Last week I allowed it to "upgrade" to Win 11 22H2. Part of the upgrade involved silently resetting a heap of my default apps. When the upgrade was done, Firefox was no longer my default browser, it was changed to Edge. Also, the default apps for PDF, JPG, PNG, TXT, MKV, and probably others that I haven't yet discovered, were set to their MS equivalent apps. Microsoft, this was not a nice thing to do to a user.
I've never had that happen to me in 20+ years of using and updating Windows. I suspected it's an urban legend but when a friend told me they experienced it with a feature update in Windows 11 I inquired further: It turns out during the first startup after a feature update in Windows 11 (and 10) they sometimes show a bunch of new prompts, one of which is a very vague text with a big (default) "Recommended Settings" an…
I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).
Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.
That’s it. This is a boring story.
There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.
There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.
I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.