Re: just got a Iphone6 plus, cases and questions
[[wow]], Dark, are you really saying that you turned down faster broadband speeds? Well, what a mug! Oh well, at least you persuaded the bastards to give you an upgrade for nothing, so that's awesome. But one of these days your obstinacy must surely kill you!
CX2 already described some modern conveniences; here are a few more that I now take for granted: virtualisation lets you run stuff in any operating system, and you need memory for that job--memory you can't use, even if you had it, under XP. I actually don't use search for the Start menu very much, but the indexer works the whole system, so finding stuff is much faster. The networking, audio, and power management are all much improved--many more options, complete firewall solution, IPv6 support, independent volume controls, lower latency, etc. These are all things you just grow to love as you use them because they're just there, and better, especially on a laptop. ISO file burning--good for users of other OSs like Linux, though probably not to you personally, it's very cool. USB 3 for your fast file transfer needs; XP almost never has support for it, even when the manufacturer supports that OS, for the simple reason that the drivers would have to be rewritten completely. Actually Windows 8 puts the stack into Windows itself, but that's irrelevant; the same holds true for 7 when the manufacturer supports it, which they always do because it's actually popular. Integrated AV solution; that is until I turn it off. A modern browser with video support. Etc. The system is just very robust.
Yes, I know you don't _need_ any of that stuff, but I'm fairly sure you wouldn't turn much of it down if you had the choice to use modern hardware with an OS which supports them, and your existing interface. It's just a case of you choosing to settle for less, which is absolutely fine, because there's never going to be an objective definition of what is better, and if you don't think you need them in light of the sacrifices you'll make, that's that. I personally love them, and while I wish there were a "Windows 8.1 for XP users" edition of the operating system, there just isn't. Of course many of the same points apply equally to non-Windows operating systems too, with the added advantage that the OS is already usable, even if you have to learn something new, and that it generally stays that way in the case of OS X.
Then again, expectations have been known to change. The machine I first tried XP on, a Pentium II 400 MHz Compaq that I bought in 1998, ran it like a dog. What did I do? Why, I replaced it with Windows 2000, its predecessor, of course. This, I said, was XP as it should have been, and I would never go back to XP. Indeed, a useful milestone of how good a version of Windows is seems to be how bad the successor is. And you'll never guess what happened. In a few more years of XP's long development cycle, it had become more-or-less feature complete and rock solid, with great speed, security and compatibility. A few years before Windows 2000 became quietly dropped, the OS seemed more and more dated and feeble, so I switched voluntarily to XP. Oh, terrible, terrible misunderstanding! XP ran just fine, even if you had to fight it a little bit to turn off the crap; all the slowness had either been outpaced by newer hardware, fixed by screen readers, or worked around, and I still got to keep the Start menu. All I'd have to do was put in a bit more work to make it right, and it'd be fine. And that PC? Ran as a Linux server until 2012--yes, 2012--when it was finally and tenderly retired to make way for my 27-inch iMac. Whereupon the server in question became a VM, and I practically kicked myself for having waited so long.
The point with cost is that you have to pay for something in exchange for your security, stability, compatibility, etc. MS aren't stupid, they can see their market share plummeting. Indeed, backward compatibility is something that has kept them very rich for many years, but even that can't argue with, y'know, people actually leaving their platform! So Microsoft plays an exhausting game of catch-up, and arguably is still decidedly the loser. They are slowly being taught not to fuck with their customers, having laid off two of their top brass, and made several backward steps on the Windows interface, but ultimately it's not about the money game any more. You are sadly being dragged, as we all are, into a battle we have no interest in, but in which MS clearly sees itself in clear danger of losing for good. Happily, they seem to know when to stop; Windows 10 will bring back the Start menu, albeit with TIFKAM elements which can be turned off with a little work.
Edit: thinking some more, it occurs to me that not only do I still think Windows 2000 was MS's best work in many important ways, but also that I had rather hoped that the XP drop would not happen on account of the shake-up that would need to be involved. I was wrong on that latter score, it seems--on the former, I put it down to sheer unwillingness to tolerate losses, no matter how small. But you know, here we are, pining for the loss of XP, a potential inferior …
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