is it just me, or computers getting worse right when they're supposedly getting way smarter?

msg knows a lot more about this ai stuff than i do, and i can totally ask him about tech-y stuff if i need to with a semi-okay chance of success. but he was about to throw a fit over our new computer the other day, and i for sure wasn't going to poke the bear by asking him what's up with computers being such a pain lately.

we've had this one laptop forever, and it still works for what we use it for, mostly, only the last few years it's been giving us guff more and more about the operating system not being compatible with websites and how we should really update it. but the thing is so old, it doesn't have enough memory to update. like, it literally will not hold a new operating system. and it's been doing some other weird stuff for a while, so msg broke down and bought a new one.

which, yay! only the new one doesn't like a lot of our old apps and programs and peripherals. the drawing tablet doesn't work right now, we had to update our photoshop, the hard drive stopped backing up and isn't even reading anymore, and it keeps telling us different drivers and plug-ins and whatevers are about to stop being supported due to this new "silicon" thing mac is changing everything over to.

i get it, we're probably suffering because all the stuff on our old computer was so old.

but ...

is it really that hard to make a newer, spiffier, more powerful computer figure out how to deal with older software than to make the old computer work with the older software?

i'm pretty sure the answer is, no, it's not that hard, but that what's even less hard is to let old stuff go obsolete and make you so miserable about having to update that you give up and update more often so they can rake in more money from you.

but at least they keep adding all these ai features that offer to help you do stuff you don't need help with, and that give all kinds of interesting answers to your google searches only you really can't trust those answers without doing more of a google search to make sure the ai wasn't just making everything up.

anyway, it seems like computers are more likely to turn into those battle droids from star wars sooner than they'll turn into the terminators from terminator, which i guess is a good thing.

xoxo,
claire