Only Microsoft would come up with a new security feature and then intentionally and arbitrarily limit its availability to the most expensive version of their OS.
This is the same company that thinks putting ads in the fucking file explorer is appropriate on an OS they charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars for.
The same goes for full disk encryption, it isn’t included in the cheapest edition I installed on an old laptop for my mother. Now booting with veracrypt takes 2 minutes. Needless to say I had to get her a chromebook: new laptop, easy to use, secure and for the price of one windows license. This is what will get Microsoft in the end.
This is a legitimate concern for me, but almost no part of my mother's life takes place online. She did have a mac, but lost that and there is no money for a new one. She also has an android phone, so the privacy argument applies here as well and is still very valid. Eventually I will get her on a mac or ubuntu laptop or something like that.
In terms of usability I have to tip my hat to Google. ChromeOS is very easy to use so far. Probably until chromebook vendors start adding all sorts of their own shitty tools and accounts like Huawei has done with their phones.
> Secure and inexpensive as long as you don't mind paying with your privacy.
There are obvious alternatives to ChromeOS that are just as secure and just as inexpensive (especially if you have some old hardware just laying around, or else you can just buy refurbished hardware - just about anything made in the last 10 years will do, if not more than that) - and not any less useful than a Chromebook. And they can be updated for as long as the hardware keeps going - they won't suddenly become "unsupported" after a mere five years.
Yeah, if you're technical enough, then for now you can still install and run Linux. That's probably not an option for OP's parents.
You can easily imagine that in the future hardware manufacturers will remove the ability to install a 3rd party operating system. It's already essentially impossible on a locked-down Apple iOS appliance.
Chrome wins on the mom, grandpa, etc. can easily use it... I've yet to see an OS that is less locked down that's easier to use in practice. Yes, privacy concerns. That said, it's still what I recommend for MOST people not interested in gaming.
Everybody needs disk encryption. Loose your laptop on the train or in a cafe and all your browser cookies are out in the wild.
That's just the start, people store private stuff on their computers you know. Photos, letters, bank transactions, emails, contact lists.
Microsoft choice to make this not only non-default but even a premium feature is inexcusable. I already switched to Ubuntu for this reason alone. Now my life is much easier for many other reasons as well, like Docker.
While your statement is reasonable, it's interesting seeing a Mac user complain about things being too expensive. Is it fundamentally worse to overcharge for software over the hardware?
You misunderstand me, it has nothing to do with Windows being "too expensive", the point is that you've paid for it and they still abuse your privacy and shove ads down your throat at every opportunity.
By way of comparison, I willingly and happily pay more to use Apple hardware and software specifically because that money buys me a hell of a lot more privacy, security, and functionality than the equivalent amount of money would buy me in the Microsoft / PC ecosystem.
I am not misunderstanding you. Your entire comment was centered around a perceived unfairness regarding price:
> most expensive version of their OS.
> they charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars for.
To be clear here, I'm not defending Windows. I agree with you that what they do is not constructive for their users. I'm merely pointing out it's ironic for Mac users sit on their throne and decry Windows' practices while paying significantly more for non-upgradeable Mac hardware when if you really gave a shit about security and privacy, you'd buy reasonably priced PC hardware and install a linux distro.
Last I checked, App Store is absolutely filled with advertisements that I didn't request. Why is it so significantly worse that Microsoft happens to place theirs within Explorer? I think both are rather frustrating when you already paid for the software and/or hardware.
Are you seriously trying to claim that Macs are overpriced by hundreds of dollars by trying to compare them against an ATX desktop? Or do you have some more reasonable comparison in mind of Apple and non-Apple products that actually compete in the same market segment, and where the Dell/Lenovo/HP/whatever is significantly more upgradable?
And do you have any reasonable complaints about the security and privacy of a modern Mac with the T2 chip, or are you saying that anyone who cares at all about security should run Linux and spend 30% of their time wrangling with SELinux policies?
