From the Editor’s Desk: Reactive Change (Premium)

Earlier this summer, I wrote about a shift I made away from Sonos. Oddly, this change was unrelated to the easily avoidable problems the company brought on itself, problems I refer to collectively as Sonosgate, but the timing was interesting, if only for its coincidence. Indeed, there were so many coincidences to that event that it’s difficult to keep track. But whatever, it all came to a head when it did, what happened is what happened, and I went down a path that I couldn’t possibly have imagined just a few months earlier.

Me being me, this was accompanied by a lot of navel-gazing. I routinely engage in a practice I think of as triage, though that’s not really the right word. It’s more of a post-mortem, really. Something happens, or something ends. And I look back on it and think about how I might have handled it differently. Better.

A simple example: I try to travel as lightly as possible, and at the end of every trip, I unpack and separate the dirty clothes from those that went unused. That any clothes went unused is a defeat of a sort, since I carted those unused clothes to and from whatever destination, and didn’t need to. These events all go into a vague mental tally and the next time I have to pack a bag for a trip, those collective experiences inform what I bring that time.

This isn’t a skill I can perfect. It’s highly likely that I reached some apex of light packing efficiency many years ago, and that every trip I’ve taken since is just some percentage more or less efficient than I’ve ever been. That is, I’m not going to get any better at this now, not after 35+ years of traveling as an adult. Despite this, I silently chide myself for carrying those unused clothes across the country or around the globe after every trip.

For better or worse, I approach personal technology the same way. I’ve written a lot about my need to constantly reevaluate the products and services I use with the aim of being open to something different if it’s better. This is something I’ve always done, but this past year has been notable in that regard.

One year ago, I was among the first, if not the first, to point out that Microsoft had begun silently enabling OneDrive’s Folder Backup feature in Windows 11, even after I had explicitly denied its requests to accept this change multiple times. In my role as canary in the Windows coalmine, I identified the behavior, explained what little you could do to prevent it, and then made a major change to how I stored personal information in OneDrive when the behavior escalated. But the cancer spread into Microsoft Office, which also badgered me about using OneDrive, and by the end of 2023, I had done the unthinkable. 30 years into my career covering Microsoft, I stopped using OneDrive. And I stopped using Microsoft Word. I had had enough.

When we were in Berlin for IFA recently, my wife at one point referred to the trip as “reactive travel.” This was something that was foisted on us–Lenovo and Qualcomm both offered to pay for the trip, and I wouldn’t have spent the money myself otherwise–and we took advantage of it by paying for her to come along and then spending a few extra days there to sight-see. This phrase resonated with me, and I’ve begun thinking of some of the changes to the personal technology products and services I use as a “reactive.” That is, I didn’t set out to replace OneDrive and Word–or Sonos or whatever else. I did so in reaction to their bad behavior. And I didn’t just complain about behavior that I see as enshittification. I did something about it.

Change is funny that way, and the changes I’ve made this past year are good reminders of why I routinely reevaluate products and services–a behavior one might describe as “proactive”–in the first place. Educating oneself is always healthy, but sometimes life forces you down certain paths too. How one responds to that says a lot about you as a person, I think, but no one is going to get it right every time. Change is scary, and it’s often unwanted. It helps to know that you can emerge on the other side in better shape than you were before it happened. Not always. But it can happen.

This is as true with more profound events, like losing a job. Or as with what happened to me in December 2022, when George, the owner of the company I then worked for, approached me with a plan to spin off Thurrott.com in a way that he felt would make sense for me. At the time, this wasn’t what I wanted, it was scary, too soon, and an unknown. After going back and forth on this for a bit, we spent several months unwinding it all, switching things over, and getting settled in to this new world. But that unease is long gone. Today, I wouldn’t change a thing. Succeed or fail, I was always going to end up on my own, and though it happened sooner than I expected, once it did happen, I was happy it happened. And happier overall. And when a few of my closer friends lost jobs, I was able to use that perspective to help them get through the suddenly familiar dread and uncertainty they faced.

Speaking of perspective, nothing that happens in personal technology is that important. But in thinking about the churn of the past year, about my wife’s remark about reactive travel, and applying that to tech choices, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t some bigger force at play here. Because there’s more.

Consider Xbox.

In March 2023, my wife and I were prepping for a flight to Mexico City and having just about finished up, I found myself with an hour or so to kill. And so I did what I often did up until then: I fired up my Xbox and started playing Call of Duty. When it was time to head to the airport, I shut down the console, turned off the lights, and walked out the door with my (yes, lightly packed) bag. And then I proceeded to basically never turn it on again. Three months passed with no Xbox. Then six months, during which I barely played video games at all, and only on the PC, focusing mostly on Halo Infinite, a game so uneventful that I started jokingly describing it as a cure for a video game addiction.

In mid-2023, my PC-based choices for games were minimal. I’ve only infrequently owned what I’d called gaming PC-class PCs over the years, and the mainstream business-class laptops I typically get for review certainly don’t usually land in that bucket. But two things changed by the end of last year. Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard after 18 months of hard-fought regulatory battles, with the promise that my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which had gone mostly unused, would suddenly be quite interesting. And formerly pedestrian laptops were suddenly becoming powerful enough to play reasonable games at a reasonable level of quality.

