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Comment by esperent

3 days ago

> It's basically stealing

This feels like hyperbole to me. Who is being stolen from here? Not the end user, they're getting the tradeoff of more features for a low price in exchange for less optimized software.

From what I’m seeing people do on their computers, it barely changed from what they’ve been doing on their pentium 4 one. But now, with Electron-based software and the generals state of Windows, you can’t recommend something older than 4 years. It’s hard to not see it as stealing when you have to buy a 1000+ laptop, when a 400 one could easily do the job if the software were a bit better.

  • Most people today could be using excel '98 and be no less productive.

    • In my SO's job (HR), it's basically Word, Excel and email. And nothing more than what was available around 2005 other than some convenient utilities.

It’s only a tradeoff for the user if the user find the added features useful.

Increasingly, this is not the case. My favorite example here is the Adobe Creative Suite, which for many users useful new features became far and few between some time ~15 years ago. For those users, all they got was a rather absurd degree of added bloat and slowness for essentially the same thing they were using in 2010. These users would’ve almost certainly been happier had 80-90% of the feature work done in that time instead been bug fixes and optimization.