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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to Microsoft for going out of their way to support and improve an important product after launch. Microsoft certainly has a history of doing this with their larger initiatives like XBox, but in the PC industry, this kind of post product improvement isn't so common.

When was the last time you saw Dell really iterate on a product post launch in a meaningful way.

To revive the PC market, Microsoft needs to do what Apple did for the last 15 or so years - stop treating PC like a commodity market where you ship beige boxes to customers without much care to differentiation or a delightful end user experience.

Surface is easily the most interesting PC I've seen in probably 10 years in Windows' ecosystem. I hope Microsoft sticks with it.

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Delightful end user experience you say? I happened to be visiting my father and to my surprise he pulled out a Surface 3. He turned it on and it ... spent 90 minutes rolling back some service pack because Dad had had the temerity to put the device to sleep when the service pack was being installed. Needless to say, all the end users in the family were delighted by this endless administrivia.

What happens if you power off an iPad (or any other device, for that matter) in the middle of a system update?

Atleast his mistake didn't brick it and Windows was smart enough to make sure that didn't happen.

Powering off is not the same as putting the device to sleep.

Windows offers a menu option to the user to sleep the device during the update. That is a design fault.

There is at least one good reason to do so. Imagine that you're installing an update and notice that your battery is so low it won't finish before it dies. Surely sleeping is better than allowing a loss of power?

In the worst case, the update is rolled back, which wastes time, but it's better than risking file system corruption due to loss of power.

Even if you don't get corruption, data loss is likely. For instance, you may have been browsing HN when power goes out. Will your browser's crash recovery carefully restore the comment you've been typing for the last 17 minutes? Maybe yes, but is every program you're running so careful?

This is not a design fault, at least in my opinion.

Other devices (e.g. iOS) will warn you if you try to start an update with low battery power, so you can't make this mistake in the first place. Besides, the device itself can spot a low battery (and act on it to ensure the system stays consistent), so why does there need to be a user option to put the device to sleep during the upgrade?

My guess is that Microsoft didn't think about this at all, leading to the rubbish user experience.

It doesn't just warn you, it prevents you from making that mistake.

It's certainly a design fault:

1. How can the user know how much battery power is required to complete the update? If they don't know, they can't utilize the option effectively.

2. If the system knows, why not let the system manage the sleep behavior? iOS won't let you start an update if there isn't enough power to complete it.

3. Why would there be sudden loss of power leading to data loss? Surely the system can determine when the battery is at a low level, and a) Warn the user a few minutes before they need to stop working, and b) Provide the applications with an orderly shutdown sequence. Guess what? iOS does both of these.

This is certainly a design fault. Your scenario doesn't change that. It merely offers that this feature is needed in order to work around other design faults.

> What happens if you power off an iPad (or any other device, for that matter) in the middle of a system update?

You don't. During the critical period, it won't let you. I mean, you can hold both power and home for several seconds to force it off, but if you're regularly powering off your iPad that way, something is seriously wrong...

Absolutely not true.

My iPad was unplugged by my kid during an update and the iPad shut off.

2 weeks later I had my iPad back from he Apple Store after it was bricked.

What I'm saying is that PICNIC will happen no matter what device your using. Calling out MS for rolling back after a user mistake just shows you aren't a fan of MS and will jump at any chance to knitpick them.

I am quite impressed with the surface pro 3. But because of their awful marketing I'm actually embarrassed to admit I own a surface pro 3. When those terrible commercials come on when I'm around friends I feel compelled to explain the merits of the device.

maybe that's the plan, forced word-of-mouth through the use of corny advertising!

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