Not a parent commenter, but I have some examples of upgradeability/repairability. Dell XPS line of laptops has upgradeable storage and screwed-in batteries. 15" variant has upgradeable RAM and wireless card. The keyboard is attached with screws instead of being permanently fixed to chassis and costs significantly less to order and replace yourself should you find a need for it. Similarly in the worst case scenario, there are replacement motherboards on eBay for $550 or sometimes less which you could again order and replace yourself (or upgrade your base CPU option with).
And both 13" and 15" Dells have a fingerprint sensor which is as snappy as Touch ID without being bundled with a thin strip of touchscreen and a $200 price hike.
That's because these laptops are designed to be serviced on-site by repairmen who are not always so bright. So I imagine, similar HP offerings are as robust.
Dell's and HP's phone support and warranty support are super awful, though, so this may be a factor for you. For me, the difference between a drink spill costing $600 (and I do it myself) on a $2500 Dell versus $1500 (and I have to lose my files/get a new system) on a $1600 MBP (both true stories) is significant and I'm not rich enough to go for latter.
I think the problem is not that windows pro costs money. The problem is that Microsoft also sells a second-class version of their OS that is really shitty.
From a pure brand perspective, the smart move for Microsoft would be to stop selling windows home.
And while they are at it rethink the "OS as a service" strategy. I don't get the often cited comment on how Microsoft transformed itself under Nutella. They just take the steps they are forced to make because a lot of developers ran to different platforms.
I think MS-software to be less attractive than any time before. Be that windows, their office suite or their cloud landscape, which mainly excels at being slow. And stronger competitors are not the reason for decisions that are mostly not consumer oriented.
I have mixed feelings on this one... tbh, I wish I could pay MS $5-10/month to nuke all the passive-agressive ads. I reluctantly do so for YouTube already.
But the subscription model for windows makes a lot of sense, I think. Leaving people on older versions is the same as selling a crippled version of your OS
It seems to me that no matter what happens two classes of users are going to be created: those that can pay for security and those that cannot. Ultimately Apple's pricing means all their users are first class - hence security as a bread-and-butter feature on their platforms. In MSFT's case they're going to have low and high cost consumers, so they segment those users into the two relevant classes.
None of this is good, for anybody involved. IT security is like vaccines, it only works if everybody's got them. This one of my biggest issues with the current "ads let us have free software" defense of the advertising craze. Ads let us segregate users based on what features they can afford not to have, and unfortunately for most laypeople it's security and privacy that's on the chopping block.
> unfortunately for most laypeople it's security and privacy that's on the chopping block.
I think this is why we need legislation: The free market obviously can't sort this out to peoples' benefit.
I have a couple Android devices I can't figure out how to update, so I'm afraid to use them for anything serious. If the author isn't responsible for writing crappy code, and I can't fix it, then where's my lemon law?
I agree, but have one nitpick - it's not that the free market can't sort this out, but that this is exactly the solution the free market is set up to organically create. Can't afford the tech? Sell your identity to marketers! That's all free market and I don't think we give the "free market" (scare quotes because we're so far from that in actuality it's painful) enough credit for creating these exact problems.
It is not a better solution to take away the freedom of people who are willing to sell their privacy. For some, it’s the only way to afford a computer.
> Ultimately Apple's pricing means all their users are first class - hence security
Yeah... Good luck running the latest version of iOS on an older iPhone. (Many are still have a 5/6 and you really don't want to update those if you value a reasonable experience and latency.)
iOS 12 runs on everything through the 5S, and notably improved performance over iOS 10/11 on the same devices. [1] is a bunch of benchmarks from back in the beta period.
My kid has it on a 6, and it's legitimately good performance there.
Good luck getting the latest Android onto a 5 year old handset without jumping through some non-trivial hoops.
I'm not speaking hypothetically, but from experience. I have a 4 year old 200gbp Android phone running Pie, took 10 minutes.
I also have an iPhone 8, this is an Ok phone but is a worse experience than the 4 year old Android phone. Despite the cost being much higher, the screen is worse quality, for instance.
My partner has a 6 and it is remarkably slower than both. To the point where you sometimes just want to give up on whatever you were trying to do while waiting for a map or Spotify to load.
Maybe your experience is different to ours, but I'm only reporting what I see from using all 3.
> I'm not speaking hypothetically, but from experience. I have a 4 year old 200gbp Android phone running Pie, took 10 minutes.
