Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple
mashable.com
mashable.com
Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company should completely fail and dissolve.
I'll stick with Apple who, though not without faults, works hard to:
- build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
- secure the integrity of my machine and my privacy
- deliver industry-leading user experience
Apple isn't perfect. The 1st-gen Magic Mouse (I haven't tried the 2nd gen) is utter garbage. Some iOS 10 UX are inconsistent and flawed. They probably should have included a USB-C - Lightning cable in with their new iPhones.
But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
I ask because while my macbook air coming up to 3 years and feels almost like a brand new machine - the current 12" is actually slower than my air. Can i really expect that to have 4 years of solid performance updates on the macbook?
In that case should i expect my air to last me the next 4 years and do just well for a solid 8 years of great performance?
If the Macbook is fast enough for someone now, and their workload doesn't change, then yes, I'd expect it to be just fine for them in 4 years; just as the same can be said for the Air, or the others.
Will the software they make over the next 4 years stay at the same level of requirements and run just as smoothly as everything seems to run on my air after 3 years?
I am not sure that is the case looking at how the OS is moving and how they are treating performance.
If MS had that $650 discount on returning a macbook when buying their hardware in Europe, I'd have already jumped on it.
Guess what, that didn't happen. It became a high-end niche market. Not saying that that's where USB-C will be going but I have a bad feeling about this.
And Thunderbolt of yore was not Apple only by far, HP, Dell, Lenovo all had mobile workstations sporting it. Heck, the Thinkpad T430s had it. Of course, it's all different now, practically all $1000 and over laptops have TB3.
90%+ released phones will have USB-C in late 2017 I wager. The alternative mode stuff may take a year or two to sort out though
> do I even want to trust an Android charger?
I don't know what this means. I'm reading this as "Do I even trust a USB-C charger", which you can safely do if you buy something that adheres to the standards. A lot of chinese knock-offs don't, but the point of standards is that you shouldn't have to care.
In those 5 years I've never seen anybody using Thunderbolt for anything other than connecting a monitor.
Dunno, I bought a top-of-the-line rMBP in late 2013, and the anti-glare coating has come off from the screen -- Apple didn't honor the warranty (this is Europe). I sold it because it was crap to use, then some months later Apple confirmed that it is a widespread problem and they will replace the screens for free. (Except in e.g. Hungary where the official dealers didn't give a crap, because the 1 year warranty was over.) Also it had problems with overheating and wifi.
On the other hand, I had a bulky, unsexy HP Zbook G2 that had a GPU problem after 2 years. HP guy came to my house with a new GPU, disassembled the laptop on my desk, put the new GPU in, run some diags and left. In 24 hrs. I sold this one and it is in service at one of my friends, rendering in 3DSMAX 12 hours a day.
Anecdata, I know.
64GB DDR4 ECC, Quad core Xeon E3-1575M processor, NVIDIA Quadro M5000 (really overkill for my work, but fun to have), etc. It's a real professional machine. Just can't be touched by anything Apple makes.
Any reason to believe MS does this more than Apple does?
> their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level.
MS making their own hardware looks to be at least partially a response to that.
> - build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
Again, this really isn't the advantage it used to be. MS first-party surface hardware is really high quality.
> But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
Apple has long offered an excellent direct user experience but extremely poor interoperability. You're still not allowed to run their OS in a VM or on third-party hardware, nor develop programs for Apple systems on non-Apple systems - and if you want a different configuration than the very limited choice Apple gives you, tough. There's plenty wrong with MS but I feel like they're at least somewhat open to alternatives if I don't like their way of doing it. Apple is very much "our way or the highway", which is not where I want my software to be.
"[...] you are granted a limited, non- transferable, non-exclusive license: [...] (iii) to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software, for purposes of: (a) software development; (b) testing during software development; (c) using macOS Server; or (d) personal, non-commercial use."
This section was first introduced in the EULA for OS X 10.7.
I can't speak for Windows since I don't use them, but I do run LittleSnitch on Mac (network monitor) and I don't really see requests to Apple I would not expect to see.
Of course that doesn't mean they couldn't send collected data with other information they sent, but it doesn't seem likely (a lot of effort for something almost nobody cares and optics are much worse when/if it would come out).
Every time I use Spotlight! Everytime I log in.. heck, even the keyboard service has to make internet requests!
# Privacy: don’t send search queries to Apple
# Safari
defaults write com.apple.Safari UniversalSearchEnabled -bool false
defaults write com.apple.Safari SuppressSearchSuggestions -bool true
# Spotlight
defaults write com.apple.spotlight orderedItems -array \
'{"enabled" = 0;"name" = "MENU_WEBSEARCH";}' \
'{"enabled" = 0;"name" = "MENU_SPOTLIGHT_SUGGESTIONS";}'
Voila! More privacy.
Compare to the shit that Windows 10 collects, and the comparison isn't even remotely close.
Yes you are, for several years now(I realize this was not always the case). You can find the explicit allowances for doing so by searching for "virtual machine" in their license:
Amusingly, this is the method that most hackintosh-style OS/X VMs work - by taking the config from a OS/X version of VMWare Workstation and adding it to the Windows / Linux install.
However, that's no longer licensed (and to me, the main advantage of running a VM here is to be able to test stuff in OS/X when I don't otherwise have access - i.e. on a Windows machine).
I don't see the problem with ignoring the hosts file, if that is indeed what is happening. It's not really intended as a blocking mechanism.
Google is, for better or worse, still an advertising company. Selling you a phone isn't how they make money; getting you to send information about yourself to them (in order to provide more accurate ad targeting) is how they make money.
Microsoft is caught in a weird place. Historically they've been dependent on OEMs to buy Windows from them and preinstall it, and OEMs have had such low margins that they have to pre-load the hardware with a bunch of spyware/adware in order to turn a profit. Microsoft could kick this by taking greater ownership of the hardware side and adopting a more Apple-style approach, and the Surface line seems to be an attempt to do this, but they aren't there yet.
