Barry Collins warns that you always end up paying, even for “free” OS upgrades
It wasn’t so long ago that Apple and Microsoft routinely got away with charging for upgrades to their operating systems. Now, the very idea of paying to update Windows or Mac OS X seems as ludicrous as making Wayne Rooney the poet laureate.
We’re all suckers for a freebie. As soon as an alert pops up informing us that there’s a new version of an OS for our phones, tablets or computers, we eagerly tap the ‘Update’ button... and then spend the next eight hours regretting it while swearing at slowmoving progress bars.
Every OS update makes our devices incrementally slower. My HTC One smartphone ran like a spritely young gazelle when I first brought it home from the shop 18 months ago. Now, after two major upgrades to Android and Lord knows how many different app updates, it runs like a gazelle after an encounter with a Minnesota dentist. I’ve honestly missed calls altogether because my phone is now so unresponsive it sometimes takes a couple of seconds to even register a tap on the Answer button. And this was one of the most powerful smartphones (a considerable sum of) money could buy when I first got it.
It’s the same with my iPad 2. A once perfectly alert piece of hardware has been reduced to a cumbersome crawl by successive updates to iOS, each of which has taken a little bit more out of the tablet’s performance. It will allegedly work with iOS 9 which is due out in a couple of months, but I’m loathe to update it, in case this is the straw that snaps the camel’s spine.
Now, Microsoft is trying to tempt PC users with the “free” upgrade to Windows 10 – the first time it’s ever made a whole new version of Windows a free upgrade, and most probably the last, considering that Microsoft now plans to issue rolling updates to Windows 10 instead of releasing major new versions every few years. Anyone with a PC running Windows 7 or 8 now qualifies for the free upgrade, and because the system requirements for Windows 10 are almost exactly the same as they were all those years ago for Windows 7, your existing hardware should be able to cope. For now.
The question is: what happens when Windows 10 (like iOS and Android) starts to surpass the capabilities of your hardware? Those rolling upgrades to the Home versions of Windows 10 are compulsory – unlike Android, iOS or even previous versions of Windows, you can’t choose to sit them out. As the licence agreement for Windows 10 states: “The software periodically checks for system and app updates, and downloads and installs them for you… By accepting this agreement, you agree to receive these types of automatic updates without any additional notice.”
As Microsoft adds more and better features to Windows 10, the demands on your hardware will increase. You will inevitably reach a point where your hardware can’t cope with Windows 10 and you’ll be forced to upgrade it, whereas if you’d stuck with Windows 7, you could have conceivably carried on going until the computer conked out.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 10 or that Microsoft will turn the screw anytime soon. But it will. It must do. Only then will the true cost of that “free upgrade” become clear.