Windows 7 updates will end in January of 2020. So that's plenty of time. App developers always target the operating systems that are used, and Windows 7 WILL be used for a long time on many PCs simply because of how much it is popular in the enterprise.
I have had enough experience with Windows 10 machines to find out that Windows 10 is probably the most fragile and buggy OS since Windows 95. For example, I have seen machines enter into some kind of endless CPU eating loops. The task manager only shows that "system host process" uses 30% CPU, but for some reason does not tell you which specific Windows process is doing it. Forums are filled with people complaining about it, and there seems like a dozen of solutions, and you have to try each one of them. For example, one time clearing the event log ended it, but other times nothing helped.
Another serious problem with Windows 10 is that it has this ability to corrupt its own update system, and now it gets stuck half way through trying to install a month old update, eating CPU and all that. This seems like a very common problem, and strangely Microsoft does not seem to have a solution for this besides offering a bunch of canned answers along the line "reset the auto update components, reboot, reinstall all apps, reinstall the OS", none of which seem to work. I have seen one PC run into exactly this problem right after a clean reinstall.
And then I realized that I have spent so many hours of my time troubleshooting all those Windows 10 issues, but nothing in this "free" upgrade really made it worth it, specially when this OS constantly installs new software at the moment you don't want it to, and even takes the liberty to reboot your PC, even when there is a PC user logged in and an application is running.
And so I just backed up my files and put Windows 7 back on my desktop. It was a bit of pain as I had to hunt for the most basic hardware drivers, like optical drive or 802.11ac card, but after that it was a relief.
I believe someone did research on this when win10 just came out, and it turned out the amount of distinct IP addresses and ip blocks involved is incredible, and they may change in future.
because they no longer posses the imagination to strike out in a truly new direction
Honestly, Microsoft run out of imagination and new ideas some time in the mid-1990s. All of their OSes starting with 2000 were simply an iteration the Windows 95 and NT GUI concept. The introduction of all new Microsoft products has always been leveraged and tied to their desktop dominance.
This. I went for the free Windows 10 upgrade on all five PCs in the household, and now I have downgraded one machine to Windows 7 with a clean install. Besides offering effectively no new features to the desktop users, Windows 10 is also surprisingly fragile. The updater corruption is a serious problem, for which Microsoft has no real solution besides some canned answers that don't work.
Sounds like someone hasn't don't much research about the free Windows 10 upgrade. If you went for the free Windows 10 upgrade, then your PC's license and activation are registered on Microsoft servers. You can download media and reinstall Windows 10 any time you like.
I do not get all the hostility that Windows 7 downgraders get.
Windows 7 may be +7 years old, but it's still the best desktop OS Microsoft really made. It went downhill with Windows 8, and everything that followed.
I can confirm your claim. Recently, I have helped a friend to install Windows 10 on a PC that originally shipped with Windows Vista and Intel Core Duo. You can imagine how old that is. This PC running Windows 10 is not only adequate for performing office work tasks, but it actually does pretty much every task much faster compared to when it had Windows Vista.
I am sorry, but you don't need to buy a new smartphone every year or every other year, or even three years.
You see, people stopped replacing PCs every year because both hardware and software have already reached a level of maturity, and further improvements to the OS are not much needed any more.
I think the smartphones are also been reaching this kind of a plateau for a while. For example, using the iPhone 4S I got only something like four years ago is a miserable experience today, it's just too slow, but the smartphone hardware has improved so much in the recent time that by now I think really _need_ to replace my smartphone ONLY when it breaks physically, which is not inconceivable for any mobile device. For example, the LG/Google Nexus 5 which was released in late 2013 and sold for the budget price of well under 400USD is still perfectly adequate smartphone today, and the SoC is actually still better than the one on many entry level or mid-range smartphones.
To contrast with the PC hardware, the Intel CPUs now improve only by 10-15% between the major generations, which is not a whole lot. On the other hand, the smartphone SoCs can continue improving at a much faster pace, but I think this process is now slowing down too, and will slow down even more.
I disagree. Windows 10 reduced new PC sales because a whole lot of people who were sick of Windows 8 tablet interface and those who wanted the latest and greatest Microsoft OS, got it with a free upgrade instead of buying a new PC with windows 10 pre-installed.
In the past, PC sales were also driven by the new Windows releases because of the increasing hardware requirements. But in the recent times we have observed the phenomenon, where Windows 10 is leaner and faster than Windows 8, and Windows 8 is leaner and faster than Windows 7, and Windows 7 is leaner and faster than Vista. Windows 10 is the kind of OS that was designed to make sure it can run on a tablet with a humble CPU with no cooling fan and only 2GB of RAM. As a result, I have observed that Windows 10 can run fine on an ancient 8 year old PC that originally shipped with Vista just fine, and in fact a lot better than Vista.
