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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • Thanks for providing insights and inviting a more nuanced discussion. I find it extremely frustrating that in communities like Lemmy it’s risky to write comments like this because people assume you’re “taking sides.”

    The entire point of the community should be to have discourse about a topic and go into depth, yet most comments and indeed entire threads are just “Nvidia bad!” with more words.

    Obligatory disclaimer that I, too, don’t necessarily side with Nvidia.






  • Push notifications though GMS don’t use the device ID; they use a generated GCM registration ID that occasionally rotates. Who knows what Google uses internally to associate GCM reg IDs to users, but to overly state that it uses device IDs is simply not correct.

    I’m not suggesting push notifications are inherently secure because it’s impossible to make that determination from the outside. But their assessment is incorrect and the same privacy concerns apply to Apple.



  • The topic is windows losing customers.

    To a degree yes (ignoring the fact that assumption proved to be incorrect, but who comes here for facts), however the comments mostly don’t focus on that topic; much of the discussion here is about how evil Microsoft is and malicious Windows is as a product. The individual I replied to before you was the one who immediately sidestepped into a debate about laws that should restrict Microsoft’s ability to operate as a company.

    People here are outliers in ideas and passion.

    Ha, this genuinely made me laugh out loud! An amusingly and refreshingly optimistic position! I’d have chosen the words “circlejerk of pessimisme, hate and nativity” but it’s certainly accurate to call the community exceptionally passionate among each other.



  • I wonder if consumers would choose to pay more to opt out of this. Surely corporations have done their research, because none of them have chosen to offer a buy-out option. To be perfectly frank, I wouldn’t pay more for a laptop for a guarantee that I’m not prompted for any up-sells, and it’d only make the consumer offerings more confusing if such an option existed.

    All these companies are forcing themselves into the corner of offering the one-time fee to be as low as possible, preferably free, and find other revue channels after the purchase. I hold them all equally guilty of this: why pay $100 for Windows when there’s no such fee for a Chromebook or MacBook? Microsoft is forced by competition to reduce the fee and recoup it elsewhere, and they’re in my opinion not even the worst among those examples.

    It’s odd that Lemmy directs its anger at an individual company, while they’re all guilty of the same practices, instead of towards their government representatives who are actually able to take action against it.



  • You’re right that Edge routinely attempts to make its return—that’s annoying alright. Microsoft is skirting a fine line here since they were found guilty of antitrust practices for this very thing. (Tangentially, I wonder if iPhone users have the same complaints about Safari.) In Europe, at least, those updates prompt you whether to make the switch, and the user remains in control. It’s been many years since Microsoft changed my defaults.

    You’re also absolutely right about the attempted upsells for Office 365 or OneDrive or whatever. I agree they’re ads and that they’re annoying, but not more so than how my MacBook constantly nags me about iCloud or how iPhone consumes it with app data, or how Google leverages its surfaces for Photos, Drive, Workspace and Gemini upsells.

    In the end all these companies arrive at the same challenge: converting a one-time purchase into regular payments through subscription models. I had honestly forgotten about these prompts until you reminded me of them, and so long as they’re irregular and easy to ignore, I feel like Microsoft isn’t doing anything outright awful.

    I often think communities like Lemmy choose to disproportionately hate on things. In this case it’s Windows, which I really don’t think is warranted.