You're lying. Installing a custom third-party Android ROM is way more than a 10 minute process, your OnePlus X is barely more than 3 years old, and there's a huge difference between a random OS image you downloaded from a forum online and manufacturer-supported OS updates for a 5 year old phone.
At the risk of wading into the iPhone vs Android battle...:
iPhone 8 vs Nexus 6 from 2014, back when Google marketed that series as reasonable Dev devices, not necessarily flagships.
326 ppi vs 493 ppi
750 x 1334 pixels vs 1440 x 2560 pixels
IPS LCD vs AMOLED
Somewhere there is a tongue in cheek meme comparing a sister phone, the Nexus 4, from 2012 against a 2016(?) iPhone and it's quite interesting how many features the Android phones had and were mildly credited for that when copied to iPhone were /world changers!!1/
Granted, Android phone manufacturers have wised up and besides things like the Nokia 6.1 you can't really get a good mid-range Android phone any more... it's mostly clustered around either the humble Moto E or the Note 9 price points.
>Yeah... Good luck running the latest version of iOS on an older iPhone. (Many are still have a 5/6 and you really don't want to update those if you value a reasonable experience and latency.)
Spoken like someone who's never actually used a 5 or 6 running iOS 12.
I have a couple Android devices and I can't get them to update at all. I'm sure there's some kind of solution, but my time is really valuable to me: If all I have to do is spend £1k every four years (£20 a month) to not worry about this, it's a done deal.
I imagine that people who buy a Mac, want to have a Mac and it's their choice to pay. Maybe I am wrong. But people who buy a PC, have no choice but pay the Microsoft tax for the pre-installed Windows on it.
So, yes, it is reasonable to be angry when they put advertisement on the hardware that you paid on the OS that you paid together with the hardware. It is creepy, and belittling too.
Luckily IT professionals have yet the choice to install something else. Let's see how long it takes until we have no choice what software is allowed to run on devices that we buy.
I totally agree, Apple's markup on products must be astronomically high.
Am I the only one who doesn't see where the roughly $1000 price gap between the Honor Play and the newest(?) iPhone XS Max?. Their brand is really not worth that much to me anyhow.
"iPhone: About 1250 EUR, Honor Play: About 320 EUR" [1]
It also has that blank area at the bottom, whereas Apple had to basically invent some insane hardware gymnastics to not have that on theirs. The iPhone X screen bends around backwards at the base.
The 'chin' on newer Android phones is pretty thin anyway. And with gesture navigation becoming more common (see the newest Pie version, but plenty of OEMs offered gesture navigation before), starting the gesture from the "chin" (outside the touch area) is a nice convenience. The newer iPhones have that horizontal line at the bottom anyway, so it's not even clear what the cleanest design is.
Yeah I actually don't mind it at all. Just saying there's extra hardware (and R&D) expense in doing it Apple's way, in terms of the production cost of those two phones.
I paid 0 EUR for Linux. My school works with Windows stuff and Microsoft doesn't even provide us with free keys. It's ridiculous. Let's just keep all school stuff open source.
Those are digital (unused) licenses, that although can't technically be resold, they "can" be in Europe as they contradict a ruling made in 2012 (I don't have time to dig the link up, unfortunately).
Those cheap licenses are always used. They exploit the fact that these can be used to activate ~10 copies of Windows. It's even worse than that though. One seller could keep track of this limit, but what happens is that a bunch of sellers source their keys from other similar sellers. So they don't even know how many times a key has been used.
Last time I bought one of these 15€ keys for a friend, I had to write to the customer support over 10 times and shuffle through at least 6 different keys until one actually worked.
To be fair they aren't necessarily unused. I made the mistake of buying one once and had to jump through a lot of hoops to get Microsoft to activate it. I'm still not sure that it was entirely legal, if I'm honest.
Last time I tried a (legitimately owned) Windows 7 Ultimate key (around 6 months ago?) it still happily activated Windows 10 despite no longer being "officially" supported.
Actually, I think it would be hard to find an enterprise software vendor who wouldn’t want to include extra functionality in their premium SKUs as a way to further differentiate them and encourage up-sell.
