple, I don’t even know where to start. But I evaluate (much of) it’s hardware and think, yep, I get it. It makes great hardware products.

To put this in historical context, I had a real crisis of faith with Microsoft during its U.S. antitrust era, as more and more internal documents came out and exposed how terrible the company really was. And I felt very strongly that the software giant deserved and needed to be broken up. And I’m still a lot less impressed with Bill Gates today as a result, though I do recognize that he has somewhat redeemed himself through his philanthropic and healthcare work.

What I don’t understand is why so many of Apple’s fans give the company a pass for its own terribleness today. And the big problem with Apple---and Amazon and Google and Facebook---is their respective terribleness impacts so many more people than Microsoft ever could back in the day. Meanwhile, today’s Microsoft isn’t even the same company it used to be. It’s a model I wish the rest of Big Tech would follow.
Mint and prepaid mobile plans
zcarter68w asks:

Like many people are probably doing, I am going through our budget to see where I can trim some of our expenses and of course, my cell phone plan is one that I would like to reduce. I am currently on an unlimited plan with AT&T but I'm not using enough data to warrant it. I have narrowed down my choices to two prepaid plans. AT&T offers 8 GB/month for $25/month, while Mint offers 12 GB for the same price, $25/month. My question is how have you liked Mint's service? The only advantages I can think of ...