For me, this started with Intel’s first generation Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” chips, which despite whatever issues I’ve pointed out include dramatically faster internal GPUs than previous generation Intel chips. But as those in the AMD camp already knew, AMD’s integrated Radeon graphics had delivered similar gains much earlier, and their current chips are even better. I belatedly wrote about this phenomenon in July 2024, by which point I had only turned on my Xbox once or twice, and then just to get it updated.

As is the case with Sonos, 2024 hasn’t been a great year for Xbox, and it hasn’t been a great year for the Xbox fans who were hoping to see something special come out of the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Here in September 2024, almost one year later, only three Activision titles–Diablo IV, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy–have come to Game Pass, and we know of only one more title, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, that will arrive by the acquisition’s one-year anniversary.

That’s a pathetic showing for an entire year. But it’s even worse than that. All that inactivity occurred during the worst year on record for Xbox from a perception perspective, with spiraling console sales, massive continual layoffs, studio closures, and even price hikes on the Game Pass services that never panned out to be the no-brainer many had anticipated. Xbox Game Pass for console is gone, replaced by a Game Pass Standard offering that lacks day one access to new titles, especially the big franchise launches from Activision. And my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription went up in price from $16.99 per month to $19.99 per month.

Had I been paying month-to-month–fortunately, I was not–I would have paid about $210 over the past year for a service I barely used. And regardless of what I did pay, this year passed with the unrealized expectation that any day now I’d be flooded with the Activision Blizzard titles that never arrived. I’m paid out to whatever date now, but if I could have paused this service at any time this past year, I would have. When my term expires, I’m not sure what I’ll do. The decision will be based largely on what happens with those Activision games, I guess.

But here’s the thing. When I put down that Xbox controller to head to Mexico City over 18 months ago, I didn’t know that I’d never play Call of Duty again. I didn’t know whether Microsoft would successfully acquire Activision Blizzard. Or that, when it did, they would bring no games I wanted to play to the service I’m already paying for and then raise the price of that service anyway. I didn’t know that pedestrian PC laptops would suddenly become decent video game machines, even more so with the new AMD Zen 5 and Intel Lunar Lake generation of chips. I didn’t know that these things would all happen in concert and that me, a console gamer since the Xbox 360 appeared in late 2005, would suddenly find himself looking to the PC again for this activity. Almost 20 years later, I’m back on the PC. I could never have predicted this.

Here’s what I do know. I’m not going back. It doesn’t matter what happens with Xbox as a console now: The PCs I routinely use now and in the future will work just fine for video games. That problem is solved. And the console, which I once prized for its perfect combination of simplicity and quality, no longer has a place in my life. Eliminating something like that is freeing, in a way. There’s a certainty to it.

Here’s what else I know. This was all reactive and coincidental, the result of months of activity, none planned on my part, all leading to the same unavoidable conclusion. As with my decision to start back-stepping out of the Sonos ecosystem, I didn’t see it coming, and if you had asked me months earlier, I would have told you I did not want such a thing. The changes I did make didn’t happen because of the problems of this past year–Sonosgate and all the crap that’s made Xbox so much less viable and interesting–they weren’t the triggers. But did escalate them.

Sometimes you get swept up by a wave and end up randomly in some other place. But sometimes you’re swimming in a certain direction and a wave just pushes you to that destination more quickly, and you can try to fight it or just go with the flow. That’s what’s happening to me with Sonos and with Xbox, I think. I had had this pestering feeling in my head, vague ideas about fixing things, and I may have gotten there on my own. But outside forces I never saw coming made it happen more quickly.

I don’t have an end-game for Sonos. Apple is the right solution for me now with television because we use Apple TV. I would prefer something more platform-agnostic for music, but my HomePod experiences have been so positive so far that I’m open to whatever. I would like to experience more music in Dolby Atmos at least, and for now, Apple is the only mainstream offering for that. I don’t know. I just know that walking away from Sonos, and being open about future choices, is the right path. And that I am content with that.

For games, I have a similar certainty that a video game console is not my future. I have big libraries of PC games to play through in Steam, Epic Games, GOG, and Xbox, and that’s not so horrible. I have my eye on mobile. The future is fluid here, too, in other words. And I am content with that as well.

There will be more of this, more changes.

More reacting.

I opened Hulu on the Apple TV the other night and was confronted by a full-screen notification that the price of my “Hulu (No Ads)” subscription, already expensive at $17.99 per month, is going up to $18.99 per month in October. That’s not a huge increase–roughly 5.25 percent–but it’s just part of a broader, unending enshittification of the subscription services we all rely on perhaps a little too much. And just one of dozens of price hikes we’ve all weathered this year. I’m tired of sending money to Disney and these other greedy companies. Maybe it’s time to get started on my “one video service per month” plan.

I’m also trying to tamp down a building outrage about the ongoing enshittification of The New York Times, one of two mainstream news publications I now read every morning. The Times is expensive enough as it is, $20 every four weeks–so it can charge you an addition $40 per year, presumably–but every time I sign in to the site with a new PC or web browser, it upsells me to something called “All Access” via a full-page advertisement before letting me in. It displays ads everywhere despite me paying for the service. It purchased The Wirecutter, which I love, but now I have to pay another $40 per year for that. And it bought The Athletic, by all accounts a fine publication. But now I can’t read the f#$ing sports without paying, either: If I want to read that content, I have to subscribe to The Athletic, too, for $8 per month. And now the base subscription price of the Times is going up as well, to $23 per month.

I don’t have the mental acuity to do all that math. I just know that I’ve f$%ing had it.

And that I am going to react in kind.