> And I do, but your tone in general -- and your last sentence in particular -- makes it very hard to empathize. Microsoft used its near-monopoly status to stifle innovation for years, and many of us have figurative scars that will never heal. You seem to think that they are making great strides (while I see them as half-hearted overtures), but either way I'm not about to "throw them a bone." Their decades of misdeeds, in my eyes, will not be expiated so easily.

I feel like Apple's has forgotten what was important, created then ruined a market, and lost everything that made it interesting (long before Steve Jobs passed away, by the way). Which cuts all the more deeply because back in the early 2ks they were walking the walk and taking a lot from NeXT's culture of developer friendliness. I grew up deeply invested in Macs and NeXT, which makes the realization painful, but... Apple wants to annihilate maker culture as it monetizes its platform. It's also stopped caring about design on a grand scale, instead appealing to very shallow notions of "visual simplicity".

That's all gone now, and they're consequently useless to me. I'd rather patronize a company currently doing the right thing after a troubled past than pretend a previously aligned company was still there.

It should be very telling that Apple AND Google's flagship hardware announcement of 2015 was something that Microsoft has been doing for years.

And if Microsoft suddenly goes evil again? Fuck them, I'll drop them and move somewhere else. Not Linux, unless the distros pull their act together, but I'm sure a competitor will emerge. Or I'll make one.