So. Apple releases the Macbook NEO less than two weeks ago and suddenly I have a email in from Microsoft through the Windows Insider program that’s talking about the company commitment to Windows quailty.
There has been a lot of chatter about the quality of Windows taking a shit over the last few years. So let’s see what they are saying in the message that was just sent out.
Ok.
So that’s not a huge thing for me but I know that a lot of people were pissed off when you pulled that functionality in Windows 11 with no really good explanation why that needed to happen. This isn’t really a huge issue for me, but let’s see what else is in here.
Ohh… And. Here. We. Go.
This is one of the key reasons that I loaded up a copy of Windows 11 LTSC on my computer the last time that I had to do a reload of the OS on my desktop system. To be clear, what I need the operating system on my computer to do is provide me with a entry point to run applications and manage files. I absolutely do not need the operating system for my computer to include out of the box a pile of LLM based bullshit that just consumes system resources.
I get that Microsoft wants to add AI features into the system, and I can understand that people might want to have them but let’s do this – make them a optional download that you don’t have to install instead of being baked in and non-removable by default.
And while we are at it how about we take Windows Recall and stop building spyware and tracking tools into the freaking operating system. The last thing that I want is the operating system tracking everything that I’m doing and providing a catalog for people to dig into my activity on the device upon request.
Let’s see what Microsoft’s definition of “Craft” and “Focus” turn out to be.
Ok, I’m ok with you streamlining this, and skipping updates during setup might be helpful in some cases, but what about just making it so that the Windows updates don’t completely screw over the operating system when you load them?
Given that you just posted news a few months ago that you would be pre-loading file explorer in the background to try to improve the performance of the thing I’m sure hoping that you are going to do something other than trying to play shell games with when things are happening.
From what I’ve read online Windows Explorer switched to using different programming models between Windows 11 and Windows 10 and that’s where a huge chunk of the slowdown came from, and if that’s the case I would really like to know why they bothered with that change. File explorer just needs to let me get at my files. I don’t need any entry points for AI crap, I don’t need it to be pre-rendering crap or changing how folders are displayed.
Frankly, all those widgets and feeds have been shut off in my install of Windows. So as long as I can continue that process I don’t really give a crap about this one.
Alright, so more lip service on something that we can’t really quantify.
And now we get into some of the actual things they will be doing;
Ok so we are going to de-bloat the operating system to try to speed things up, I’m ok with that, but you really don’t have a choice here. Memory pricing has gone from around 100$ for a 32gb kit of DDR4 to like 350$ for the same kit in the space of less than a year. DDR5 is just as bad, if not worse, and the cost of storage is doing the same. 1tb NVME SSD’s are about double what I was paying for them last year, and even magnetic hard disk drives are climbing in price – when you can find stock on them.
A lot of people, myself included, are looking at the price of memory, disks, and even gpu’s and are going to be deciding to postpone hardware upgrades. My desktop machine is a little long in the tooth right now, but it’s still running everything that I want it to as well as I need it to and unless that really changes I don’t think that I’ll be building out a new system any time soon. Even my laptop is a little older now, but a M3 Pro MacBook is still more performant than I need.
Even if I was having problems with performance I would probably be looking a trying a copy of Linux on my system rather than going and just grabbing another piece of hardware. Given all the BS stuff that’s crept into the OS over the years I have the feeling that a linux install might perform better than what I’m seeing on the Windows side of things.
Frankly I don’t care what you call the underlaying frameworks. Just make the dammed thing work properly and make the thing responsive enough that I’m not sitting staring at things waiting for stuff to load out.
Frankly rolling back to Windows 10 would probably fix most of the issues that I have. But sure, let’s see what you can do to make the file explorer more livable.
Frankly if I want Linux, I’ll logon to the system(s) that I have running that operating system. I have used WSL in the past but honestly I have always found it to be kind of an odd duck. Any time that I found that I needed to do something that I could do quickly in a Linux terminal on a Windows machine it’s generally taken less time to just re-do whatever I was doing using PowerShell or a plain batch file than to turn on WSL.
I’m sure that there are folks out there that do make use of this thing but I’m not really one of them so big meh from me on this one.
Ok this one is going to be fun, let’s see what you have in mind.
Don’t care. You barely listen to what people are saying we want so this doesn’t really matter to me. Start doing things that prove you give a crap about what’s going on and let’s see where this goes.
Oh please, let’s get this stuff done. I have had nothing but issues with all my windows laptops for years when I’m pulling them on and off docking stations. These power issues are things that I have NEVER had with any of the macOS devices that I’ve used.
And yes please start holding your hardware partners to a standard where their drivers work better. There’s been piles of examples where NVidia’s drivers have shit the bed in the last few years, and I remember having all sorts of issues with the AMD GPU drivers when I was running the RX580 – I don’t think that I ever let that computer sleep while the GPU was installed. If I did the dammed thing would never come out of a sleep state.
Granted you have a harder fight here than Apple does. Apple controls all the hardware that’s going into their devices out of the box, where you don’t have that level of control outside of the Surface devices. I suppose that you are getting closer with the ARM based laptops, but most of those are still being built by other OEM’s that you don’t have the ability to completely dictate terms to, but come on it’s been years of this and frankly it’s one of the major things that drove me to picking up a MacBook for my personal laptop last time around.
Ok, so Windows Updates aren’t a thing that bothers me that much, but most of the time don’t you only push updates out at the start of each month?
I don’t have much of a problem with the Windows Updates needing to be installed and I don’t find the general process to be that invasive for the most part. However I do remember the days of Windows XP where people would go years or longer between running updates and the resulting mess that type of approach would cause.
Don’t really care. Not a huge fan of biometrics being stored on my device given what you have been doing with Windows Recall. That’s not information that I’m sure I want to trust you with right yet.
Again, don’t much care. Just pick something and stop screwing around with the dammed layout. All that I need the start menu to do is point me to where to load a application and access settings.
Ok that might be interesting. Most of the time I wind up leaving the computer with the notifications just turned off because they are at a point where they are really quite distracting.
Search has been crap for years, anything that you do would probably be helpful here but personally I’m generally aware of where things live on my computer well enough that I don’t frequently have a lot of use for searching for random crap on the machine.
If you want to have a look at the full message that they put up you can see the thing here.
It’s a lot of the right type of noise but you know that this is being done now because Apple has suddenly dropped the entry point for someone to jump into their ecosystem considerably. And say what you will about Apple their user ecosystem and user experience across their devices is solid. The limiting factor to getting into there has always been the “Mac Tax”. You can argue the value of the macOS hardware compared to Windows devices at the same price point but the simple fact is that your point of entry into a macOS device has always been higher than that of a Windows one. But now I’m not aware of many, if any, Windows devices at the price point of the MacBook Neo that have the same build quality and user experience that you would get from the Neo.
Actions speak louder than words, so we will see what comes up over the next couple of feature releases. If it’s all more AI packed slop, well it might be time to start looking at moving over to Linux for my gaming machine.