This is a common and generally accepted interpretation of Google that I conjecture contrary to. To restrict such an unprecedented glut of data solely to marketing would seem prohibitively wasteful. Access to intellectual property[1], psychology/social trends, biometrics[2], political, economic, and myriad otherwise private/personal details, etc., collectively and individually comprise a colossal repository useful for predicting, manipulating and understanding (in entirely novel ways) all these very subjects. From intel (e.g. gov) to legislation (e.g. ALEC), the implied applications are many. Perhaps ads are the primary ostensive means of income for Google presently, but opportunity elsewhere abounds. And maybe I've got it all wrong and marketing is the root directory of humanity.
1. Considerations: Exchange of unencrypted prospective patent data pre-patent; google edu domains; unclaimed conceptual material, etc.
2. Voice, face.
"Instead, the company is tremendously iterative which is a fancy way of saying that they’re good at making steady, small improvements over time." http://time.com/3712678/apple-innovation/ from 3/2015
Maybe Microsoft needs less innovation and more bread and butter products for ordinary users.
The fact is that these were criticisms before last week, and nothing about those has changed - the issue is that one firm released a product which was significantly better than the offerings made by the other firm.
Providing this kind of argument is moving the goal posts
I had an iPod touch. When I was using it on a certain network it couldn't hit the NTP servers. This set the time to 1970, and I couldn't change it manually due to some integer overflow bug. Trying to scroll those wheel things to the current date, it would start skipping 30 years forward and backward. The time not being set meant I couldn't use the app store, upgrade the OS, etc., rendering the device useless.
I'll stick to Linux and Android. At least I can fix those when they break.
The iPad is still working nicely, but the behavior by Apple just sucks.
If you're trying to do this with an app you haven't previously purchased, you'll need to purchase it directly on iTunes, and then it will show up in the Purchased section of the App Store on the device.
This doesn't make sense. No device resets its time to 1970 when it can't hit NTP servers.
Windows 10 don't really spy on me more than Apple or Google, but for those who complain there is always Linux that is the only real true alternative to opting out of being spied upon.
I run Windows 10 Pro and love it auto-updates is wonderful as a programmer also because I know people will get the latest version automatically.
I did try my hand at an apple machine for awhile. Bought one of their "high quality" laptops. Used it until multiple keys broke - the < key angled sideways when part of the hinge broke, and the capslock key literally snapped in half. There are less extreme measures to discourage me from macro and template metaprogramming...! I've never had a laptop break that fast before or since. They wanted me to leave the entire laptop with them for weeks to replace the keyboard, IIRC, so I passed and just used the exposed membrane for awhile.
Since then, I've turned down a free MBP at work. I'd exhaust the max memory linking. I want a sane, tactile keyboard. They didn't splurge enough on the SSD to fit my projects on. The display isn't even 4K. I'll be forced to dual boot if I try to use it as a laptop. It's overpriced - and while an overpriced iPhone dongle for iOS development may be necessary, I'd much rather have a Mac mini and have the difference spent on more 4K monitors, more RAM, more SSD space, and more cores for my PC build.
I've finally gotten around to retiring my 2009 PC build this year. Admittedly, I replaced the motherboard once when it failed, and upgraded the RAM, but that's still doing better than a dead-out-of-the-gate MBP I'm afraid. Which is a shame - I'd like more competition for my money.
Enough with this rubbish claim, please. Everyone I've asked to actually substantiate it resorts to angry handwaving. How about you?
The telemetry collects crash and feature usage data, the same as macOS and all of the phone OSes does. You want that on because it tells MS where the bugs are. If you turn it off, you don't get to complain about bugs because MS has no idea you encountered any.
Microsoft may not be any better on the software end of things, but at least they're doing interesting things with hardware, WITHOUT killing what works.
Are you talking about this[0] (which seems inconclusive), or something else? All other spying incidents I see from Lenovo are software-based.
[0] http://www.geek.com/chips/spy-agencies-shun-lenovo-finding-b...
I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good, right now, or die. Microsoft can throw a lot of money at something and still be ok. The surface looks very good, and it's a unique vision.
I wish someone would found the equivalent of BeOS, and sell BeBoxes for it. A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. A slot for a stepper driver card would be pretty cool. Maybe a geek port, or maybe a clever way to integrate a breadboard or FPGA, or both.
Things feel really stable right now. Google will keep selling ads, Apple will keep cranking out consumer electronics, Microsoft will keep selling its windows/office pair to the universe, Amazon will keep getting better at logistics, and Facebook will keep growing the social graph. None of them are going to bet the farm on anything. And, really, they're all big clunky slow organizations they rebelled against.
I hope there will be a big wave of innovation, I don't think it's going to come from the big 5. But i'd agree, yes microsoft is some percentage more innovative than apple. Big, radical, disruptive, change the world ideas? No, none of the big 5 are capable anymore.
I mostly agree, but seen some of Google's acquisitions and what they're doing now? Boston Dynamics are making some huge strides in robotic motion.
Ask a google engineer. they'll tell you Tesla is screwing up the market. Tesla is risking the existence of self driving cars ever happening. One big failure means massive lawsuits and regulation. That may be true. But it's clear, Google does not need the win. Google is unwilling to take the risks to make it happen. They're going the Xerox route.
And that's completely fine. Google has a lot to lose. They could easily be put in a situation where they have to pay billions, for years. They will get there eventually, they might even win. They're just structurally incapable of risking what Tesla can risk.
> A linux laptop with flawless hardware support.
is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia).
