Ask Paul: April 26 (Premium)

It’s Suntory time! By which I mean, Happy Friday! And welcome to another far-reaching set of terrific reader questions. We’re all struggling with the same questions these days.

Tick tock, tick tock

JustMe asks:

With the potential shutdown/mandated selling of TikTok looming, what do you see as the potential outcome? If it is sold, who would be in the running to buy it? If it is simply shutdown, is there a competitor out there today that could possibly fill the void?

I don’t think it’s worth speculating about a potential buyer, since this order is unprecedented and almost certainly illegal. And it will be contested in court by many parties. ByteDance has said repeatedly that it hasn’t even considered this option.

The politics in this country are an ongoing embarrassment that I really struggle with. Imagine the outrage if any one country dictated that Microsoft had to sell Windows to some other non-U.S. country so that that country would own and then maintain, license, and support this product everywhere in the world going forward. It’s not just fantasy, it’s ludicrous.

We have antitrust laws for a reason, and they work. If TikTok is violating those laws, charge them, go to trial, and make them fix it if you win. You don’t take the ball away like a spoiled child with bad parents who always gets their way.

A living will for Windows

JustMe asks:

With the impending end of life of Windows 10 and 12 on the horizon, how do you think Microsoft plays this? Do they release Windows 12 early to encourage switchers, or do they delay the 12 release to get as many users as possible on 11 (possibly lowering OS requirements) before they roll out 12?

Without knowing whether there will even be a Windows 12 in the near term—this was Microsoft’s plan until more logical people in the company successfully argued that yet another product name/version would just confuse customers—I suspect Microsoft will do what it has always done in this situation and evaluate where the user base is at, what enterprise customers have told them they will do and when, and then either push back the Windows 10 end of support date or not.

In the past, they did this with Windows XP (twice) but not with Windows 7, and since those are the only comparable versions from a usage perspective, that’s good data. Windows XP was a special case, but with Windows 7, Microsoft had a viable alternative in Windows 10, and so it didn’t need to extend (free) support. So I feel like Windows 10 parallels that version more clearly.

That said, Windows 10 is still being used by a bigger percentage of the user base now than was Windows 7 at a similar point in its life cycle. And if Microsoft gets enough pushback, it will delay the end of support. Microsoft may or may not want to do what its customers demand, but this market is too important to ignore.

All that said, my guess is that Microsoft will end free support for Windows 10 in October 2025 as planned. And that once we get Windows 11 version 24H2 over the bizarre staggered release schedule Microsoft has planned for this year, all bets are off. At that point, working towards a Windows 12 starts to make sense. The timing is obviously unclear. But Windows 11 arrived 6 years after Windows 10, and that was likely later than might have otherwise happened because of leadership and strategy shifts. I would think we’ll see Windows 12 in a tighter timeframe. And that, as we see with Office, Microsoft will shorten support timelines as it can and maybe move from version to version more quickly. (Office perpetual has quietly moved from a 10-year support lifecycle to a 5-year support lifecycle.)

The fallout over a TV show

JustMe asks:

Have you ever played any of the Fallout games? Have you seen the Fallout series? Do you have any Fallout opinions either way?

I have never played a Fallout game, but I did just finish the Fallout TV series and have started a review that should be up soon. For now, I’ll just say that I’ve always been fascinated by post-apocalyptic stories—books, movies, TV shows, games, whatever—and that in reading up on the history of this game and its various plots, that I really like the whole vibe and tie-in of the TV show.

This makes me want a Half-Life 2-based TV show even more. Indeed, there are moments in the Fallout show that are very reminiscent of Half-Life 2. And while the Fallout universe is strong, and good for multiple seasons, Half-Life is even better. Hopefully, this show inspires more high-quality adaptations of good video games and franchises. (And not middling shows like Halo, which should have been better.)

I have a cunning plan…

markiehill asks:

Where are you with your phone situation, are you still a Pixel user ? Or have you found yourself going back to on your Iphone while doing your Macbook air review ?

Generally speaking, I don’t really get to use any one device, whether it’s a phone or a PC. I move between devices regularly. PC more than phone because I review so many.

