Microsoft’s AI tax

While preparing a household budget today for the next calendar year, I was somewhat shocked to discover that my Microsoft M365 subscription for next year was jumping from $109 to $159, an increase of nearly 50%. A bit of research showed that the price jump was due to the introduction of AI capabilities (branded as Copilot) in the suite of Office products. I have no use for these AI functions, and was somewhat miffed that I was going to be slugged for features I’m never going to use.

The good news is that it is possible to revert back to an M365 subscription without the AI, and avoid the inflated price. The process to do this is slightly non-obvious. You have to …

  1. Sign in to your Microsoft Account
  2. Go to the “Services & subscriptions” tab
  3. On the M365 subscription, click “Manage”
  4. Click the “Cancel subscription” link, which will then take you to page where you have the option to …
  5. Choose the “Microsoft 365 Personal Classic” subscription (with no AI)

Just to demonstrate how pathetically useless AI is, I asked Microsoft’s Copilot to “generate an image of an evil corporation sucking money from unsuspecting consumers”, and this is all I got. 🙁

Facebook folly

Today Facebook blocked news content from its platform in Australia. This wholesale eviction of content from professional journalists, after years of intentional inaction on stamping out the spread of lies and falsehoods, simply makes explicit Facebook’s long held aim of being the premier purveyor of misinformation in the chase for clicks and ad revenue.

My hope, and I know it is a forlorn one, is that people will dump Facebook in droves, and turn to other sources and providers who don’t bully their users in order to get their own way.

Facebook is not the internet. Choose wisely.

App failure

As a software developer I well know that software and information systems can have bugs. But it still astonishes me when software from big companies that is being used thousands of times each day across the world has egregious errors.

For example, look at this screenshot from the Malaysian Airlines iPhone app, where the top of the screen has a prominent and scary message about there being no e-mail address provided, while the bottom of the screen has a notification that an e-mail has just been sent to the address which is supposedly not available. And yes, an e-mail was received.

 

The Woes of iCloud Photos

I’ve blogged before about how Apple’s iCloud is a disastrous mess when it comes to managing your music library. What about photos?

Until recently I had been using Flickr to upload my iPhone photos to the cloud. Flickr is about to enforce a 1000 photo limit for free accounts, so I thought I’d give iCloud Photos a go. In the settings page on the iPhone it proclaims that iCloud Photos will …

Automatically upload and safely store all your photos and videos in iCloud so you can browse, search and share from any of your devices.

Nice promise, but largely unfulfilled. I’ve been using iCloud photos for about a month, and I’m somewhat gobsmacked at how badly a global tech giant like Apple can mess up a basic function such as uploading photos to the cloud. I’ve experienced numerous problems over the last month. Yesterday was a prime example of the inadequacies of iCoud. I went bushwalking and took about 50 photos. When I arrived home and connected to Wi-Fi, iCloud uploaded the most recent 7 photos and then resolutely refused to upload any earlier, or subsequent photos.

When you do a Google search on iCloud sync issues, you get hundreds of results, but all the suggestions are various permutations of “Have you tried turning it off and on again”. (Yes I have. It turns out that turning it off and on again doesn’t stop iCloud being rubbish.)

In the interests of truthfulness and transparency, Apple ought to update the message in the iCloud Photos Setting to

Automatically Intermittently and unpredictably upload and with a false sense of safety safely store all some random subset of your photos and videos in iCloud so you can browse, search and share from any some of your devices (because the Windows PC iCloud client is rubbish.)

[Update: In a cruel twist, moments after I hit Publish on this blog post, iCloud uploaded the remaining photos from yesterday, some 17 hours later. I guess that just reinforces the point that uploads are intermittent, unpredictable, and ridiculously slow.]

GFail

After months of declining the new GMail interface, Google finally foisted it upon me today. Maybe I’ll get it used to it after a while, but in my opinion that font they’re now using is way too weighty and ugly. I feel like I’m being shouted at whenever I open my mail.