I always feel like there's a whole rule-book of "how to Do Life" that I didn't get, for this easing-into-the-upper-middle-class and/or doing-serious-business-stuff shit, that other people just know, because of who their families are and who they grew up hanging out with.
I gather the version of that I did get was the middle-class version—which some others didn't get and have a similar "wait, that's just normal?" reaction as I do to the upper-middle stuff. Like 90% of that's basically credit-related—how credit cards work and how to use them, how to build credit, how to buy a house (generally with a mortgage, so, still basically a credit-related thing), that kind of stuff.
I've noticed similar things when it comes to paying others to do stuff for me. Having a house cleaner come in for the first time was fucking weird. Still is, really. I can't relax, feel like I ought to be helping. Or paying someone to do work on my house that I could do—tiling, drywalling, some light electrical, plumbing, most general home-improvement stuff. It feels gross—I don't think it does for those who grew up with that stuff being normal. I suspect it's a barrier to advancing in business, because those attitudes carry over. Delegation is weird to me. Being someone's boss is horribly uncomfortable. The notion of starting a business and hiring employees to take over stuff I've been doing feels icky and wrong, and no amount of one part of my brain telling another part to knock it off makes that go away.
It really was. Just my own machine's traffic makes it scroll faster than I can read, these days. Every web page and program constantly phoning home up and and including sending real-time mouse cursor locations, mdns, UDP local-network-device-discovery traffic, all kinds of stuff.
Relaxing. Like back when you could attach WireShark to your local network and not see a single damn thing happen for tens of seconds at a time unless you pressed a button somewhere.
... But also when computers wouldn't do anything useful unless you pressed a button. Or a bunch of buttons, more likely.
Hand-me-down or used Windows laptops that were $300 to begin with [EDIT: when purchased new, I mean] don't tend to last a super long time. Maybe, if you're lucky.
[EDIT] What I've seen break on mine and my wife's, back when I used Windows/"PC" hardware on mobile computers, and these were all lot more than $300, even 15+ years ago:
- Display controller board just... dies, barely outside the very-short warranty period. (I repaired this one)
- Display cable frays at hinge.
- Thermal paste on insufficient-to-begin-with cooling for discrete video chip goes bad after a couple years (discrete video cards in laptops: just a bad idea, they're historically the source of a solid half of the problems on MacBooks, even)
- Something shakes loose inside. Several times. I've self-repaired (open, screw with anything that has a socket or port until it's good) but it's not worth taking it in to a shop on a very, very cheap machine, if you're not comfortable doing this yourself.
Most of the people I know who run Windows personally (not at/for work) either do it only because gaming's easiest/best there, or because it's easy to get free or extremely-cheap used Windows machines that'll hold up for a year or so (then get another when they break) [EDIT] And actually that last category's a single person I know who's a writer, so wants a laptop with a keyboard but only uses an old word processor on it, and email, nothing else.
Exceptions are my relatives over age 60, who barely do anything with their computers and should probably just have Chromebooks or iPads + keyboard (god, they could really use the accessibility features...), but are used to computer = walk into Costco or Best Buy and buy a desktop tower.
Most non-gamers who also aren't computer nerds, whom I know, "compute" mainly on their phone anyway. Shit, so do I, and I'm both of those—my Windows machine is just for gaming, nothing else whatsoever. 95+% of everything important that needs some kind of computer, happens on my phone. I bought my last house on it, entirely, LOL.
I wonder how many gamers now run both Windows and Linux. I bet it's a high percentage of Steam Deck owners. ~100% of Steamdeck owners run Linux (they have a Steam Deck), but some proportion of those, which I'm guessing is fairly large, also has a Windows gaming rig.
I was issued a Lenovo Thinkpad at work, recently, for the first time in more than a decade. "Sure, let's see. I used to own a(n IBM) Thinkpad back in the day—sure I ran Gentoo on it, but it was nice enough hardware. I've used Windows since 3.1, and still game on 10, I know my way around it. I can manage. Having a USB-A port is sure nice."
40-50% battery loss overnight while "sleeping". And other irritations galore. I'd forgotten what battery anxiety was like. Good lord.
Got on the MacBook list with IT ASAP. That MacBook lost 40% charge sitting in my backpack—over a week-and-a-half Christmas break. Ahhh, back home. So much more relaxing.
No, I mean as an sms app. It’s fine for that. Group sms can get kinda rough but I’ve also never had a phone that did it better, including pre-iPhone phones, and a few Android phones. Of course it’s better if you can stay in iMessage, to avoid SMS, same as switching over to WhatsApp or whatever is way better.
> MMS group chats are an absolute dumpster fire from an UX point of view. In some countries, a single MMS costs about half an USD as well (per recipient)!
> From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved.
I'd be sure this was why, if Google hadn't once tried to get me to use a combo SMS/MMS + some-other-Google-messaging-service app on my phone (by replacing the normal SMS app on OS upgrade—this was on a Nexus phone) that was so broken and janky it was unusable.
Like, it is for-sure the case that a rich, huge, "smart" company can fuck this up a lot worse than Apple has. iMessage is easily good enough that I haven't had to go find some alternative SMS app, at least.
> It really isn’t any better than SMS anyway, so I put the value at $0.
Depends on what you do with it. You can send much higher-quality photos and videos over iMessage than SMS/MMS. You can also do things like play games (chess, for example) entirely inside iMessage.
If you're just sending short messages of plain text, yeah, it's not much of an improvement.
I gather the version of that I did get was the middle-class version—which some others didn't get and have a similar "wait, that's just normal?" reaction as I do to the upper-middle stuff. Like 90% of that's basically credit-related—how credit cards work and how to use them, how to build credit, how to buy a house (generally with a mortgage, so, still basically a credit-related thing), that kind of stuff.
I've noticed similar things when it comes to paying others to do stuff for me. Having a house cleaner come in for the first time was fucking weird. Still is, really. I can't relax, feel like I ought to be helping. Or paying someone to do work on my house that I could do—tiling, drywalling, some light electrical, plumbing, most general home-improvement stuff. It feels gross—I don't think it does for those who grew up with that stuff being normal. I suspect it's a barrier to advancing in business, because those attitudes carry over. Delegation is weird to me. Being someone's boss is horribly uncomfortable. The notion of starting a business and hiring employees to take over stuff I've been doing feels icky and wrong, and no amount of one part of my brain telling another part to knock it off makes that go away.