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Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft is boldly experimenting with PC hardware, but Windows and everything around Windows is woefully inferior to macOS and the Mac software ecosystem. Even if Microsoft did everything right, it would take Windows at least a decade to catch up — and they won’t do everything right.

So, if you have everything already on macOS (I still hate that name change), I can get not wanting to switch. But what on Earth is it doing so much better than Windows that at minimum a decade would be required for it to catch up?

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* The windows registry vs the OSX defaults system

* Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa

* HiDPI that always works or has good fallbacks

* Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use

* Battery life

* Multidesktop

* POSIX scripting (that one is slowly coming to windows now)

* Can be restored from another computer in a matter of minutes (see also the first point)

* PDF support baked into OS

* Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa

Really? I can run Windows apps I bought 10 years ago easily, whereas many Mac apps seem to break with every OS update. It's also extremely hard to build apps for older versions of Mac OS X, as Apple hide the older versions of the SDK.

I think m_mueller's comment is more from a developer's perspective than a users. Microsoft has done an amazing job of preserving compatibility. Its not that Microsoft gets rid of APIs (they don't), but that they haven't stuck with a "one true" API to program Windows in[1]. Their switching of what tech you should use to build your apps is problematic.

Cocoa has been a long path, but my Windows friends have had a constant churn of the latest API to use.

1) I am talking about the stuff we are supposed to use above the base Win32.

I suspect this will change under Nadella. Things just feel like they have a better vision to them.

A key difference with the Microsoft approach vs the Apple approach is that on Windows the API that exposes every single feature is such a beast that developers are expected to work at a level above that API.

Whether it's WPF, WinForms, WinRT, or whatever the new flavour of the day is, it's always a layer on top. And that layer is never perfect, because you still have to do the occasional [DllImport("Kernel32.dll")] interop reference.

Here are the currently supported ways to deal with windows on Windows:

* HWND

* System.Windows.Window

* Windows.UI.Xaml.Window

On OSX, you use Cocoa. When Apple introduced Swift, they didn't have to layer on top of the API accessed by ObjC. When you write Swift code, you call the exact same APIs as you would have done with your ObjC code.

Here are the currently supported ways to deal with windows on the Mac:

* NSWindow

You use Cocoa in 2016.

There was the Object Pascal Toolbox, replaced by C Toolbox (MacApp), replaced by MPW, replaced by PowerPlant, replaced by Carbon, replaced by Cocoa.

I can list many other examples, even Cocoa has lots of deprecated APIs since OS X 10.0.

Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs. Carbon/Cocoa was the last time that OS X has had a dual-API situation but even then, Carbon was always referred to as the transitional library and Cocoa was always referred to as what you should use for new code.

While Apple floundered during the 90s with their OS strategy, their API strategy in OS X has been absolutely rock solid.

It's now 2016, Carbon has come and gone as it was intended to and Cocoa is still around and is still the API you use for working with the Mac. If you're trying to do something on the Mac, there's going to be a single officially supported way to do it and that's it (if it's supported at all).

Meanwhile, there are three totally different frameworks on Windows that you can use to do the same thing, all of which are officially supported and none of which are deprecated.

> It's now 2016, Carbon has come and gone as it was intended to and Cocoa is still around and is still the API you use for working with the Mac. If you're trying to do something on the Mac, there's going to be a single officially supported way to do it and that's it (if it's supported at all).

There are quite a few 32bit apps making use of it and they will never be ported to Cocoa.

> Meanwhile, there are three totally different frameworks on Windows that you can use to do the same thing, all of which are officially supported and none of which are deprecated.

Win32 and MFC are deprecated for new applications, the way forward is UWP with XAML.

Project Centipede is just for porting existing code into UWP world.

Windows Forms was officially deprecated at BUILD 2014.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

> Sure, but the Windows APIs that I mentioned aren't historical. Those are all currently supported APIs.

That's not a bad thing. It means if I wrote an app 5, or 10, or 15 years ago, I can keep working on it and updating it without having to throw most of the code away and start again.

Everything you listed as either incorrect or extremely insignificant. I don't have time to correct you right now but please, you're really reaching on quite a few of those.

Edit: maybe it would help you to level out your perspective by thinking about some reasons why almost every business on the planet runs Windows and not Mac.

* Touchpad / gesture support that is actually pleasant and precise to use

* Multidesktop

* PDF support baked into OS

He's right with these.

I now solely use the touchpad on my MBPr. I cannot see myself ever switching back to a mouse. Having been a mouse user for 16 years!

The ability to do a 3 finger swipe and switch to another virtual desktop in a split second is awesome. Is this possible on Windows? I don't know.

I was working on a Windows 10 machine yesterday and PDFs opened with Edge. Again, I don't know if it's right or not.

