I volunteer at a community organization that uses a laptop to help livestream some events, and other times it uses the laptop to drive a projector during an event. The laptop is rarely used outside of these events, as it isn't anyone's workhorse machine for anything. In particular it's a good rule of thumb that if someone is booting the laptop up, they have a fairly immediate goal (e.g. they've come straight from work and have 30-60 minutes to set up A/V equipment before a public evening event).
We had to buy a windows laptop, both because of cost and because of strong "I'm a PC person" preference of a few board members. Sometimes we use it 1-2x per week, but sometimes a few weeks go by and we don't use it for anything, so I've absolutely hit this case where the last time I had the machine open, it wasn't concerned with updating itself, but it now, after being off for weeks, feels that I am delinquent in updating.
I curse that machine every single time it hijacks my setup time to install updates. I feel so frustrated, and so powerless. I would so dearly love an option that says "I will stay late after this event. I promise, you can install this update in 3-4 hours, just as soon as all the time critical live stuff is done."
Anyway it's the curse of success, right? I guarantee I'm not the only one with this kind of story, but I guarantee that all of us together are a tiny fraction of a percent of all Windows users.
Still in all, I'd gladly have paid the cost difference for a macbook air that I could trust not to start updating itself shortly before it's going to be relied on for a public event. But I guess the worst case now would be a mac running Big Sur but set to auto-update, cause then you really _could_ be out of operation for 30+ minutes.
(and obligatory - gosh, it has to have been a year since I dealt with this. Everything fades with time but I can still feel that helpless panic.)
We had to buy a windows laptop, both because of cost and because of strong "I'm a PC person" preference of a few board members. Sometimes we use it 1-2x per week, but sometimes a few weeks go by and we don't use it for anything, so I've absolutely hit this case where the last time I had the machine open, it wasn't concerned with updating itself, but it now, after being off for weeks, feels that I am delinquent in updating.
I curse that machine every single time it hijacks my setup time to install updates. I feel so frustrated, and so powerless. I would so dearly love an option that says "I will stay late after this event. I promise, you can install this update in 3-4 hours, just as soon as all the time critical live stuff is done."
Anyway it's the curse of success, right? I guarantee I'm not the only one with this kind of story, but I guarantee that all of us together are a tiny fraction of a percent of all Windows users.
Still in all, I'd gladly have paid the cost difference for a macbook air that I could trust not to start updating itself shortly before it's going to be relied on for a public event. But I guess the worst case now would be a mac running Big Sur but set to auto-update, cause then you really _could_ be out of operation for 30+ minutes.
(and obligatory - gosh, it has to have been a year since I dealt with this. Everything fades with time but I can still feel that helpless panic.)