I’ve been looking forward to Windows 10 for at least a year. My Windows 7 box is at least five years old, and I’ve already had a hard drive go wonky on it (having multiple backups pays off). The motherboard was great for its day, but I can’t put any new expansion boards on it, even into free slots, and have them work; so it’s starting to croak. So I was going to buy a new box, build it from the ground up with the best components I could buy, and put Windows 10 on it.

Same for my cell phone. I started researching the existing Lumnia line, to see what “flagship” phone Microsoft might come out with when Win10 came out. I was tired of using my iPhone 5 with my Win7 box, as things seemed to never work together all that well. Since at work we’re moving to a complete Microsoft shop and getting rid of the old mainframes, it seemed like a great time to move completely to Microsoft on the personal side as well.

I wanted to go “all in”.

And I did.

I’m typing this post up on my new Macbook Pro. I’ve also upgraded my phone to the iPhone 6. I’m hoping that next year the Mac Pro will get updated, and if it is I will get one of those.

I can imagine the Mythical Reader out there sputtering as they choke out “but… but what about Microsoft? What about Windows?”

Indeed. You see, although I planned to get Windows 10 for a new computer, Microsoft had other ideas. Like a good citizen of the net, I used Windows Update to regularly update my machine with software patches, lest my box become a home for viruses and malware that could spread to others’ machines. Well, Microsoft used my trust in their upgrade procedures to infect my box with a nag feature imploring me to upgrade my existing Win7 box to Win10 immediately. In researching how to block that, I discovered that Microsoft had months earlier already used their upgrade procedures to turn their CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) tracking program back on, even though I had specified when I installed the software that I did not want to participate. They’d also installed additional telemetry tracking to collect more information about my machine and the software I had on it and what I did on my machine. Without asking. Without notification. Because it suited their needs to do so, regardless of what I wanted. (I had wondered why my nightly backups were suddenly still running at the time I woke up in the morning, when they had been long finished previously; the backups were set to only run when the machine was otherwise idle, and Microsoft’s spying was being uploaded at night over my slow crappy DSL line, thus delaying the start of my backups.)

This is all in addition to the revelation that Microsoft will not permit home users to decline an update to Windows 10. You have no choice; your machine is Microsoft’s now, not yours. Microsoft has turned Windows into a virus.

Hence my going all in, alright… all in to Apple. Not that Apple doesn’t have ways to get your info back to them as well, but as far as anyone knows thus far, if you turn off the settings to send info back to Apple, those settings are respected. Which is all I ask.

I have everything moved over to the Macbook from the Win box except a few photos; I want to be sure I understand how Photos works on the Mac before putting pics over there. After that, the Win box will be a sad thing set off in the corner, occasionally started to dump some files onto it as an additional backup. It will never really be used again. It will certainly never be updated again, and after the final files moved to the Mac, I’ll unplug the Win box’s Ethernet connection, and it will slowly rot away.

May Microsoft do likewise.