You can get a Linux laptop with flawless hardware support right now, really. In fact, I haven't looked over HCLs when buying a Linux laptop for more than five years now. Hardware support is realistically not a problem with Linux anymore.
What is a problem is the fact that, once again, we're going through one of those Let's Rewrite Everything phases and nothing works, for any serious, productive, professional definition of "works", not in Gnome land, not in KDE land, and thanks to the ever-encroaching XDG & friends land, not in fuck-it-i've-done-this-throughout-my-teenage-years-so-blackbox-and-a-bunch-of-xterms-it-is land.
It's great, it's the system that gives you the most control over your system, it's the one that doesn't spy on you and doesn't force you to buy overpriced hardware (look, I'm all for good design and thinness and whatnot but Powerbook G4s were a good bang for the buck, despite the funky hinges, not today's MacBook Pros), and I've grown so accustomed to it and so fond of it on a personal level that the thought of leaving it behind is unpleasant, and compensated only by the fact that I'll still be using it at work.
But I'm sick of nursing my system back to health after every other dnf update. Gnome 3 looks good and it's great to use, but it's a maintenance nightmare, since virtually everything breaks from one minor version to another. Plasma 5 is a step forward from KDE 4 but it still crashes and Kmail2 is still a nightmare. Mind-boggling bugs pop into existence with each new release.
Whenever I show the latest and greatest to someone (this week it was my screen going blank when switching virtual consoles, and if your next question is "why would you switch virtual consoles in 2016", the reason is that gdm was freezing and I wanted to restart it), they shrug and swear they've never seen it before on their system. Unfortunately, this type of thinking is so ingrained in our community (by "our community" I mean "Linux programmers") that I doubt we'll ever devise anything that will stay usable for more than six months.
This was all very fun many, many years ago, when I was in high school and I had a lot of free evenings and when, if something suddenly stopped working after an update or crashed or whatnot, my reaction was "whoa, cool, what's causing this" rather than "well, I'll think about how to fix this while I'm making dinner so that I can still have an hour of two to hack on something". This is not only no longer fun, it's not understandable. Fifteen years is a long time.
I've been messing around with Windows on an old laptop I have around. Windows 10 is pretty slick (maybe it doesn't seem so impressive to you, but please realize that the last time I used Windows routinely, it was Windows 2000) but the *nix-style usage is too ingrained in my brain by now. However, I'm not really looking forward to having to wrestle with my OS for privacy, nor do I trust Microsoft with my computer-related well-being on a ten-year period -- and, being a programmer, I guess it's understandable that "computer-related well-being" is a pretty big deal to me.
Four years ago, suspend/resume was pretty much a solved problem on regular, run-of-the mill hardware. It worked out of the box, hardly needed any tuning, hardly had any performance problems. It was messy when it was introduced but by 2011 or so, we pretty much took it for granted.
Nowadays, it feels like the year is 2003 again (only I have a lot less hair so it's a weird kind of 2003). I bring my system out of suspend and the text on my desktop icons is corrupted (!?) and some network connections are mysteriously failing (this one is particularly nasty, and I have no idea what to trace it to; ICMP works fine, but TCP connections to some systems just don't work anymore because the SYN/ACK never gets to me. I initially thought this was my ISP doing something funky with their routing, but alas, my Windows laptop doesn't have this problem).
And this isn't really new and shiny hardware that would sort of understandably have these problems, it's a five year-old desktop.
Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. I used i3 with Debian. That kept things simple enough so I could understand them. That meant no niceties like a display manager. Back then I could explain the differences between startx and xinit, and I could compile kernels. The desktops were way too complicated to fix if they broke.
I tired of the whole thing after doing my USA income taxes through fill in PDFs because there is no commercial Linux software. I didn't want a browser based solution. I bit the bullet and bought a Mac.
It is the best computing decision I ever made. Proprietary software is readily available and works. Free software is available through Macports. It's Unix when I need it, but when I want a GUI it always works. I spend much less time fixing broken stuff.
I miss my Thinkpad keyboard. Also, since Mac is an expensive proprietary platform, bugs in free software take longer to fix. For instance the GHC Haskell compiler currently has issues on Mac OS Sierra and it will take awhile until they fix that.
However there are many things on Mac that I could never get in Linux, such as the awsome trackpad and Duet, which gives me a cheap second monitor via an iPad.
My days running Linux on hardware are over. If I really want Linux I will get a Mac or even a Windows machine and then run Linux in a VM.
I used to do that for a very long time, too, but it's getting unpleasant. A lot of things get upset if you don't have a "proper" session running behind the scenes. It requires me to learn more about xdg and systemd than I can learn without giving in to existential dread about my profession, and frankly, it's a shame to see decades of progress in the GUI go wasted on me just because the Linux community won't get its act together.
In some ways, I think I'm more or less like the proverbial dinosaur in this regard. Virtually no one developing for Linux cares about the desktop anymore. The Linux "community" is, increasingly, a bunch of huge hardware manufacturers, automotive consortiums and a few companies with large datacenters to run. This is where the money -- and most of the development effort -- is. Most of the people who were interested in, and could meaningfully contribute to usability-related efforts and desktops have long gone to web or Apple land.
Edit: in fact, I think virtually everyone I know has moved to macOS, OpenBSD or Windows. Can't blame them.
My experience is that Linux works better on the desktop in general. Laptop's on the other hand have always given me trouble.
Overall it's sad to see that the "year of the Linux desktop" is always 10 years from now and it's realistically speaking never going to happen.
I've gone through my own versions of your frustrations, but i'll spare you the war stories.
my 2 cents. macos is bsd, hacked up in odd ways. if you want to edit something in /etc, you're doing something wrong. It's a little off putting figuring out where stuff is. /Library/Frameworks is common. There's no C compiler, without installing (part of) xcode.
