NEWS:
My new podcast Potter & Daughter is live now! You can download the first episode here or subscribe via RSS or iTunes.

Fancy Patreon Patrons get each episode a week early! My daughter and I made it together, I’m really proud of it and I hope you enjoy it.

Use code 10offhoodies to get $10 off any and all hoodies in the HE store! Use it as many times as you like.

When we were kids, our parents were the early adopters. They invested time, money and emotion into this untested bit of kit with lots of shine on the surface, but very little functionality and the promise of buggy software with little to no developer support. As bugs cropped up, they applied patches. As hardware became obsolete, they upgraded. Eventually the hardware and software reach a stability point, leave beta and enter the 1.0 phase. The tech runs smoothly for a good many years, and is beloved by its users for its reliability and consistency. Every so often, there’s a service pack released and the tried and true hardware gains new abilities, and with that, a bit more usefulness and an extended lifespan.

The sad thing about technology is eventually it reaches End Of Life. The world begins moving faster and in an entirely different direction than anything the original developers expected, and supporting the first generation product starts to get expensive and frustrating. The goal of the user stops being about upgrades and new functionality, and instead focuses on just maintaining basic functionality for as long as possible, with as few unexpected system crashes or hardware failures as possible. But the hardware does start to fail, and the OS does get corrupt and, though it still boots up and performs its basic functions, those functions aren’t really compatible with the current landscape or, even worse, they aren’t even necessary.

At this point, the user is faced with the choice of continuing to use the generation 1 tech, or upgrade to generation 2. I mean, it just came out and the developers said they’ve corrected almost everything that was wrong with the first generation. Plus, you can’t even get parts or patches for the old one any more. AND there’re are some great deals to be had, if you just shop around a bit. It’s an inevitability. The new generation product is going to accomplish everything the gen 1 never could and make the users life, hell, THE WORLD so much more amazing. It’s faster, it’s more adaptable, and it already has the architecture for compatibility with hardware and software that are still only in the development phase. Upgrading is the only sensible solution. The gen 2 even looks like the old one. Just… somehow better. Cooler.

However, you shouldn’t throw out the old one just yet. Toss it in a drawer in case you ever need to transfer any files or settings to the new one. Remember, not everything comes preinstalled.