Ava commented last night that she regrets upgrading her iPad to iOS 7. It’s not really better, and now she can’t go back to the system she felt comfortable with.

I think back to the release of Apple’s old Macintosh System 7, and I realize that it’s been a long time since I felt excited about software upgrades in general. My home computer is still running OS X 10.6 and I have no plans to upgrade it. The newer versions are just different, not better. I still don’t really use Windows much but I hear the same kinds of things over there. People upgrade reluctantly, and the new system seems to be built more for Microsoft’s benefit than for theirs.

I’m reluctantly downloading Xcode 5. I’ve been ignoring it, but apparently some of my co-workers got suckered in, and now in order to keep the project files in sync we all have to upgrade. What a waste of time! Who cares? What can the new version possibly do that the old one couldn’t? I’m sure Apple is very excited for me to upgrade, but it’s really a big waste of my time, as things will inevitably have changed and broken and I’ll have to get them working again, and at the end of the whole process I’ll (hopefully) have exactly the same thing I have now: a window I can type code in and a button that says “compile it”. At least when I upgraded gcc I got access to the new language features in C++11, which are actually worth something!

To some degree, this must be just a reflection of the fact that computers themselves have largely topped out. The only thing that has made any significant performance difference in the last two or three years is the introduction of solid-state storage. We no longer have ever-faster processors coming along every couple of years and making brand-new capabilities possible, but software makers still have to keep developing new software in order to fund their continued existence, so they get ever more cosmetic and esoteric in the features they try to sell.

Maybe I’m just getting old.