You've got 2 choices for package management. macports is a shared nothing approach, everything is compiled against libraries compiled to /opt/local/. Or homebrew. brew tries to share everything with the built in libraries. Just be consistent, i lost some time to libiconv, postgress and haskell the other day. If i'd been consistent i'd have avoided the problem entirely. I've never used brew seriously, but lots of people like it. I swear fealty to macports.
The biggest loss for me was no tiling window manager (although i think some hacks exist to get the same effect).
osx is different. it will trip you up from time to time. a whole bunch of stuff is reliable in ways that were not reliable for me in linux. (take that with some salt, i haven't used linux as my desktop in quite a few years, and i think things have come a long, long way).
If it sucks, you can always go back to linux. That touchbar support might take a while to work right though, and no esc key till it does. ctrl-] will probably be your friend.
You're looking at a different set of tradeoffs. you're a programmer, odds are very good everything you want is there. You can always run a VM if you get stuck. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. I do think rainbow free days are a little less frequent than either windows or linux, so it has generally been a win for me.
So I know what to expect right now. Frankly, what I'm afraid of is that I don't know what to expect next year. 2K for an experiment is ok if I could run it for three or four years. Right now, it looks like if Apple has a document called "Roadmap for Mac Computers, 2016-2020", there's a good chance that it's a four-page summary of another document called "How to convince all our customers to just get an iPad already for fun and profit".
There is always risk it's not the "optimal" choice, but it's certainly not the "wrong" choice. MacOS is fine. If you hate it just install something else. (but the brand new stuff might be flakey under windows/linux for a while)
Gnome 2 actually turned out to be a lot better than Gnome 1, but it took a long time, and the unpleasant thing is that when it finally became polished enough not to be annoying on a daily basis, it enjoyed about two years of quality life before the CADT wheel started spinning again. I'm sure Gnome 3 will eventually be a lot better than Gnome 2 (it already is, in a lot of ways, but it's hard to enjoy it when it keeps crashing and when you have to tweak it for days after every update).
At least on the GTK side, things are actually starting to look a little better (the GTK team has a long-term roadmap, for instance).
The nice part about OS X is (or, at least back when I last used it, was) that it's a convincing enough Unix underneath. As far as I can tell, there is no direct equivalent for e.g. launchd, the *nix-ish frontend isn't really integrated, it's more like an additional layer.
This is ok for what I guess is 99.99% of the people who use Windows and need to use the occasional Linux program/bash script/whatever. I'm in the other category :-).
I made a peer comment about google vs Tesla self driving cars that captures the essence. The point is, Google won't sacrifice ad sales to win at tablets. Apple won't sacrifice consumer electronics to win services. None of them are in a do or die situation that startups are in. The big five might see the problem, but they can't make the move. They're structurally incapable of taking the risk.
I promise you that Microsoft would happily dump a couple billion into the phone market to own it. Microsoft paid 7.2 billion just for Nokia, not counting the likely billions poured into the Windows Phone OS itself.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee
Consider fencing vs. sword fighting. In fencing, my goal is to turn on a little light when i touch your body with my epee. In sword fighting, my goal is to kill you. it's a gruesome analogy, and hard to really crystalize. The big 5 have something to lose. They fence. The little guy is sword fighting. Did you ever really feel like Microsoft would go out of business because they lost the phone market?
There is an umami to sword fighting. There's this whole other flavor that's hard to describe, unless you've tasted it. I know, it's kind of a bullshit argument. There's this visceral sense of impending doom that leads to brilliant or lucky moves. I don't believe a large, successful organization can really get that flavor. you can take fencing seriously, but it's still different than sword fighting.
I dunno. the best idea i have is to try playing poker. You have to face this horrible, awful feeling. You know the right thing to do, but it's so hard to do it. A good fencer will do the right thing. A sword fighter will do the right thing out of desperation.
I don't doubt Microsoft's commitment. I think they were committed at the wrong layer. Furthermore, i think their income level makes it impossible to see the layer to commit at.
My apologies if this seems crazy. It's hard to articulate.
This isn't just you not explaining yourself well. This is an entirely different claim. Your first claim was that the big companies "are incapable of risking losing billions on an idea" which is patently untrue.
This claim isn't as clearly untrue. It's just not meaningful. If you need billions to win, then the "little guy" need not apply. If only big players can afford to compete, then that's who will compete.
For the record, Nokia and BlackBerry and a number of other phone companies got to the point that they had nothing to lose, dumped in billions, and still lost the market. I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of taking a major market from an established player.
> There is an umami to sword fighting. There's this whole other flavor that's hard to describe, unless you've tasted it. I know, it's kind of a bullshit argument.
Yes, that is a bullshit argument, partly because it's the whole "you couldn't possibly understand" thing that is in general a bad argument, but mostly because this claim means that you've been in a sword fight and literally hacked someone to death. I find this hard to believe.
All of these are huge, expensive undertakings. Making humanity distributed will be expensive and costly, but also transformative. Solving global environmental sustainability with solar power and energy storage, and revolutionizing planetary transport with hyperloop technology will also be hugely transformative. I don't see that happening without spending tons of money on infrastructure.
The idea that small startups will usurp large companies in nature industries is folly. Examples like Uber aren't valid because fundamentally it's a different kind of company based on technology. A better comparison would be what are the chances that a small startup, competing in the same market as Uber, will take over that industry or change the landscape dramatically?
For PCs what we have is what we see right now in terms of companies and choices.
While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just need to keep iterating it. They also need to introduce a Surface product that the average consumer can afford--even Apple has done this with the Air line and the non-Pro line.
I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings, and provide a $1k Macbook Air equivalent, along with a sub $2k iMac equivalent, they'll win.
Microsoft also has one other major hurdle. They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks. They have to build an update to 10 that wins over the people they lost. They have to come out and say "Yes, we want your telemetry data, but we aren't going to force you to give it to us, so from now on, it's opt-in".