But I was using the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra-full-time during most of our February trip to Mexico and as part of my normal review process, I switched temporarily back to the iPhone for comparison purposes and intended to do the same with the Pixel 8 Pro: The idea there is to have a fresh experience to work off and see how these things compare, etc. But as happens so often, life gets in the way. I didn’t finish my review of the Galaxy S24 Ultra before we came home in early March, so I figured I’d just do that soon thereafter. But then the MacBook Air happened. And so it made sense to stick with the iPhone temporarily so I could experience Apple’s cross-device ecosystem stuff. And that pushed everything else back further. I have a busy schedule and, sometimes, you have to prioritize.

Yesterday, however, I published my MacBook Air review. And so I will be switching back to the Galaxy S24 Ultra soon—I had expected to do so yesterday, but, again, busy—and will finish that review. And then we’ll see. My expectation is that I’ll be back on Pixel, as that’s my general overall preference. But I do move from phone to phone, as noted.

I really enjoy your what I use articles – could we have an update on hardware and the software you use day to day ?

My general setup doesn’t change that much, but I will look at that. Sometimes, I look back and realize that a lot of small changes over time did add up.

The noose is tightening

madthinus asks:

I see reports of Microsoft clamping down on local accounts during setup, have you looked into 24H2 to validate the work arounds as of yet? I am not sure if we have iso’s yet, I stopped following the Insider announcements. I do use a Microsoft account, but still prefer to use a local account for setup. It is fine mostly, but local network shares have become an exercise of frustration to get it to work, if you can get it to work.

He’s referring to a change in the Windows 11 Release Preview—meaning, something we will see in stable (the General Availability channel) soon—in which Microsoft seems to be stepping over yet another line. The description is innocuous enough—the release notes just say there will be “account-related notifications for Microsoft accounts across the Start menu and Settings”—but testers see what’s really happening: If you use a local account, it will bug you to switch to a Microsoft account. This is similar to other forms of harassment in Windows 11, like the OneDrive folder backup issues I always see, or what Edge does when you’re bold enough to make certain configuration changes. A minor form of enshittification, but enshittification nonetheless.

The good news is that you can turn off these notifications. The bad news is that this follows a pattern, well, two patterns, of abuse. One being an escalation in making it harder to use a local account in the first place. Two being a more general series of annoyances in Windows 11 that just keeps growing in scope. The fear here is obvious: Will Microsoft one day prevent users from configuring a local account?

I don’t see that happening, honestly. But in the meantime, we do have all the obvious workarounds, and even if one of them stops working in the future, you can just sign in with a Microsoft account, create a local account sign-in, sign in with that, and kill the MSA. It’s not elegant, but it works.

The bigger issue to me isn’t local accounts per se—honestly, most people are better off using an MSA anyway—it’s that Microsoft is escalating its war on customizations that in any way undermine its best interests. You see this all over Windows 11, from the default browser nonsense to the Edge and OneDrive pop-ups, banners, and other messages. This is another slippery slope: It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. This will never end, I bet.

ChromeOS Flex

christianwilson asks:

Do you have plans to publish a write up of your impressions of ChromeOS Flex? I recall you were testing it on a laptop during your most recent Mexico stay.

Yes to both, and I’m not sure where or even if I mentioned this, but at some point on that trip, I had some USB issues with one of the 16-inch laptops my wife and I intended to use there, and I ended up having to revert to Windows 11 on that laptop just to get work done. But I came home with it—replacing it in Mexico is a problem for future Paul—with the idea of either giving it away or re-imaging ChromeOS Flex. But I ended up installing that on a different laptop.

One thing I know I haven’t discussed publicly is that I’ve been using ChromeOS a lot since we returned from Mexico. I’ve been pretty vocal about the MacBook Air stuff, but ChromeOS has played a big role over the past month or so, too, and that will start bubbling up.

Anyway. Yes. I will be writing up ChromeOS Flex. It’s just been busy, as noted above.

Enmacification?

lindhartsen asks:

Since you’ve been spending more time on macOS of late do you have any opinion whether that platform is going down the path of enshittification as well?

I’m coming at this from the outside, but I’ve been thinking about that, actually, and I figure there are two ways to assess whether it’s happening. One, by comparing macOS to Windows 11. And two, by comparing macOS to what Apple is doing on iPhone and iPad, two very locked-down systems.

Both comparisons are straightforward and “prove,” for lack of a better term, that no, macOS does not suffer from meaningful enshittification.

When you install a web browser and accept its offer to make it the default web browser, that happens with no complaining or commentary, and it always works. Likewise, when you visit System Settings and search for “default,” a default web browser choice comes up in the results (this does not happen on iOS) and you can make the switch there. Again, with no complaining and no baloney.

