[michaelje]

Once upon a time, physically shipping faulty software had real costs borne by the organization - production, redistribution and transportation of a physical disc.

Today there’s no disc, no recall - that cost to shipping broken software is gone. We the users pay the price.

[hahn-kev]

You act like there's no benefit to the user either, plenty of software gets better because of updates shipped after the fact.

[sudobash1]

I would prefer to know what the product will do when I purchase it, and it should continue to do the same things in the same way for its entire lifespan. I would also prefer that vendors be unable to retroactively add ads, tracking, or other user hostile "features".

Also, as an embedded engineer, I know things get tested better the more "final" they are. Faster release cadences always have poor testing as one of the tradeoffs.

[throw0101d]

> You act like there's no benefit to the user either, plenty of software gets better because of updates shipped after the fact.

There is a "release early, release often" line of thinking.

But I also think there is a risk of "fixing it in post(-production)" thinking: that lack of preparation and care can be patched over after-the-fact.

[wyager]

The averaged-over-usage-lifetime software quality for things like cars or video games is worse today than it was before OTA updates

Arguably the peak quality after a few months/years of fixes is better, but that doesn't really matter because usage is front-loaded

[itake]

I remember my parents needing to buy very expensive map DVD disks in order to update the car’s navigation system to update their car’s navigation computer.

The disks were very expensive and if you didn’t update them it wouldn’t know about new roads (slower trip, missed turns, etc).

[mook]

That's why we have Android Auto: move the updates to a thing that already has frequent Internet connection, and if the update goes wrong it's clearly the fault of this other company, plus the car itself still works fine.

Jeep already had an OTA the broke the ability for the car to be driven.

[SoftTalker]

Did those updates ever break the navigation software?

[vel0city]

I've had map update packages brick head units before, yes. Largely because they also shipped some software updates in that map update package.

[hulitu]

> plenty of software gets better because of updates

This was true for old Microsoft Windows releases. This is not true anymore. Everything is a rolling release. Angry users ? F*k them. They will get an update.

[slumberlust]

You act like all the updates benefit the user.

[hahn-kev]

Fair

[foofoo55]

s/better/less bad/