As far as Apple goes, I think they know they aren't innovating at the same pace. I think the headphone jack, the escape key, and touch bar are them trying to figure out how to innovate without Steve Jobs. I think Jony Ive is capable, but he needs room to fail to learn. Steve Jobs talked a lot about how as a company, you produce a lot of failures for each success. Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Either way, I don't care who the most innovate company is. I'd rather see them all trying to innovate, because the good stuff they come up with can only benefit the consumer.
I'd be happy if they made things opt-out. As in you can opt out of them. I just had a miserable time getting my default documents folder to not be the onedrive folder so things stopped saving there and microsoft stopped complaining about me being over my pitiful 5GB.
I tend to agree. Windows 10 is better in some respects than earlier versions and worse in others, but right now most of those don't matter very much. The forced updates, forced telemetry, and emphasis on online services make it a non-starter for small businesses like ours. I've given up even feeling Schadenfreude when I read reports of friends or colleagues who have moved to 10 and then lost something due to a bad update or untimely reboot. Now I just feel a general sense of disappointment mixed with concern about what we'll order in future when we can't conveniently buy new machines with Windows 7 preinstalled any more.
Sadly, I don't anticipate any change in direction for Microsoft as long as Nadella remains at the helm. He clearly has a vision for how the future of Microsoft software and OSes is going to be, and it's clearly backed by the board who put him there, and a traditional desktop OS would seem to be in conflict with that vision. And at least for now, the business as a whole seems to be doing OK with this emphasis on services, even with the unpopularity of Windows 10.
The Surface Pro 4 costs $150 less than a comparable Macbook air.
https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Microso...
Also, Surface price doesn't include a keyboard.
Microsoft have...
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/con...
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/charlesa_us/2016/05/02/c...
Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones.
This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows 10 still has some serious pain points that need to be worked out, specially on the Surface line with touch interfaces.
So Gnome and KDE need more Devs to become better, and people only have so much spare time, which is why having corporate backers is also critical to projects.
The problem isn't so much the hardware but the OS. I have awful memories of Windows. I suppose it has gotten better, but I wonder if it's a realistic replacement to Mac OS X? Essentially, I want something that just works and where I can use common unix tools. Maybe the new Unix subsystem + an X server will do it.
Concerning the new MBP, I don't mind the touch bar or the specs but they are really expensive (esp. in Europe). If they don't get cheaper, I may try a windows machine.
You end up abbreviating class names in the file names and mess up searchability.
You end up using single letter directories like 'C:\b\' instead of 'C:\backup\', etc. as workarounds. It all feels very MS DOS.
another thing to note is that it requires the windows insider preview, which in my experience required auto reboots every few days. very frustrating so I had to revert....
Switching off of Insider Preview is a TERRIBLE experience of it's own: You can't actually revert back. you either have to restore from backup (which isn't mentioned when you switch to insider preview mode) or wait for the next mainline release, which may be 6+ months away, and you have to MANUALLY TRACK when insider syncs with main and then switch to main during the window in which they are matched.
The computer is a useful tool only when it has an OS. What you run on it is as important as the hardware itself. The combination of Hardware and OS is what makes the tool what it is, and comparing them each separately doesn't make any sense in my opinion.
And that is where Apple wins for me currently. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and Windows just doesn't have that unix base that I'm comfortable with. Sure I can get a terminal on it, but it feels like a program I'm running, not actually being in control of the machine.
Linux is my real fallback option, but then I don't get paid to worry about wether my local backups are working OK, or why my laptop won't sleep or wether my GPU is working etc.
I don't think Apple is going in the direction that will benefit a lot of developers, but they've got a long way to fall before they become a second choice for me.
It literally runs native Linux with Windows subsystem for Linux:
To me that is a very tired phrase for Apple users. I don't begrudge anyone's preferences, until they force everyone else to jump through hurdles to get their machine to work the company's network and technology stack. I see IT guys almost every day being absorbed by people who claim to be more productive on their Mac. Every OS seems to work as well as the person using it. I prefer Linux on my Chromebook, but I don't expect hand-holding, and will break out the Dell when needed.
They're trying to directly compete with their partners. Budget laptops are where literally everyone else they partner with focuses.
Buying Iphone, Ipod, IMac, or air its more of a fashion statement than a Technical one, and coding does look cool on Mac, and time may be changing, but most people that i know who code on Apple product arent your typical computer science, nerds with no art back ground kind of coders.
Yeah. Honestly, I don't want Windows. What I want is a really solid durable hardware platform for running Unix. One day maybe I will try a surface with Linux, I wonder if MS has crippled that or not. Anyone know?
So Linux is good enough for me, but on the Laptop there are still many issues, like waking from sleep. Apple has an excellent product, but on the day that I decide that I need to switch, then I'll probably also try to contribute to help fix the Linux issues.
The art background comment is funny. I don't really know what all my colleagues studied in school, half of them probably don't remember. But I work with a lot of backend distributed systems people, very little visual UI type work. Most of us use macs because of unix. And that's important because we deploy to Linux. While not the same exactly, it's close enough to build comparable tools between both.
Apple has hands down, the best portable Unix on the market. They should play to that audience more, rather than just a side note.
Why does this suck for users? This is actually one of my favorite aspects of W10.
Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.
Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways. They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else. They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company). Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.
Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.
Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better. Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.
I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack. I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.
MS Research is a brilliant department but it is (was) completely disconnected from the main business.
And yes, NT driver model is super robust.
If one is to assume R&D spending it roughly equatable with "non-public" innovation than historically Microsoft is more innovative than even Google, let alone Apple. This assumption may be weak but I think it would at least be somewhat correlated.
can you elaborate on what you mean by this?