Apple offers an iCloud service that’s analogous to OneDrive. And Apple would obviously love for you to use it. But I don’t use iCloud, and I just turned it off. I don’t use it with Photos (and don’t use Photos at all). I don’t use it for Mail, for passwords, for anything, really. (I did eventually enable iCloud Drive as part of my coming ecosystem post, but only for testing; I put iCloud on a Windows PC for part of that too.) As I do on Windows, I just use Google Drive for file sync/storage and it works great. And macOS did not complain once at any point. Ever.

Apple doesn’t bundle third-party crapware in macOS. Doesn’t display ads. Doesn’t nag you to do things their way. There are pop-ups occasionally for a Tips app that, literally, is about helping you understand the Mac better, and they are inoffensive (and can be easily disabled). I don’t see ads for Safari when I use Arc, Brave, Chrome, or Edge. Nothing.

So, no.

My theory is that Apple briefly tried to go down this path starting with the Mac App Store, and for all the obvious reasons. But the user base was thoroughly uninterested in seeing this desktop platform turning into a mobile-like closed garden. And so, yes, there are mobile-influenced features in macOS, even a goofy iOS-like app launcher called Launchpad. But no real hint of enshittification, let alone anything outright offensive.

This is the premium experience I want for Windows. And suspect I will never get, even by paying extra for it.

Well beneath the surface

OldITPro2000 asks:

Earnings call. Surface revenue continues its decline and is expected to post a decline next quarter. Do you feel there’s an internal metric at Microsoft where, if met, they just pull the plug? They’ve already bailed on hardware accessories (sold the designs to Incase) and Xbox hardware has – let’s just say headwinds.

Yep, I do. Surface has never been successful, let alone profitable, and it’s just a drag on the business. Objectively, Microsoft would be better off without it. I think the recent scale back that resulted in Panos Panay’s exit was the first major step to fix the problems (which included Panay), and if Surface is going to succeed, it only makes sense as a premium PC brand that exists to provide an Apple-like experience in a market dominated by penny-pinching PC makers that fill their products full of crapware, advertising, and upscale services.

If this overdue strategy (re)shift doesn’t pan out—meaning, the current-generation Surface Laptop and Surface Pro devices don’t reverse the slide—I think it may be over. I could see Microsoft dropping everything but Pro as a last-gasp attempt to revive it. Or just giving up.

If I were laptop shopping today I wouldn’t even look at Surface; too much of a risk that they bail on it in the next few years.

Oddly, I am very seriously considering buying a Snapdragon X Elite/Plus Surface Laptop 6 15-inch when Microsoft announces that in May. (A trusted source told me we can expect Microsoft to announce 13- and 15-inch Surface Laptop 6s and a Surface Pro 10 next month.) There’s something I’ve always loved about Surface in general, and Surface Laptop specifically. And I’m sure it’s the same hard-to-quantify qualities that contribute to why the MacBook Air is so desirable. We need a MacBook Air in the PC space. And Surface Laptop is literally that.

I understand anyone not even considering Surface and that my strange love of this product line is as irrational as my love of Google Pixel. So maybe I’m not thinking clearly in either case. But there’s definitely an emotional component to both.

But if push comes to shove, I do not expect Surface to survive. It never made any sense, and with years of losses, it makes even less sense now.

AI: Hot or not?

gg1 asks:

I am preparing a few slides for a talk I am giving and decided to opt in to the Microsoft 365 Copilot Pro trial to see if it could help me with the presentation. I wanted to test out whether the hype was real by having Copilot craft a presentation draft from an outline and make slide designs on the fly. Everything I tried produced woeful, generic results, and it was just easier for me to do the work myself.

My wife and I both went into AI writing assistance with the most cynical possible viewpoint, but we have both come around and have had very different experiences than you describe. Just sticking to your example, the ability to create a “good” presentation relies on both tools and the individual, and when the person doing this work isn’t experienced, AI can make a huge difference.

We all work differently. I create presentations in plain text and then add styling later, unless I’m doing the work for a project in which a template is supplied. I have a graphic arts background and was an artist, so I feel like I have a good eye for design. And I’m a professional writer, so I feel like I can handle the content. But these are skills most people don’t have. And AI can help with all of that, and it’s a great tool for most to have.

