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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

For anyone looking at my HN history, apologies for being a broken record.

For the elderly variety of normal people this is a disaster: All the behind-the-scenes UX and setting flipping, the forced installs, and the performance dips that comes with all this means that low-confidence users feel like they're working on quicksand. The experience becomes unpredictable and scary and the iPad gets more and more use and the PC gathers dust.

I don't get why this all is worth the cost of squandering the good will MS has built up elsewhere.

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To be fair, the shift-to-iPad happens even when the desktop isn't awful.

My mother now only touches her Macbook Air if she needs to use her bookkeeping software, or transfer embroidery files to a USB drive to use with her sewing machine. She's much happier being able to do everything else on her iPad -- plus, she can take it with her more easily, and the battery life is ridiculous.

Perhaps for the next holiday, you can buy her an adapter so she can plug her USB drive into her iPad, and remove one more reason to device shift to her computer.

Alas, the embroidery world still ships things on CD-ROM.

> For the elderly variety of normal people this is a disaster

that's pretty wretchedly ageist. I know people up and down the age spectrum for whom this is an identical unmitigated disaster with the same effects. I also know a lot of greybeards who will just go in to some "registry" thing and rip out the cancer at its source.

Eh. It's not inaccurate.

For whatever reason, I've fallen into a kind of side job of helping various people with their computers (I have trouble saying no) and I have noticed that as people get older, their desire to deal with UI changes declines rather rapidly. Many operate purely on muscle memory rather than re-reading and re-parsing whatever new UI gets rolled out.

New things on the screen (or in menus) can induce a kind of paralytic panic and now with Windows 10, Microsoft feels rather free to just ... add stuff, wherever. My first Windows 10 tablet was baffling because stuff kept appearing when I know I didn't put it there. This prompted me to get ahold of and install Windows 10 LTSB. I could not be happier with the result. After a bit of wrestling, I was able to control when updates occurred (if at all) and the random UI changes vanished.

I, too, am getting older.

How much bunkum fluid versus crystallized intelligence is, I do not know, but this has seemed to be a trend I have picked up.

Okay yes. You can be in your 90s and opening up regedit or writing rust programs using async.

But for the majority of people at that stage of their life, who don't really care about the technology and haven't really followed it closely, it's a valid concern that random A/B testing and continuous version updates that change how you use programs are an alienating obstacle to using computers.

From the comments on this thread, a lot of people who do follow technology and who are used to being treating like this also hate it. It's not a stretch that, for less savvy users don't know what exactly it is they should hate will just assume it's computers that are at fault and choose a different tool.

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