* Custom screen technology leap-frogging 4K displays directly to 5K, at a full-system price below that of a 4K screen alone from competitors at the time.
* wide colour gamut screen tech putting them several years ahead of the competition.
* Brand new screen digitiser technology in the iPad Pros that also puts them several years ahead of any of their competitors.
* 3D Touch technology nobody else even appears to have a path to implementing because it requires such close design integration with the hardware and software.
* mobile processor designs putting them years ahead of any of their competitors in yet another technology category.
* A new variant of iOS (Watch OS) that's now powering two completely different product categories.
I venture to suggest that the death of innovation at Apple is being declared somewhat prematurely.
Watch OS has nothing innovative about it that Android Wear doesn't already have, and is not taking off in the market.
3D Touch is a technological marvel but a useless feature for usability. It hasn't taken anymore than Samsung's "hover over the phone" touch has.
I can't comment on the colour gamut tech or the screen digitiser tech, but what exactly is Apple doing there that is leaps and bounds ahead of other display/tablet manufacturers? Do you have any links that compare these?
I haven't heard about #3, I guess I don't understand 3D Touch's hardware specs enough to know what you mean with #4, and I just don't believe #5.
From my facebook feed where I follow artists from AAA game companies: Blizzard, EA, 343, etc.
How many ADC monitors are out there now??
What technology are you talking about?
> mobile processor designs putting them years ahead of any of their competitors in yet another technology category.
Are you talking about the A10 Fusion? It's the fastest single-core processor, but according to https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Mobile/Apple-iPhone-7-and-7-Pl... the Snapdragon 820 has a faster GPU and the Kirin 950 a better mutli-core score in Geekbench. So I wouldn't say that their mobile processor design is years ahead (it's more that iOS doesn't need more than two cores and therefore they can really optimize single-core performance).
> A new variant of iOS (Watch OS) that's now powering two completely different product categories.
How is this any different than Android Wear?
The way the pen and screen work together, and the screen sandwich layering that significantly reduces parallax between the pencil tip and image.
Regarding processor tech I was mainly thinking of the move to 64bit and secure enclave which completely out-manoeuvred the competition.
I'm not saying Apple is the only company innovating, Android Wear is a credible and innovative alternative that's holding its own in the market.
Why is the move to 64 bit so important, but the move to 4 cores isn't? I don't really see why 64 bit makes sense for < 4 GB RAM devices and I also bet that no one can really tell the difference performance wise.
This is also the first time I hear about Secure Enclave. TouchID isn't that secure anyway (https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2013/ccc-breaks-apple-touchid), so I really don't care how the fingerprint is stored.
It's literally just a rebadged LG display.
Apple can use their formidable logistics (few variants bought in huge quantities for several years) to be first-to-market with these improvements. The same logic probably applies to their Hi-Def smartphone/laptop screens, I don't think they made fundamental R&D in that space, but signaled early to manufacturers they were ready to pay for them. This makes them appear as innovators, while allowing their competitors to offer cheaper alternatives a few months later (where they invariably outdo Apple spec-wise after a year or so, so clearly the tech is coming from the manufacturers, who were just waiting for their next-gen to become economically viable). That is no small feat, and has a positive impact for the industry, but I would not call that innovation.
And what is specific to Apple about wide color gamut displays? These types of displays have been common for years.
Apple didn't invent 5k screens.
Apple also didn't invent the micro harddrives in their iPods. So what?
Apple was really good at making basic consumer ideas work not at inventing stuff. Most inventions (by apple, MS) are based on older ideas. Don't get the invention religion anyway, who cares if apple was first or not. Just use wat you like
From memory they beefed up the "modern" one then ditched the "desktop" one in Windows 10 sometime around the Anniversary Update.
The LTSB edition.
My home PC has a license for W10 Pro, but I run LTSB instead. Trading less "features"/more power over my OS of LTSB with a possible improper licensing violation is a gray area I'm willing to admit and apply.
I think that almost every piece of information which is not pure art or mathematical formulas - is some sort of propaganda..
Meaning someone somewhere is pushing his own agenda, directly or indirectly.
It is strategically wise for Apple competitors to put out all kinds of negative articles right now.
Apple does something unpopular - use that as a lever to swing the opinion - that's when some customers fall into your own nets.
After all, competition is not messiah - they desperately want to push their own products and inflict as much damage as possible to the top dog, which happens to be Apple right now..
I don't know about this particular article, but I'm just saying - I've seen so much negativity and wining about the MacBook Pros - that the "pro" people are left behind, there's no ESC key and so on - I'm really curious to actually try it for myself..
What if I like it ? Is that a strategy too ?
I find it harder and harder to believe anything on the Internet now, because it's all twisted and bended and distorted.. It's a war out there and the battlefield is our minds.
The proof is littered all over HN and Reddit where blog posts all begin with the same defense, "I"ve been using Macs since... and have bought Apple since this, this and this."
Personally, I wish there were a company selling a generic looking, uni-body notebook, similar in aesthetic and price to the new Xiaomi laptop. If some company could optimize hardware like that specifically for Linux, from the ground up, then maybe I could ditch this aging mid-2011 Macbook Air running Linux.
But these are just words. Actually, I just lied, but you would have probably believed me, because, why would I lie in a comment ? Well, why not ? :) I got my first ever Mac in 2008 and I've only owned an iPhone 5 and 6.
So truth and falsehood on the internet is very cheap - it costs nothing to write something outrageous - and people would probably not even notice it.
Being paid to write a lie ? Easy money...
But I totally agree on the need for an open source alternative to Apple.
I'd also like to see an open source version of UIKit..
With Swift being open source, I think people are already working on it. You'll have an army of iOS devs ready to build cool Linux applications in their favourite language, using familiar UI concepts. I'd love to get involved into something like this ;).
