I have had a frustrating day from a technology perspective.  Both Microsoft and Apple have forced me to spend a significant part of the day waiting for their software updates to finish.

This is annoying not just from the perspective of the time required for the updates to finish but aggravated by the fact I cannot use the computers while the updates take place.

Inconvenience

For me and my wife, these regular updates have quite the impact given the multitude of hardware we have, although I will note Android and Linux updates are not forced on you.

Although you can select manual control of Windows, OSX and IOS updates the processes are designed to, shall we say, “encourage” you to download and install precipitously.

With more than 10 different hardware devices affected by these regular updates some which can take a couple of hours and entail downloading multi-gig-a-bytes of data (e.g. last major OSX upgrade) this is really becoming annoying.

Push at Night

Of course both Apple and Microsoft recommend you do auto-updates overnight.  Sounds brilliant, yet, it never works right for me and I end up spending the morning adjusting and recovering.

Maybe I am just targeted by their dev teams, somehow they got my IP and make my updates more difficult.  Who knows, although I am just a humble guy with technology as a hobby, why on earth would they pick on me.  Aah, I remember it is user error.

Security Matters

The driving force for these updates seems to me to be keeping the operating system current as it is less likely to be hacked and is therefore more secure.

The other feature enhancements are mostly just annoying, albeit interesting but really there is a very small value equation.  Do I really want to spend 5 to 8 hours every month keeping my devices secure?

Rethorical question – emfatically NO!