But even when you’re good at something, AI can help. This would be like a writer in the 1990s disabling spell checking in Word because they can spell correctly. But it’s also deeper than that. We’re hobbled by the way things have worked in the past, and we pigeonhole AI and try to make it work like that. But AI works best when you can get by that thinking.

There’s a video, 5 Things Everyone’s Missing with ChatGPT, that explains this very clearly. It also provides solid advice about the right way to use these tools. Not like we used older tools (Google Search, etc.) but differently. Because these tools are different. You can’t use basic instructions—you need to be as detailed as possible—and you can’t treat it like a search engine. Just watch the video.

My tests for Copilot so far have been seriously underwhelming, not only not worth the $20 / month, but not even worth it having the functionality be free. Most unbelievable of all, the Excel functionality requires that files be stored in OneDrive, which makes it a non-starter for me since I use Dropbox (I suspect this will be addressed with NPU-enabled machines, which I won’t own for several years as my machine is still quite new). I don’t remember seeing this big caveat mentioned anywhere I’ve read about the functionality.

Inspired by the video noted above, I had my wife watch it too. And it transformed her approach to AI. She’s a writer, like me, but she focuses on health and wellness topics, and she has to deal with science: Real sources with real facts, not nonsense from individuals, the web, or Wikipedia, or whatever. So she does not use AI for health-related topics, it’s just not reliable enough now. But that will change as curated, grounded AI services emerge. (This will happen all over the place. Financial, insurance, and so on.) Indeed, that will be transformative.

She does use AI for wellness and food-type topics, though. She prompts three different AI services, compares and combines the results, and then fact-checks them against known-good sources and in interviews with doctors and experts as needed. The idea isn’t to let it write for you, it’s to use it as the basis for work you can expand on as the actual author.

I know that you believe Copilot Pro to be worth it for you, so I’d like to know what functionality you’ve found that works very well, and what doesn’t.

Aside from image creation, I use Copilot mostly to summarize long documents, like court documents in recent antitrust cases, whitepapers, and even long web articles. That’s just the start, though: It also works well in situations where I’ve actually done the work and want to see whether an AI summary matches what I’m trying to communicate. And you can deep dive from a summary—a list of bullet points, perhaps—and then focus on a particular area. I’ve written a very long piece on monopoly I’ve not yet published, and AI has helped me at various steps to more clearly understand some core issues. I might have given up otherwise.

The weird thing about these services right now is that some work better than others for certain tasks, and they all evolve almost daily. It’s difficult to keep up.

Also, I’d like to know if you’ve created any guides on Copilot Pro for the site to make sure I am testing out this functionality correctly.

It’s not possible for someone as focused as I am to write general guides about something as far-reaching as Copilot or Copilot Pro/Copilot for Microsoft 365. Not with any credibility, anyway. I will never spend enough time in Excel or PowerPoint to ever really help people there. But I am trying to help with the basics—the language of AI is unfamiliar and daunting, for example—and I am writing about my experiences as I go (and even making short videos). This would be like writing a series on the spelling and grammar-checking features in Word; we just kind of use them and they’re well-established. But I think the stumbling block you’re having is addressed by that video I noted above. We’re all making the same mistakes when we approach AI and then we dismiss it when it doesn’t work as we expect. Because our expectations are skewed by our previous experiences.

Hype vs. reality

digiguy asks:

You mentioned this on Windows weekly. Without even considering the claims of Qualcomm “cheating” on benchmark, which are sensetionalist and do not deserve attention, I am not looking forward to what the press is going to do once these WoA devices arrive if they don’t beat M3 or whatever because the cooling is not as good as the reference devices, because emulation has an impact. because efficiency is a clear step down compared to Apple etc. I would be more than happy with M1 performance and even just 70-80% of the battery life as long as there is no fan noise (ideally fanless) and the device does not get hot, but I have the feeling that the press, especially the Apple camp, is going to crucify these devices given the hype Qualcomm has built. What do you think?

I don’t have much to add here. A publication I do not trust claims that Qualcomm is outright lying about the performance and efficiency of its Snapdragon X-series chipsets. And that is just nonsense: We will soon have shipping hardware and the entire planet will see for themselves what the reality is, reviewers will run benchmarks, etc. If Qualcomm just made this up, it would be found out. Worse, it would have already been found: I and many others were free to run any benchmarks or use any software we wanted to X Elite-based PCs a few weeks back. Notably, no one raised any concerns. Even more damning, benchmark scores are just showing up in the wild all the time, and look solid. Qualcomm can’t manufacture those.

