Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes.

The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.

I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS.

Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.

But I have found rentalware (specifically Adobe Creative Cloud as I use it) to be a somewhat positive experience. Adobe pushes out updates frequently enough where you see positive increment in productivity without it being an annoying update. Plus it has bought the price within affordable range for people like me who can afford the software if we save up enough for a few years but not the down payment in one go. Having the payment broken down over months makes it more manageable. I have been a convert from a pirate to a legitimate paying user just because of this. Straight out licenses for adobe's software cost more than some kidney operations in my country before this SaaS model.

Jetbrains has also moved onto a SaaS model. If they continue with legitimate updates every few months, then that subscription is also worth paying for.

The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.

If the Office 365 subscription (for businesses) only included the Office suite, then I'd agree with you, but it also includes hosted email (for your own domain) and 1TB of OneDrive storage. To put that in perspective, Google Apps is a comparable product that offers hosted email, and it costs around the same but only includes 30GB of storage.

On paper at least, the subscription provides quite a bit of value. If only OneDrive for Business wasn't a piece of crap...

Eh, as SaaS goes, at least Adobe's has some compelling reasons to use it, the biggest one being cost. Sure, you'll pay more in the long run, but try telling someone trying to start out a small business that they should shell out multiple thousands of dollars for Adobe CS, or multiple hundreds of dollars per individual program if buying a la carte. That's the situation my Fiance was in, and I was finally able to move her to Adobe's SaaS offering and off of pirated Adobe CS because $40/mo is much easier to swallow than the prior cost. That they offer tech support, she can easily migrate computers, and there's no virus' bundled with the installer are all good selling points when coming from that side.

The saddest thing?

The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4.

There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.

You can argue that Google and the OEMs should be making these upgrades easier and more widely available... And they should... But at least 3rd-parties filling in is an option in many cases. You can shop around to find the combination of hardware and software support that you want.

The problem with getting locked into a walled garden - no matter how nice it is - is that you're still locked in when winter comes.

Seems kinda painful.

I've had a G and X Play, and update support has been pretty good.

And if you're reinstalling the OS anyway, add an SSD (at least for the system files). This gives a substantial performance boost on most old PCs for under 100 $/€.

About a year ago I upgraded RAM from 3GB to 6GB, which dealt with most of my multitasking and "large files in memory" issues.

About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung Evo 250GB SSD for under €90. This solved just about every other frustration I had with the machine - slow boot times, slow program load times etc.

The only issue I really have now is maxing out one core too easily and having the fan spin up loudly. Investigations reveal a CPU upgrade is possible.[0]

I have no intention of buying another laptop for a further 12-24 months, even if the plastic case of this one is held together with super glue and tape.

[0] https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/433227-asus-x54c-bbk9...

In any case, with an SSD, my boot times from cold start have been faster than coming back from hibernation were with rust disks. Plus, clean starts are less likely to leave things in a fubar state than the often-buggy hibernation

Well here's my problem with that argument. The 3G, 4 and iPad 1 were quite fast until the bloated OS upgrades started coming out.

The one thing that would keep me from being bitter is if Apple offered an easy way to downgrade to the original OS version of each one.

I don't run a lot of apps. The most important apps to me are the ones that come with the phone. If that meant living without some apps and new features but being able to keep the devices in use longer, I would have surely made that trade-off.

The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.

My experience after switching to Android is not that though. Most of the major releases, including the upcoming N, offer performance improvements.

Granted, I don't know what that says about the code base, whether it was already so vastly inefficient that they find tons of room for improvements or whatnot, but it's definitely a refreshing change from iOS for me.

I long ago switched away from iPhones to Android devices, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Apple's public commitment to privacy and Android's recent security woes didn't make me think twice about what the next phone in my pocket will be. I look at the system updates page on my Moto X longingly, but it still says February 1st is the most recent update available. Not sure how long I'll have to wait but I hope I don't get exploited in the meantime.

But I also wonder what the story is behind that adoption rate discrepancy.

Apple makes their own phones, so they can push out upgrades easily. Most of the Android phones sold were made by Samsung right? And Samsung has a a wide variety of phone models and penchant for making mods that slow down updates and/or make them infeasible for other models.

Aging iPhones also tend to become less enjoyable (carefully selected words) to use on their last viable OS update, so people tend to either upgrade to the latest iPhone or switch platforms.

Speaking of Moto X'es, I just got a notification for an update right now, while my wife who has the same model on the same network got her notification over a week ago. I'm guessing they like to stagger their updates?

We often act as though the world we live in is the only way things could have possibly proceeded, but after WW2 U.S. manufacturing invented the idea of the consumer to cope with manufacturing capacity built up during war time.

We are still effectively living in a manufacturing boom time created by a war machine.

Is this slowness//clunkiness liveable for what I'm doing? When the answer is "no" more days than "yes", it's time for me to go shopping. Until then, I'm ok with typing on something you might find on the Millennium Falcon.

(My six year old PC laptop is an incredibly heavy piece of junk that crashes all the time due to the combination of corrupted hard disk and Vista, and it actually is sad that I still occasionally find a cause to use it, not least because it's still the least unreliable device for running Skype that I own)