Windows 10 contributed to the slump BECAUSE it was a free upgrade. Regardless of all the complaints about Windows 10, a whole lot of users see it as an improvement over Windows 8 with it's bizzare tablet user interface. So most people who were sick of Windows 8 preferred a free upgrade, which was cheaper than buying a new PC.
We can safely lump those 821 and 820 together. 821 is using the same "Kryo" compute cores and the same Adreno GPU as 820, clocked slightly higher. Nothing revolutionary there AT ALL.
Of course, we can't lump all the 800s together. However, the situation is quite similar to say the relationship between Snapdragon 800 and 801. The same cores, core count, and GPU. The 800 came out first, and then 801 came out with a slightly higher clocked CPU and GPU. I had phones based on 800 and 801, and there was practically no difference there.
With such a long list of deal-breaking requirements, I don't think you will ever buy a new smartphone. Meanwhile the prices for 32GB Nexus 5X have dropped to well below 300USD since this summer, and I suspect the 6P will also drop down by the holidays.
Google's arrogance is incredible. They are the last to release their 2016 smartphone based on SD820/821, and a very long while after the releases of spec-by-spec pretty similar products from Samsung, LG, HTC, Oneplus, etc. They advertise this as something new and revolutionary and demand a premium price.
To be honest, you're exaggerating the importance of the performance in the smartphones. A three year old Nexus 5 has enough power to provide smooth web browsing, video playback, and so on. I think the only demographic that really cares about the SoC power is the mobile gamers.
Given the same price, I personally will still choose Google phone over LG, Samsung, etc (and don't get me started on the iPhone). Why? Google phones come with a relatively lean software setup. A typical Nexus phone had something like 50-60 apps preinstalled. A typical LG, Samsung, etc has well over one hundred. The Google phones are also free from carrier junk, carrier lock-in, or limited bands. For these reason, I don't think I will ever buy a carrier branded smartphone.
But yes, the pricing kind of sucks. We're going to see more people now buying the likes of Oneplus Three or the 2015 Nexus smartphones.
On the other hand, I do not get it why Google has decided to replace its successful Nexus brand name with Pixel. Google Nexus devices are almost like an underground brand, but the level of satisfaction among the consumers and developers who hold the Nexus devices is relatively high, while the "Pixel" name is so far mostly associated with a failed tablet "Pixel C".
Oneplus X was a flawed device because it did not support AT&T's LTE band 17, and I believe the band 12 which was used by some other carrier. You could still use the Oneplus X with any major carrier, but the deletion of those crucial low-frequency bands meant you will have less than optimal LTE signal in many areas. Otherwise Oneplus X was great.
Apple's marketing always needed to have something to hype the superiority of their device. SoC is a good target for that. I mean, just look at how they always hyped the superiority of their SoCs for the last three years, while keeping absolutely quiet about the fact that the iphones came with the absolute minimum of usable RAM. It's still shocking to me how fast those 1GB iPhone 6 devices will become obsolete.
troublesome connector when dealing with phone cases
Then stop buying those troublesome cases.
When using a $100 extended battery case, such things become serious problems
This issue concerns an insignificant portion of smartphone users. Just because they can't plug the 3.5 mm plug with the charging case does not mean that the connector had to be deleted.
Basically, none of the arguments I have heard before, except those about space savings justified actually deleting the headphone connector. In iPhone 6S which had it, you could still use BT, digital or whatever other headphones you want.
To be honest, I don't get what you're complaining about. That a four year old tablet is no longer fast enough? Please. You gotta realize that the mobile technology in 2012 was nowhere near being as mature as the PC technology. A 2012 PC notebook is usually a perfectly usable device today. A 2012 smartphone or a tablet.. that's a big question mark.
The 2013-2014 technology was a lot more mature by todays standards. A Nexus 5 from the late 2013 is still a perfectly usable device today, and still has a better SoC than most entry and mid-level devices.
The fact that some vendors are having "backdoor sales" blowouts of the less than one year old Nexus 5X smartphones (often though ebay) simply proves that Nexus 5X was ridiculously overprices. Just consider these two specs and the price: 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, almost 400USD MSRP. Shocking. Granted, I will still buy a google Nexus device over a carrier branded/locked garbage like LG or Samsung phones, but such pricing is not sustainable considering the presence of the Chinese startups like Onepus.
That's why I am not worried much about what google does. I can always fall back to Oneplus Three, Honor 8 or whatever else replaces those.
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Windows 7 updates will end in January of 2020. So that's plenty of time. App developers always target the operating systems that are used, and Windows 7 WILL be used for a long time on many PCs simply because of how much it is popular in the enterprise.