So that report is nonsense. It’s fair to say that Qualcomm has “cherry-picked” the benchmarks it chooses to highlight, but that’s an unfairly cute way of saying that it’s doing what every single product maker does when it compares its offering to the competition: It highlights the strengths and doesn’t discuss the weaknesses. Think back to the Mac G3 days when Apple would talk up the floating-point advantages but never mention integer performance because that’s where Intel/x86 came out ahead. This is a basic competition strategy, where marketing steps in.

Anyway, my position on this has never shifted, not because I’m a unilateral idiot but because we’ve seen nothing but good news. The reality of these chipsets will hinge on real-world use with real computers. We’re going to see how well these PCs perform using real software, emulated and not, and we’re going to see real-world battery life. And here’s the thing: In a world in which Apple Silicon chips have very real advantages over PC chips, the Mac still hasn’t moved the needle all that much on marketshare. If the Qualcomm stuff is even in the same universe, that will be enough to prevent a massive platform shift, and it could transform the PC as a platform. All these things need to be is competitive, not better. But you know what? They might be better. Maybe not across the board. But in some ways. And for me, one of those ways is, they run Windows natively. So we’ll see.

As far as hype goes, Apple employs hype far more than Qualcomm does. If we can suck that up, we should have no problem rationalizing Qualcomm’s claims with reality. Let’s not hold Qualcomm to a higher standard. Apple invented hype.

But enough about me, what do you think of me?

iAlrakis asks:

Do you think we’ll ever get to a stage where the customer is really at the center of everything?

No. Moving on …

But I kid.

I mean, recently the EU has been making things a tiny bit harder for Apple to name 1 thing. But the reality is that we still have to make choices and nothing works great.

Some of this is semantics, really: You can view every choice as a compromise, but that word feels negative. But every choice is just that, a choice. There are pros and cons to everything, and I’ve often talked about how a decision—which phone to use, which computer, but also which life partner, which home, etc.—is never about one thing but is rather a matrix of choices.

But it’s more than that. This isn’t a list of equally important choices, but is rather a list in which some choices are weighted more heavily than others. In the end, we all have to make those decisions for ourselves, based on needs and wants, preferences, and even emotions. Nothing is clear-cut, everything is nuanced. And confronted by the same choices, we will all make different decisions. It’s astonishing we’ve lasted this long as a species.

Reason for my question is that I picked up my first EV today. It’s running Google Automotive, which is great. It has google maps taking my battery charge into account etc. Good reason to use that instead of Apple maps via Carplay. I have a subscription for Apple Music though. No prob was my first thought, they have Apple Music for Android… Oh, that doesn’t mean it’s available on Google Automative. Sigh. Personally I think ‘tech’ will always be at least 2 steps ahead of regulations.

Yeah, this is a good example of that matrix of choices thing. More generally, you do things for what feel like the right reasons, but there are also these outcomes that are negative. Taken individually, you might say that not having Apple Music in the car is a negative. But it’s not enough to cancel the purchase (hopefully). And there are workarounds in this case, I assume, like the ability to still play music from the phone over Bluetooth or whatever. That’s the definition of compromise if you were expecting a full-screen Apple Music experience (especially if you’d experienced that previously).

Life is such a struggle. And it’s worse when you know too much about anything and then just obsess about it. I don’t wish to get hit by a bus and lose my capacity to think clearly. But I do sometimes wonder if I’d be happier living in some kind of simple ignorance. The more you know …

It’s not you, it’s me. OK, it’s you

will asks:

Breaking up is hard to do. I have been thinking about your comments last week on being able to walk away from something if you need to and specifically this is around vendor bundling and lock-in. More specifically with Microsoft over the past several years expanding the services and offerings they provide for just a dollar more here and a dollar more there, always touting how having a single ecosystem to work from and in is overall better and a better value for the organization.

This is a basic decision-making thing: People naturally gravitate towards community, and in the tech world, that takes the form of ecosystems built around products we like. Back in the day, a Windows user might feel inclined to at least try other Microsoft products and services—Office, of course, but also various digital media offerings and so on—and these days we see this most clearly with Apple. People tend to love the iPhone, and it triggers a halo effect where they wake up years later with 8 Apple devices and $200+ in monthly payments to cover those and the Apple services they subscribed to.

