users
Explanation
The Joke
A group of tech company employees sit around a conference table. One says: "I just... I just don't feel like our users love us enough." Another adds: "I need reassurance that they don't just think of us as having a transaction-based relationship." Someone proposes a solution: "What if we temporarily broke all of their hardware? Just a little. Then we see if they stick it out with us." The next panel reads "SOON..." and shows a phone or tablet screen displaying the message: "YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE NEW OS TO CONTINUE."
The Humor
The comic satirizes how major tech companies (particularly Apple, Microsoft, and Google) push mandatory operating system updates that can degrade device performance, change familiar interfaces, or cause compatibility issues. The joke frames this behavior not as a business strategy but as the emotional neediness of an insecure romantic partner -- the company wants to test whether users truly "love" them by deliberately making their experience worse and seeing if they stay. The forced OS update is presented as the tech equivalent of a partner picking a fight to see if you will leave them. This reframing makes the real-world annoyance of mandatory updates feel even more absurd by revealing the implicit logic: if users tolerate being inconvenienced, it proves loyalty rather than mere dependence. The comic also touches on the power imbalance in the tech industry, where users often have no real choice but to accept updates due to ecosystem lock-in.
References
The comic likely references controversies around forced updates, such as Microsoft's aggressive push to upgrade users from Windows 7/8 to Windows 10 (which was ongoing in late 2015 when this comic was published), as well as Apple's iOS updates that have been accused of slowing down older devices. The "planned obsolescence" debate in the tech industry is also relevant.