I have had enough experience with Windows 10 machines to find out that Windows 10 is probably the most fragile and buggy OS since Windows 95. For example, I have seen machines enter into some kind of endless CPU eating loops. The task manager only shows that "system host process" uses 30% CPU, but for some reason does not tell you which specific Windows process is doing it. Forums are filled with people complaining about it, and there seems like a dozen of solutions, and you have to try each one of them. For example, one time clearing the event log ended it, but other times nothing helped.
Another serious problem with Windows 10 is that it has this ability to corrupt its own update system, and now it gets stuck half way through trying to install a month old update, eating CPU and all that. This seems like a very common problem, and strangely Microsoft does not seem to have a solution for this besides offering a bunch of canned answers along the line "reset the auto update components, reboot, reinstall all apps, reinstall the OS", none of which seem to work. I have seen one PC run into exactly this problem right after a clean reinstall.
And then I realized that I have spent so many hours of my time troubleshooting all those Windows 10 issues, but nothing in this "free" upgrade really made it worth it, specially when this OS constantly installs new software at the moment you don't want it to, and even takes the liberty to reboot your PC, even when there is a PC user logged in and an application is running.
And so I just backed up my files and put Windows 7 back on my desktop. It was a bit of pain as I had to hunt for the most basic hardware drivers, like optical drive or 802.11ac card, but after that it was a relief.
I believe someone did research on this when win10 just came out, and it turned out the amount of distinct IP addresses and ip blocks involved is incredible, and they may change in future.
because they no longer posses the imagination to strike out in a truly new direction
Honestly, Microsoft run out of imagination and new ideas some time in the mid-1990s. All of their OSes starting with 2000 were simply an iteration the Windows 95 and NT GUI concept. The introduction of all new Microsoft products has always been leveraged and tied to their desktop dominance.
This. I went for the free Windows 10 upgrade on all five PCs in the household, and now I have downgraded one machine to Windows 7 with a clean install. Besides offering effectively no new features to the desktop users, Windows 10 is also surprisingly fragile. The updater corruption is a serious problem, for which Microsoft has no real solution besides some canned answers that don't work.
Sounds like someone hasn't don't much research about the free Windows 10 upgrade. If you went for the free Windows 10 upgrade, then your PC's license and activation are registered on Microsoft servers. You can download media and reinstall Windows 10 any time you like.
Indeed, the PC technology hit its peak many years ago, and smartphones are getting there too.
I do not get all the hostility that Windows 7 downgraders get.
Windows 7 may be +7 years old, but it's still the best desktop OS Microsoft really made. It went downhill with Windows 8, and everything that followed.
I can confirm your claim. Recently, I have helped a friend to install Windows 10 on a PC that originally shipped with Windows Vista and Intel Core Duo. You can imagine how old that is. This PC running Windows 10 is not only adequate for performing office work tasks, but it actually does pretty much every task much faster compared to when it had Windows Vista.
I am sorry, but you don't need to buy a new smartphone every year or every other year, or even three years.
You see, people stopped replacing PCs every year because both hardware and software have already reached a level of maturity, and further improvements to the OS are not much needed any more.
I think the smartphones are also been reaching this kind of a plateau for a while. For example, using the iPhone 4S I got only something like four years ago is a miserable experience today, it's just too slow, but the smartphone hardware has improved so much in the recent time that by now I think really _need_ to replace my smartphone ONLY when it breaks physically, which is not inconceivable for any mobile device. For example, the LG/Google Nexus 5 which was released in late 2013 and sold for the budget price of well under 400USD is still perfectly adequate smartphone today, and the SoC is actually still better than the one on many entry level or mid-range smartphones.
To contrast with the PC hardware, the Intel CPUs now improve only by 10-15% between the major generations, which is not a whole lot. On the other hand, the smartphone SoCs can continue improving at a much faster pace, but I think this process is now slowing down too, and will slow down even more.
I disagree. Windows 10 reduced new PC sales because a whole lot of people who were sick of Windows 8 tablet interface and those who wanted the latest and greatest Microsoft OS, got it with a free upgrade instead of buying a new PC with windows 10 pre-installed.
In the past, PC sales were also driven by the new Windows releases because of the increasing hardware requirements. But in the recent times we have observed the phenomenon, where Windows 10 is leaner and faster than Windows 8, and Windows 8 is leaner and faster than Windows 7, and Windows 7 is leaner and faster than Vista. Windows 10 is the kind of OS that was designed to make sure it can run on a tablet with a humble CPU with no cooling fan and only 2GB of RAM. As a result, I have observed that Windows 10 can run fine on an ancient 8 year old PC that originally shipped with Vista just fine, and in fact a lot better than Vista.