Furthermore, you can see the products yourself and decide what is a major improvement for yourself - without needing to relate to what someone says on an article.
It bears to remember that this is microsoft, the company which until 2012, had no hardware product of its own.
I use a surface today, and the new studio which was launched is a poor product because of its graphics card which is substandard compared to whats on the market now.
But its still a significant step ahead, and all these changes are happening along side getting one core together. The braver company today is Msft.
They're not quite passing off their goods as Apple's but they're not far off it.
Apple's current vision might not be my current vision but at least it's authentically theirs.
I don't even think Apple is catering to the high end here. If they were, the new MBP would be shipping with a lot more horsepower. It seems like they are catering to the casual user who is happy to pay a premium to have a slick-looking Apple product but doesn't actually have demanding computing needs. Many college students would fall in this category.
The high-end buyers that would pay a premium to have a powerful Macbook to do serious development or multimedia computing have been left out in the cold.
Maybe there are enough of the casual buyers that Apple thought it made more sense to cater to them than the professionals. But Apple easily could've made a machine that catered to both markets if they had better vision.
I love Apple for this and I am buying the new Macbook Pro tomorrow. :)
I'm looking forwards to when wireless headphones are more ubiquitous and cheaper.
If quality is just a matter of sending enough information through then why could wireless never be enough?
Surely you've seen a speed difference with a wired internet connection compared to wireless?
> Surely you've seen a speed difference with a wired internet connection compared to wireless?
yeah, but note also that what I was responding to was you saying wireless would never have as good of a sound quality. "Never" is a long time.
> I'm looking forwards to when wireless headphones are more ubiquitous and cheaper.
So wait for that before you remove the port. Otherwise we're just trading 3.5mm cable hassles for Lightning adapter/cable hassles.
> So wait for that before you remove the port.
Err, I was stating my personal opinion on wireless headphones. I'm not Apple.
Obviously people have different preferences on removing the port. I'm glad that it will help push the availability of wireless headphones, and speed up their marketplace penetration.
> Otherwise we're just trading 3.5mm cable hassles for Lightning adapter/cable hassles.
Again, for my own situation, I wouldn't have any Lightning adapter/cable hassles.
Is there any shred of proof that this has happened at Apple? How has their marketing budget developed over the last few years? Was replacing all the ports with USB-C a typical sales/marketing decision?
Maybe Apple has changed, but not in the way Steve talks about here if you ask me. The only thing that is relevant in that video is that Apple has indeed come to the point where they've gotten a very big monopoly-like position. And they're struggling with finding a new innovation/product which is as big a success as iPhone was. But I don't think they've changed how they've organized the company. It could just be that they haven't found the right opportunity yet. You can't force innovation.
"Brave" probably makes sense in the context where a company is ready to literally bet it all on something they believe in when they're in a sustainable position.
It has worked fabulously. Just look at the number of people who think Apple innovated computing at any level: from portable music to smart phones to displays and on and on. These days you're a "tech geek" if you have a couple of Apple devices in your kit. This phenomenon has almost nothing to do with innovation in technology but quite a lot with their marketing efforts to present themselves as fashionable technology innovators.
In the last 20 years or so there aren't very many technologies Apple has actually innovated on that didn't already exist in some form or another, just without the Apple Marketing Magic behind it.
It seems people manage to get it going, some have forked the Kernel to provide top notch support, I just wish it were baked into Ubuntu out of the box.
Some of the cool stuff from HCI labs in the early 2000s seems to be arriving in products on Windows faster than on Macs too (tangibles, large touch displays, etc).
It seems to me that Apple is somehow now missing the "obvious plays". They put a bunch of effort into Siri, but were late putting it on the Mac. They put a bunch of effort into multi-touch; but Macs are now just about the only notebooks without a multi-touch screen. They put a bunch of effort into the Pencil to make it low-latency for artists; but you can't use it on a Mac. Another obvious play was to make it so you can plug in the ipad and use it as a secondary display with pencil support, but it took Duet Display to do that for them so they've never been able to promote that you can do that.
Perhaps they bet single-mindedly on the tablet replacing the computer, and were caught out when the tablet market saturated and started getting eaten by phablets? Either way, it seems to me they've found themselves left with an anaemic laptop product pipeline.
Heck, Asus' Zenbook 3 line costs around $1500 and it has the best possible components, better screen, better keyboard, better everything.
Financially speaking, Apple is now the iPhone company. They could release a Mac Quantum with holographic storage and still disappoint investors.
Maybe I was just lucky with my previous Macs but that's the experience I've had in the last years.
> The MBP also lacks the chip the AirPods need to work smoothly.
Could you elaborate a bit?
The W1 chip is in the AirPods, the device that it connects to doesn't need to have a W1, the only requirement is OS support, that includes Macs running Sierra.
Under system requirements: "Mac models with macOS Sierra or later"
People that really like macOS and have no other choice. I'm not happy with the new hardware at all, I can see other alternatives that Id be much happier with but then Id have to use Linux or Windows on the desktop. So either I put up with it and stick with Apple or change my OS too, against my will. Neither option is a particularly good one, so it comes down to lesser of two evils. They've put us in a bit of a bind.
But Apple has and still is doing some great things when it comes to innovation. The taptic engine is a great addition, so was touch 3D, Touch ID, and a few of the other things they've introduced. The problem with Apple is more that they now seem to lack some judgement and vision together with a putting the bottom line before everything else.
That could be perceived as "braver" than Microsoft if it weren't for the fact that Microsoft isn't exactly throwing money at problems either any more, but seems to keeps things more focused and picking its battles. Overall though the competition is great and will lead to better products.
I don't claim to know a whole lot about the design of Windows, but what would be the possibility of seeing them become POSIX compatible at some point?
