We are being updated to death lately, or haven't you noticed? Between all the Apple Updates, browser plug-in updates, and Windows Security updates, I feel like that’s where most of my computer’s time is spent every day...downloading, installing, and rebooting for the benefit of being up-to-date.
One could hardly argue that updates are a bad thing, but having to do one almost every time you open a browser to find out what’s playing at the cinema - that's just bit extreme, no?
For software other then Firefox, developers are pretty good at trying to hide all this updating business going on from the user. They offer options like “download and install automatically in the background.” And you wonder why your machine
slows down 5 times a day while all this “improvement” is taking place.
Then there are those programs that incessantly check for updates daily, almost like they are lost puppies trying to make contact with mother for last bit of breast milk before they are put to work as adult working dogs.
And all of this activity is taking a toll in your activity monitor, whether you need these updates or not.
Some of the updating seems to have value, for example, for those that boot up Windows, virus protection is probably your best friend, and the virus signature updates that come down daily are needed to keep your machine healthy. But do I really need the update to iPhoto that adds Kazakhstan localization and minor improvements to the help system?
With all these updates going on each day, multiplied by a dozen machines or so that I have to maintain, I am really starting to notice the impact. With over 200 apps on each machine, and with all of them shouting to suckle with mother every day, it’s all becoming a bit much. I find that I am spending too much time
updating, and not enough time
dating.
So I decided to see how much of a life I was actually missing due to our software developer’s obsessions with The Update, and that statistic is staggering.
In one week, 8.9% of the total usable up-time for my computers was spent downloading and installing updates. Another 6% of the time that week was spent fixing what the updates broke. One could look at this as a 14.9% tax for using software that needs improvement on a weekly basis.
But of course, we all want the latest and greatest, at any cost. That’s why in addition to daily and weekly updates, we must do the bi-yearly Upgrade Dance, where here we are all shelling out more cash to keep up-to-date, but on a magnificent level. For example, to change the ridiculous moniker of Office 2004 to something more reasonable like Office 2008 - in the middle 2009 - I downloaded an upgrade. After all, who wants people to know that we are using software that is a 1/2 decade old just by definition?
But again, no one can argue that the benefits of having, say, iLife 09 over iLife 06, is not grand and helps daily productivity. But only if the installation of the upgrade goes smoothly...
One friend of my biz just spent 3 weeks upgrading from an older version of Final Cut Pro to be the latest and greatest. He had to start sending me some of his work, as he had hosed all of his production machines during the course of the upgrade. For him, the total cost of the upgrade went much higher then the $300 sticker price on the software package.
But what irks me even more then the typical update, is that after you complete an expensive upgrade, say for example with an Adobe CS suite, you are immediately deluged with even more daily updates, as developers rush to fix all the bugs delivered in the upgrade.
So while I would like to stand up from my list of software updates and scream DE-UPDATE ME PLEASE! - I can’t. I need to know that the software that I use is running at it’s best possible level of “overall reliability and security”, despite the fact that I will never type one word of Kazakh.
Now I am dreading the release of Snow Leopard, ‘cause guess what that means? Hundreds more updates!