Windows 10 contributed to the slump BECAUSE it was a free upgrade. Regardless of all the complaints about Windows 10, a whole lot of users see it as an improvement over Windows 8 with it's bizzare tablet user interface. So most people who were sick of Windows 8 preferred a free upgrade, which was cheaper than buying a new PC.
We can safely lump those 821 and 820 together. 821 is using the same "Kryo" compute cores and the same Adreno GPU as 820, clocked slightly higher. Nothing revolutionary there AT ALL.
Of course, we can't lump all the 800s together. However, the situation is quite similar to say the relationship between Snapdragon 800 and 801. The same cores, core count, and GPU. The 800 came out first, and then 801 came out with a slightly higher clocked CPU and GPU. I had phones based on 800 and 801, and there was practically no difference there.
With such a long list of deal-breaking requirements, I don't think you will ever buy a new smartphone. Meanwhile the prices for 32GB Nexus 5X have dropped to well below 300USD since this summer, and I suspect the 6P will also drop down by the holidays.
Google's arrogance is incredible. They are the last to release their 2016 smartphone based on SD820/821, and a very long while after the releases of spec-by-spec pretty similar products from Samsung, LG, HTC, Oneplus, etc. They advertise this as something new and revolutionary and demand a premium price.
To be honest, you're exaggerating the importance of the performance in the smartphones. A three year old Nexus 5 has enough power to provide smooth web browsing, video playback, and so on. I think the only demographic that really cares about the SoC power is the mobile gamers.
Given the same price, I personally will still choose Google phone over LG, Samsung, etc (and don't get me started on the iPhone). Why? Google phones come with a relatively lean software setup. A typical Nexus phone had something like 50-60 apps preinstalled. A typical LG, Samsung, etc has well over one hundred. The Google phones are also free from carrier junk, carrier lock-in, or limited bands. For these reason, I don't think I will ever buy a carrier branded smartphone.
But yes, the pricing kind of sucks. We're going to see more people now buying the likes of Oneplus Three or the 2015 Nexus smartphones.
On the other hand, I do not get it why Google has decided to replace its successful Nexus brand name with Pixel. Google Nexus devices are almost like an underground brand, but the level of satisfaction among the consumers and developers who hold the Nexus devices is relatively high, while the "Pixel" name is so far mostly associated with a failed tablet "Pixel C".
Oneplus X was a flawed device because it did not support AT&T's LTE band 17, and I believe the band 12 which was used by some other carrier. You could still use the Oneplus X with any major carrier, but the deletion of those crucial low-frequency bands meant you will have less than optimal LTE signal in many areas. Otherwise Oneplus X was great.
Apple's marketing always needed to have something to hype the superiority of their device. SoC is a good target for that. I mean, just look at how they always hyped the superiority of their SoCs for the last three years, while keeping absolutely quiet about the fact that the iphones came with the absolute minimum of usable RAM. It's still shocking to me how fast those 1GB iPhone 6 devices will become obsolete.
troublesome connector when dealing with phone cases
Then stop buying those troublesome cases.
When using a $100 extended battery case, such things become serious problems
This issue concerns an insignificant portion of smartphone users. Just because they can't plug the 3.5 mm plug with the charging case does not mean that the connector had to be deleted.
Basically, none of the arguments I have heard before, except those about space savings justified actually deleting the headphone connector. In iPhone 6S which had it, you could still use BT, digital or whatever other headphones you want.
To be honest, I don't get what you're complaining about. That a four year old tablet is no longer fast enough? Please. You gotta realize that the mobile technology in 2012 was nowhere near being as mature as the PC technology. A 2012 PC notebook is usually a perfectly usable device today. A 2012 smartphone or a tablet.. that's a big question mark.
The 2013-2014 technology was a lot more mature by todays standards. A Nexus 5 from the late 2013 is still a perfectly usable device today, and still has a better SoC than most entry and mid-level devices.
where can I find a DEC Alpha workstation these days?
What features? Everything is great. If you mean sd card slot, most people can do just fine with 64GB it already has.
The Oneplus brand smartphones come with a very basic Android ROM, and they're actually a better value than Google Nexus.
The fact that some vendors are having "backdoor sales" blowouts of the less than one year old Nexus 5X smartphones (often though ebay) simply proves that Nexus 5X was ridiculously overprices. Just consider these two specs and the price: 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, almost 400USD MSRP. Shocking. Granted, I will still buy a google Nexus device over a carrier branded/locked garbage like LG or Samsung phones, but such pricing is not sustainable considering the presence of the Chinese startups like Onepus.
That's why I am not worried much about what google does. I can always fall back to Oneplus Three, Honor 8 or whatever else replaces those.