The funny thing is, the only people who are sticking around with Windows 7 are the people who should know enough to care about the technobabble.
You are not getting the performance you could be out of your PC. Your computer isn't as secure as it could be. You don't have the latest features. Some of those UI changes you mention are actually nice, btw.
Your PC is not spying on you; it is not scandalous that a web search via Cortana sends what you type to Microsoft. Telemetry is also not scandalous; Microsoft has had telemetry in Windows & in Office for well over a decade (coming up on two).
Perhaps I should consider a career in tech journalism; With all the scandal around Windows 10's approach, I can only imagine how people will react to literally everything they ever do in their browser. You never use your web browser, do you?
While it may sound trivial, it was a bit of an insult to wake up one day and find Cortana begging me to ask her something.
Also, telemetry is not scandalous but it can be subpoenaed or hacked, and given its omnipresence and sheer depth, I wouldn't want less-than-trustworthy people gaining access to it.
Microsoft could have made its privacy settings simple -- an elegant on/off switch with the more legacy-style "click here to report this exception" behavior. Instead they complicate the matter and overwhelm the user with a ton of seemingly pointless options by default, when it should have been a toggle and an "Advanced..." button.
By throwing previously voluntary reporting into the same big telemetry bucket as everything else, they've diminished their product and forced users to accept an inferior experience when such integrations are unwanted (like my example above). Also, they never should have allowed marketing to get involved -- allowing advert pigs to switch people's desktops around is a massive overreach. You know the only reason it happened was to make more money from already-paid users.
Win10 only gets my vote when an upstream netmeter and port-monitor show only essential network activity -- occasional Windows Update queries, local network scans, and so on -- during a long period of idling and local (non-network) use.
> allowing advert pigs to switch people's desktops around is a massive overreach
Sorry but what do you even mean with this? Most of yours points already don't make a lot of sense, but this one jumped out at me. I've been running windows 10 while it came out and have literally not seen a single advertisement. Nor have I been bothered with cortana a single time. Not even sure what it is/does as I've never bothered to look into it or use it.
There is ads in a default Windows install, since Anniversary update at least. I remember that I had to reinstall my Windows 10 system on Anniversary update since Microsoft Update was simply refusing to update my system (unknown error multiple times), and in my lock screen sometimes I would get an ad about some random UWP app (or it was a movie? Don't remember). I would get app install suggestions inside Start menu too, very annoying.
For now at least, you can disable both in Windows Settings and they don't seem to come back automatically. I don't know in the future though.
Weird. I have win10 on my desktop and laptop, and I've barely tweaked the install on my laptop because I never use it. Neither show ads of any kind anywhere and I don't recall ever seeing one. There are the random pictures for lock screens, but those are mostly just nature pics. Never any kind of ads.
The start menu does have those flashy windows 10 app tiles, but I just reduced the size of the start menu until those went away.
I remember having to disable at least the first two items (Lock Screen and Suggested Apps). And instead of simply reducing size of Windows 10 start menu, I completely uninstalled all UWP included Apps.
The really infuriating thing is that Microsoft seems to re-enable some of those settings in each major update, and this is no fun.
The "bother" is that Cortana is there at all. It shouldn't be. I don't want it, I didn't opt in to it, and I don't want MS changing settings on my PC without my consent.
In fact, consent is the very heart of that particular issue. I do not consent to any of this cloud-flavored bullshit, yet I am forced to deal with it to stay modern in the platform I am most comfortable on.
Also, how do those arguments "not make a lot of sense"? Your insults could use a bit more subtlety.
Telemetry is scandalous, IMO, if it is done without the consent of the user and cannot easily be turned off. I've gone to some lengths to black-hole telemetry from Windows, and I have no desire to share my application usage statistics - quite the opposite.
Do you avoid using websites that have built-in telemetry as well? How does Google reading your email compare with Microsoft knowing how often you ran Notepad?
One of the main points of Windows 10 is that it's maintained and updated from the cloud, and part of the telemetry is for development purposes. Windows 10 isn't unique from that point of view.
The base level of Windows 10 telemetry is mostly security stuff, which is why it has to be encrypted and protected. And of course, if you install a third party AV product, you'll find it has even more intrusive hooks into everything, and it probably connects to back-end cloud analysis service as well.
What do you think Microsoft does with all this stuff from more than 400 million PCs when it has virtually no advertising business outside Bing?
You are not getting the performance you could be out of your PC. Your computer isn't as secure as it could be. You don't have the latest features. Some of those UI changes you mention are actually nice, btw.
Your PC is not spying on you; it is not scandalous that a web search via Cortana sends what you type to Microsoft. Telemetry is also not scandalous; Microsoft has had telemetry in Windows & in Office for well over a decade (coming up on two).
Perhaps I should consider a career in tech journalism; With all the scandal around Windows 10's approach, I can only imagine how people will react to literally everything they ever do in their browser. You never use your web browser, do you?