I want to be super clear about this: That’s human nature, and it doesn’t literally mean that those people are dumb or whatever. And that’s especially true when the benefits of their choices are real. We can complain from the outside about lock-in, but all they care about is that everything works, and who cares about the lack of choice?

But the need to make the right decisions for ourselves should include thinking clearly, knowing what you’ve done, being open to change, and understanding what the alternatives are. And digital communities, Big Tech ecosystems, are not real communities. These companies do not care about you, they care that you keep paying them, and they very much want that number to keep going up. We have to be clear-headed about this, and understand our role in this equation: We pay these companies for services we have a right to expect getting what we paid for. And when they do not come through on their end of the bargain, we have a right to look around, assess the options, and move on if that’s what’s best for us. Thus, being all-in on Apple, Microsoft, Google, or whatever, is, in some ways, dumb … unless you know what you’re doing and know it’s what’s best for you. Really know. Not just believe.

But, in the past several months there seems to be some cracks in this idea and wanted to get your thoughts. A few examples are Microsoft being forced/requested to unbundle Teams, the recent high level Microsoft security breaches on various government accounts by foreign players, products that launch with half baked features that are only updated every other year, and various other smaller items that come up now and then that make me think having everything under a single vendor is not the best idea? At work this has come up recently with moving more away from Teams and into Zoom, for various reasons, as well as looking at moving to a different solution for security vs Defender. Now my examples are small overall, and maybe it is as often said when breaking up with someone you might say “It’s not you, its me”.

We’re in this precipice in time where antitrust regulation may finally force Big Tech to be more open and competitive. As enthusiasts, we often focus on very specific topics—”Can you believe that the DOJ wants Apple to take the Apple Watch cross-platform?”—when what we should be focused on is the actual damage done to everyone else involved by all the behavior, not just to competitors, but to consumers, developers, and partners. And that this set of behaviors needs to be stopped. That’s job one.

Closer to home, I look at this stuff, and I think, is there some version of the future in which I can have what the EU dictated that Microsoft does now with Windows? And if that happens, does that reverse the enshittification I always complain about? Does it solve the problem? “The problem” being the behavior broadly, not a stupid icon in the Start menu that people are still freaking out about for some reason. And the answer is yes. Yes, it does. Broadly. Maybe not every complaint.

And because that answer is yes, is there some future where I make specific changes? Would I roll back my move to Google Drive? Would I start using Microsoft Word and OneDrive again? Would I … use Microsoft Edge? OK, let’s not get stupid here. But the answer, generally, is yes. I should always be open to changing when it’s the right thing for me. Not the right thing for some company. For me.

But there’s also a bigger debate here. And this has been with us for a long time…

Personally, I have a mix of Apple and Microsoft services, mostly Apple due to the consumer nature of things, but even still I am not sure I would be any different at home. What are your thoughts on having everything under one brand/license/name, and the ease of connection of products, vs separate items that do better in their spaces vs a single vendor doing it all?

Leaving enshittification aside, this is something I’ve wondered about for years. There are good reasons to go in either direction. You cherry-pick the best products and services, regardless of maker and integration, and you cobbled together this system that somehow works for you. Or you go down some monolithic stack—maybe Microsoft in the enterprise, or Apple as a consumer—because the cross-product integration benefits are that good. (This is the “use Dropbox for storage, use Spotify for music” debate: These companies only focus on that one thing, and getting right is central to their business success.)

And the answer here, in the sense that there can even be an answer, is that we just keep doing whatever it is that’s best for us. And I think that even if we looked at Apple’s best customers, the all-in, starry-eyed unicorns who can’t see past Cupertino, even they are a bit more nuanced than we want to believe. They use Google Search, maybe, or Spotify. Very few people are that far up any company’s behind. (Some are, obviously, but that’s a great example of not thinking clearly, of putting a company’s best interests over your own.) The mix will vary by person. It will vary over time as things change.

If there’s a silver lining to enshittification, and I think there is, it’s that it’s put this issue front and center. It’s made people who don’t normally think about this stuff start to reassess their decisions. And it has inspired change. Once your eyes are open, and you see reality for what it is, you can take one of two paths. You can give up, I guess. Or you can try to improve matters. And in thinking more clearly about the unhealthy relationships we have with technology these days, more people are starting to make better decisions. So whatever regulations and laws do or don’t do, the issue has at least been raised. It’s become part of the public consciousness. The haze is lifting. Overall, this is a win. Whatever happens with laws, regulations, and the courts.