Over the weekend I decided to do some maintenance on my low-grade gaming PC, including running Windows Update. I wasn’t sure what to expect given Microsoft released a major update to Windows 10 last week and the prior issues I’ve had with Windows updates on this PC.
Several Windows Updates later and I am still in the version released last fall. Good as that might be given my aforementioned track record, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had misremembered the release. After all, I knew Microsoft gradually tests updates with various “Windows Insider” builds so perhaps they had announced some limited release? One quick search later, and I found a write up of the announcement by Tom Warren over at The Verge:
Microsoft released a final version of the update to testers last month, and everyone on Windows 10 can get access to the May 2020 Update through Windows Update today.
“Everyone,” huh…
Not being particularly eager to update, I simply chalked it up as something that would likely resolve itself with time. Then, according to The Verge, it seemed my “wait and see” instinct was spot on. Again, Tom Warren at The Verge:
Microsoft is preventing a large number of devices from updating to the Windows 10 May 2020 Update… We’ve tried to check for the update on a variety of devices at The Verge, including Microsoft’s Surface Book 3, Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro X, a gaming laptop, and two custom-built gaming PCs. We’ve only been able to successfully install it from Windows Update on a Surface Pro 6.
But wait a minute. How in the world could Microsoft call this update “released to everyone” when they don’t even support all their own first party hardware (let alone a custom PC like mine?) Simple. They didn’t. From John Cable at Microsoft:
Beginning today, the May 2020 Update is available for customers who would like to install this latest release… (Note: You may not see Download and install on your device as we are slowly throttling up this availability over the coming weeks, or your device might have a compatibility issue for which a safeguard hold is in place until we are confident that you will have a good update experience.)
That’s one heck of a caveat1, but it’s clearly written and in plain sight. That begged the question: Did Microsoft fail to communicate the throttled release or was it misrepresented by The Verge? I looked at coverage from other sites to find out.
As always, it’s a staged rollout. It could be several weeks before your PC grabs the new update from Microsoft’s servers.
Brian Westover at Tom’s Guide:
The Windows 10 May 2020 Update is here. If you’re running a Windows laptop, chances are you’re due to get an update in the next week or two.
The update roll-out, however, may not be available for everyone initially as explained by Microsoft in its blog post.
Lastly, the venerable Paul Thurrott2:
As Microsoft notes, you may not be offered the download immediately because it is “slowly throttling up this availability over the coming weeks.
Seems like everyone else got the memo. It’s still possible that The Verge honestly misunderstood, but then why frame the throttling as some sort of reversal on Microsoft’s part in a separate article where words like “preventing” and “blocking” seem to be used purely as an unflattering way to describe what was planned all along? It’s like telling someone you were blocked from entering the airplane after attempting to board first class using a boarding pass clearly labelled “coach”.
This is an example of why I typically don’t read The Verge despite their thorough coverage from very talented writers. Information regularly seems to be presented in service to the narrative. Reading only these two articles from The Verge, you would think Microsoft did release the update to everyone, then only later decided to block the update on “lots of devices” after issues were discovered. Even their linking is misleading. The piece covering the release doesn’t have a single link to Microsoft’s announcement mentioning the throttled rollout, while the piece about the update being blocked links to Microsoft site for tracking issues found.
This narrative-first reporting bothers me because it muddies context that would otherwise help me understand the subject at hand. Maybe Microsoft is throttling this update more aggressively. Maybe there are some serious issues with the update. The Verge seems to suggest as much, but I still don’t know if that’s really the case or if it just makes for a better story.