Extra functionality yes, but not a security feature. I'd understand making WSL or PowerShell a >= Pro feature, but something that is designed to secure users from malicious applications. That should be included with even the lowest SKU that can run win32 (its sad that this last qualifier is even required).
That's OK when you put enterprise features in enterprise versions. A regular user doesn't need to be able to run SharePoint, but they might want to get proper sandboxing of regular software.
On this note, because of the lack of virtualization support in Windows Home, in my small business we're encouraging everyone to get rid of Windows both at home and in the office. They've intentionally crippled Windows Home in a way which impacts us -- we want to support devs doing work from home or on their own hardware. But when their OS can't run Docker, that gets harder. No way we're going to buy Pro licenses for people's home machines just because Microsoft decided to flip a bit in their build scripts and suck even more blood.
Isn’t this basically a virtual machine, though? I don’t see anything special that you’d need a more expensive version of Windows for. This should be using your processor’s virtualization capabilities, right?
Agreed. Every time somebody complains about Microsoft doing business shrewdly and increasing their value to customers, I think "This is wht Linux never captured the desktop."
It is basically a virtual machine but note from the article:
- "One of the key enhancements we have made for Windows Sandbox is the ability to use a copy of the Windows 10 installed on your computer, instead of downloading a new VHD image as you would have to do with an ordinary virtual machine."
- "we also allow Windows sandbox to use the same physical memory pages as the host for operating system binaries via a technology we refer to as “direct map”"
- "More recently, Microsoft has worked with our graphics ecosystem partners to integrate modern graphics virtualization capabilities directly into DirectX and WDDM, the driver model used by display drivers on Windows." (Note: it also works with OpenGL nowadays too)
Maybe you can achieve your workflow needs from Home + free 3rd party virtualization software but if you don't see anything special I'd recommend reading the article more carefully.
My perception with stuff like this has always been. Microsoft testing it out in the environment it's going to be used, and with expert supervision. Then after a couple of versions, normal users can get a solid version. I have seen this happen with Visual Studio and resounding tools.
They'd probably have to raise the price of their cheaper versions if they didn't do this. Seems like a good compromise for the consumer to me. Offset the cost of all of the fancy tech most people won't want or use to those willing to pay more and potentially use it.
So right... this is clearly a "PRO" feature. For normal users the by far better solution is still: Do not install any EXE from unknown sources. Or even better: Do not install anything new in the first place.
Not that I disagree with what you're saying per se, since it really is the simplest option, but as technologists we really need to get over this idea that people shouldn't be allowed to actually use a computer to do computer stuff. Mobile OSs got it pretty close to right: self-contained applications that are sandboxed by default. We need to embrace that concept in personal desktop computers, only without the stupid store (and that includes a package manager) and with complete disk portability of the applications. Basically, the way desktop computer OSs worked in the 90s, only with sandboxing by default.
While they sell this as something that protects against downloaded malware, I think this is going to be used a lot in software testing. We have lots of manual tests of desktop software that neads clean environments which is painful when e.g. comparing several versions side by side etc. This is great compared to running multiple full VM's side by side.
> "Only Microsoft would come up with a new security feature and then intentionally and arbitrarily limit its availability to the most expensive version of their OS."
What's your point? How is that not a reasonable business model?
Charge more for enterprise features by all means, but if basic security concepts are something you feel the need to charge for, your priorities are fucked up.
It's hardly basic. It might seem so for you or - in general - people who frequent hn, but you'd have to spend a lot of time explaining why it's good to an average person running windows home.
There are a lot of basic, in the sense of foundational, things that are not basic, in the sense of easy to understand. I think "basic security feature" was meant in the former sense.
I wouldn’t worry because it won’t work anyway so you’re not losing anything. When they introduced Virtual Secure Mode in windows 10 with big fanfare, there was a CVE that followed almost immediately.
The case in point is it’s putting lipstick on a pig at this point. Every change that is made comes with another security or friction factor. Every problem solved creates two more.
They need to stop adding shit to it and fix what is already there.
This is the same company that thinks putting ads in the fucking file explorer is appropriate on an OS they charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars for.