Compared to this amount of existential dependency, Apple continuing the Mac line is more like when Microsoft was still continuing their Flight Simulator despite already chasing much bigger prey in computer entertainment with the Xbox division.
If you're a student of - particularly - the last 50 years of tech industry history, then you understand there is always another choice: established tech companies have frequently chosen to stubbornly die off tightly clinging to their own past, rather than attempt something else. Microsoft was previously well on its way to that land of eroded or dead tech giants.
edit:
"Apple just handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom"
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-microsoft-macbook-pro-surfac...
How dumb do they think Mac users are? Pretty fucking dumb. I'm not sure they're wrong, but it's going to take a lot more than a touchscreen on a stand and a flood of credulous articles to make Microsoft cool.
Face it, Thinking Different has always been MS's ball. Them and the Unixes.
Seems like Apple has become unwilling to spend resources on features pro users want.
I'm using Sierra and honestly haven't even noticed much difference from the previous OS except for the siri icon on my toolbar.
In short: the pro user segment is alienated by Apple’s seemingly indifferent attitude towards them, and the increased integration, or synergy, of iOS with macOS does not help in any way. Generally, pro and power users want flexibility, options, customizability.
Apple seems hell bent on removing choice. Pro users were alienated when they removed firewire connectivity, you need adapters and dongles for just about everything now, and it’s not like this will be remedied with the 2016 MBP is it? Then there is the sad thing that is Mac Pro... That is how Apple actually forced a lot of pro users onto hackintosh systems, as unbelievable as that sounds, but you can run a hackintosh and have a better, more flexible, more performant, macOS experience, than with the real Mac Pro...
Currently my work laptop is an HP ProBook, and just as much to blame for my poor Windows experience as Windows it self is.
I mean the Studio looks nice if you're an illustrator but there's no obligation to compete with every niche product out there.
There are legitimate gripes with the new MacBook Pros (price mainly) but this article's premise seems confused.
> The Studio (...) is what the iMac should be by now — a truly innovative, ultra-thin, 28-inch touchscreen.
That doesn't make any more sense to me. The iMac and MacBook Pro are both expensive, but they're "computers for the masses" - they're great machines for almost everyone. (Or in the case of the MacBook Pro dongles, they're equally frustrating for everyone.)
The Surface Studio, on the other hand, is a computer built for illustrators.
I agree with the author that Apple's presentation was terrible, and I can't get excited about the TouchBar either. But I don't think that building niche computers is the way forward.
At those prices, more like computers for the 1% - a niche almost as small as illustrators.
It's only 30% more than the iMac of comparable size (which is last year's model, to boot)
Disagree. Maybe a lot of 'home' desktops will, but there will still be a need for alternative form factors. In fact, I think desktop computers will look a lot more diverse than maybe they ever have in 10 years time. I think we'll have a bunch that look more or less like the Surface studio, for use by illustrators, graphic designers, etc. But we'll also have computers that are optimised for writers, developers, etc. These will have great keyboards. They'll probably have a smaller, non-touch screen (I certainly don't want a touch interface on my desktop, and I hope that option remains). I hope they'll all have really, really good screens that are as 'flexible' as the studio (or the old iMac G4).
I definitely wouldn't want a touchscreen on a desktop monitor. Unless it was literally no more expensive or the only option - which, of course, may well be the case one day. Don't get me wrong, I do see the advantage of touch - the original iPad is probably one of the most usable devices I've ever owned - but it would be utterly wasted on a desktop for me. Again, maybe a family computer, but not one that I wish to work on.
I would also love a Surface Studio, as a toy. I'm sure it's still a great machine besides that, but I know I definitely wouldn't make good enough use of it - I'm just not that good an artist.
If someone doesn't care about touch, then all it means is "I can't wipe dirt off my screen without clicking on things."
Scrolling alone is the reason I will opt for touch display.
I am sure there will be more functions of touch with new future apps. Playing piano is one of them for an enthusiast for cheap.
Personally, I don't even use tablets anymore because I find it tedious to have to 1:1 drag over larger screen sizes. Works fine on a phone, but for anything larger a trackpad with an acceleration curve feels more efficient.
They wouldn't, or only would occasionally. But that doesn't interfere with other use, and indeed a good adjustment arm that can hold the screen steady in a lot of different positions is something most users would appreciate.
> Why doesn't everyone own wacom tablets?
Because you buy them separately, and because they take up extra space if you're not using them.
I think a lot boils down to this.
People think "innovation" is making laptops into tablets. Seeing how many times Microsoft failed here, I agree that this is not the right decision.
Maybe Microsoft is starting getting it right with Windows 10. But they've failed so many times up until now, and it's still not clear that they've nailed it yet.
A key to good innovation, is to have the right innovation at the right time. Microsoft has tried to innovate by doing the same thing over and over, in different ways, until it succeeds. This may be fine for Microsoft, but it's in Apples culture to try to innovate by not innovating until they're sure they can get it right at the first try.
But I do know Microsoft seems to be escaping the "BinG" (Ballmer is not Gates) era. They no longer assume their customers are all either fleecable home users or large orgs with deep pockets. Under Nadella, they've made life much easier for independent and small developers.
It's good to applaud innovation. The mac vs. pc argument has been entirely boring for an entire generation now.
Generally speaking... Apple sells iPhones, Microsoft sells software
The overlap of their profit centers is minimal. Comparing perceived corporate personalities is your click-bait for the day.
What happens when you have that fancy desktop tabletoid thing configured as an easel and you use some non-touch, legacy application? On real touch devices, you never have to change out of touch mode.
MS always had concepts flying around, remember the fully automated house, the courier, etc etc etc.
they always stumble on the last mile though - but now they release into production anyway.
we had customers try to deploy surfacebooks and encounter failure rates of more than 40%. turns out MS couldn't get the Intel Drivers straight. oh shucks. innovation.