On 6/22/25 09:36, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
On 2025/6/22 13:6:34, chrisv wrote:
Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
[]
It is true if you include the writeoff of existing hardware which is
still
fully functional, but cannot run Windows 11.
The price of the new PC is the entire cost.ÿ There is no "writeoff" to
be added to arrive at the total cost of the upgrade.
Yes there is. If, all other things being equal, someone had budgeted for
a PC as having, say, two or three years' useful work in it (say, talking until some hardware fails), but now find s/he now has to not only buy a
new computer but retire the old one, that cost certainly has to be
included in the cost of the "up"grade. (OK, less anything s/he can get
back by selling the old one. But that assumes they can find someone to
sell it to, who isn't also obliged to Move To The New.)>
There's probably a lot of nuances here when it comes to stuff like
marginal utility as well as business tax law for how equipment gets
written off as business expenses. Naturally, these can & will vary for
the home PC user's use cases.
For example, it used to be that that PC would be written off across a
five year depreciation life, so ($1000/5 years = $200/year). As such,
if a PC had to be replaced at just 3 years, 60% of it would have already
been written off as a business expense. Of course currently, the IRS
code has a "Bonus Depreciation", which as of 2024 was 60%, so instead of $200/year, it gets $680 written off the first year, which is 60% of $1K,
plus 1/5th of the 40% ($400) remainder: $600 + $80 = $680. And for
years 2-5, it gets $80/year. FYI, the 2025 Bonus Depreciation drops to
40%, so starting now, it would be ($400+$120) = $520, then $120/yr.
That’s the problem: Microsoft is forcing users to incur extra costs,
just to boost its own bottom line.
That's not fair.ÿ There are good reasons for the move.
There are always improvements (and degradations too, but I'll ignore
those for the moment); however, whether they are ones that will actually benefit in a financial sense, isn't always clear, and is definitely
going to vary from business to business (and person to person). [I, for example, didn't feel a _lot_ of benefit going from XP to 7, and can'
think of _anything_ - other than the below - that I've experienced
having had to move from 7 to 10. Computers mostly did all I wanted them
to do, somewhere around five to ten years ago.]The one (or two) aspects
for which people _have_ to upgrade are: 1. Security concerns. I
personally feel this aspect is exaggerated for the experienced user, but
I can see that particularly for the newbie, it _is_ a concern. For the
rest of us, yes, black-hat hackers will continue to find holes, that
might not be patched, in older OSs - but I think the incidence of exploitation of those is perhaps of a similar order to the exploitation
of new holes in the new OS? 2. Things not remaining compatible with the older OS. I'd say the majority of such are web pages, where they use
some feature of browsers, which is not present on versions of browsers
old OSs support. This _ought_ not to be a problem, but is, because web developers tend to use the latest versions of development tools, which
use new features by default. (Often, even where compiling for the older versions actually offers no new feature - they just default to the new. [Like .docx rather than .doc, and the other parts of Office; I've yet to encounter anyone who actually _uses_ whatever new features that change involved.])
There's also a lot of work being done in areas that seem divergent to
just the OS but nevertheless needs OS hooks to work (well) - or at least
an upgrade cycle to pay for it ... a contemporary example is IMO
probably Microsoft Teams which surged in application during CoVid.
-hh
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