I don’t know how many people heard this at some point. But I would be surprised if “Don’t buy the first year of anything” is something that’s rare enough to elicit surprise when said to anyone over the age of 12. This article is to thank the people that still do it. Someone has to take the plunge first and find all of the reasons why the rest of us shouldn’t.
I was one of them. Back in the olden days when rooting an Android phone was almost necessary for comp sci street cred and the only thing that my phone was responsible for was a couple of phone calls and texts a week. Android 4.0 dropped? Phone not supported? (Who’s phone really was?), well, it’s just a matter of going to XDA and finding out who had a CyanogenMod nightly. VmWare Player now allowing you to emulate MacOS? we’ll see about that. Windows 8 dropped on a Monday? It’ll be on my PC on thursday.
And when that’s done and you realize that the phone doesn’t recognize touch input, that OS X is really not happy without hardware acceleration and that a start screen is a really really bad idea, well that’s just the cost of having fun.
Other people are feeling that right now, what with some iOS 16 users reporting bugs and features that haven’t been fully implemented and Windows users discovering that the 22H2 update has noticeably downgraded the performance of their nVidia graphics cards. And hopefully, once they have reported these, they feel good about themselves, as that’s been the cost of being an early adopter ever since mass manufacturing has been a thing. Patches will be done, updates will be curated, beta-tested, signed and pushed, and that’s when the rest of us will drop in.
I got lucky, by the time Microsoft decided that QA was someone else’s problem and decided to see if the community would be able to figure out why things are breaking on their own (which I rather bitterly have come to name “The Bethesda Approach”) I had reached a point in life when my computer needed to work, and my phone being useless as one meant that I would actually miss on something important. Thus I skipped update 1809 and have only recently updated my OS to Windows 11 ( Which was a mistake-more on this in another post). As far as phones are concerned. I decided to take the advice of someone who deals with them daily for their livelihood and said, in the same tone my dad did giving the advice that opens this post. “wait until .1, and then a week or so.”
And so, some of these words have been happily written in iOS 15.7. And anyway, I probably was going to wait another revision if they didn’t fix the battery indicator with 16.1. Congrats to all the beta testers. Both the ones that actually sign to the insider program, and those to furiously refresh the update page when the clock strikes midnight on release day.
