Forget Windows - buy a Chromebook!!
Microsoft has created a massive problem, and for no good reason. I'd go further than the article states and say that Windows 11 is a significant downgrade from (current) Windows 10, foisting a bunch of AI "features" which few people want and which make it harder to do simple things simply, together with ever more intrusive upselling and insistence on hooking you into their cloud services.
I help at a weekly session in my rural village trying to enable the mainly elderly population to exist in the digital world, with banking, health services, shopping and pretty much everything else dependent upon some level of IT competence and Internet access. Most of them have elderly Windows laptops, some still on Windows7 and a smartphone or iPad (usually donated by concerned children or grandchildren). NONE of these people will derive any benefit whatsoever from Windows 11 and I find it hard to believe that even more IT-literate users want any part of it. My advice to our "customers" happy with iPhones or iPads is to get a second-hand, not too old MacBook Air and to everyone else - buy a Chromebook.
On impulse I bought a cheap (£140) Chromebook in the Currys Black Friday sale and after a lifetime using IBM/370, MS-DOS, TPF, Windows, a bit of Linux and some OSX / MacOS I can honestly say that a cheap Chromebook is the by far the best option for most people to do the things they need to do on a computer - especially if navigating a tiny on-screen smartphone keyboard has become a problem. It doesn't do "gaming", video-editing or any of the minority pursuits which the friendly Currys salesperson will try to convince you are essential, but boy does it work well with the basics. It doesn't grind to a halt every time an update is applied, it's far less insistent on selling you new nonsense than recent Microsoft software and boots up / shuts down and renders websites in a flash - with a decent, offline-capable email, document and spreadsheet editor included.
I've seen a couple of references to Microsoft being in fear of the "Chromebook threat" and they certainly should be. Just like the old, brilliant spoof video showing how Microsoft would package an iPod they seem to have completely lost track of how 95% of the general population actually need (and want) to use IT in their daily lives, encumbering their products with so many useless and unwanted "features" that the basics have been forgotten and buried under bling. Hopefully the world will wake up, reject the nonsense and maybe get back to basics - and perhaps buy a cheap Chromebook!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