To be fair to Microsoft, Adobe threw a bit of a fit when Microsoft tried to add some basic PDF support that Apple already had. https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-adobe-squabble-over-pdf/

I'm pretty sure Edge has PDF rendering built into it. It keeps trying to smash the default file association I had for Foxit.

Latest Windows insider build have DrawboardPDF app preinstalled. So no more dependence on Edge anymore.

The abillity to have multiple desktops came with the anniversary update a couple of months ago.

Without getting too much into what side wins, "my opinion is correct but I can't be bothered to express it" is one of the least convincing arguments I've ever read.

I expressed my opinion quite clearly, thank you very much.

Here it is again: Everything that person stated was either incorrect or extremely insignificant because obviously none of those reasons have affected Windows very significant market share.

EDIT: What I don't have time for anymore is refuting every person's laundry list of nit-picks.

I didn't need a restatement, it is simple enough to understand. Your opinion is a lot of words to say "I think you're wrong" in the form of a bare assertion with nothing supporting it. Why would you expect anyone to care about reasons you could not be bothered to express?

Well, that was a convincing argument.

Edit: Every business on the planet runs Office, and they used to all run Exchange, Outlook and SharePoint. They got Windows as a side effect.

They still do run all that stuff, they are just letting Microsoft administer it for them increasingly, rather than fiddle-frig around with on-premise deployments. Office 365 is exploding.

Many corporations do, but Exchange and Sharepoint are no longer practically a "given" like they use to be.

So what you're saying is that no other OS has any programs that can compete with Exchange, Outlook, Office and Sharepoint.

I agree. :)

Maybe those other shitty operating systems makers should try harder if they want to replace Windows. It won't happen though because none of them care about their business customers as much as Microsoft does.

> maybe it would help you to level out your perspective by thinking about some reasons why almost every business on the planet runs Windows and not Mac.

Every is a bit strong, but...

Well, IBM wanted to use an OS called CP/M and was buying a lot of products from Microsoft. Something stupid happened and then IBM bought their OS from Microsoft. Microsoft was allowed to license it and Compaq figured out a work around for the BIOS issues. Thus DOS became the big thing because of IBM then all the other PC companies. Apple totally flubbed the Apple III, and Commodore didn't retain their leading market share. IBM then completely failed to follow-up with OS/2 (seems working with Microsoft to compete against Microsoft Windows is not a healthy move).

DOS begat Windows which begat Windows NT, and the software was good enough. I can buy a PC from more than one company and they have a lot of non-technical, business support. Microsoft doing a bit of cheating probably helped. It actually helps sell support contracts to have some problematic areas in your software which generates an amazing ecosystem that businesses understand (paying someone to be responsible is understandable).

A lot more people drive Kia than BMW, but I really wouldn't argue Kia is a better built car.

1) Do people still face Registry issues anymore? My ME system was hosed due to a minor registry corruption, but I haven't heard about Registry complaints in a decade (to be fair, I was completely in the mac camp, until a few months ago, so I may simply be unaware).

2) Applications written in the 90s still work on Windows 10. There was a short period (around Windows 8) where MS started dropping all their old APIs, but Windows 10 has stabilized that.

3) Yeah, screen resolution stuff is finicky on Windows but this is largely due to legacy apps. Modern apps don't have issues with this.

4) The Microsoft Precision touchpad APIs solve this problem. Admittedly far too many manufacturers are still using the old system (which pretends the touchpad is a USB connected mouse) but the ones that have switched to the Precision APIs are really nice, and keep improving with each Windows update. I expect very few non precision trackpads to exist come 2017 models.

5) Windows Laptops have as much, if not more battery life than Mac laptops. (The surface book gives you a 16 hour option). I don't think this is very valid anymore.

6) MultiDesktop - If you mean virtual desktops, Windows's Virtual desktops are no worse than MacOS's. Neither are close to what Linux offers. And if you are talking about multiple monitors, simply the presence of Win+Direction Keys makes Windows superior.

7) POSIX scripting - This is huge. It's why I usually run a Linux VM in my Win10 machine for most of my programming. Good thing that MS is improving, but I am not convinced the Linux Subsystem will ever be as good as being a POSIX OS in itself.

8) I have to strongly disagree with this one. Time Machine corrupts far too easily. You can theoretically restore from elsewhere, but the failure rate is way too high for anyone to trust Time Machine as a backup system. Windows backup while far less user friendly, is more reliable. If you are referring to more UNIXy solutions (which might be the case considering you refer to point 1), you may be correct.

9) Windows 10 has native PDF support.

8. I believe the tool of choice among Mac users is Super-Duper. It creates bootable clones. Time Machine isn't that well regarded.

The asr and ditto command line tools work very well and cost nothing.

1) Hosing the registry is not the big issue. The issue is that distributed config with centralised UI >> centralised config. On OSX, if I want to reset an App to factory I delete a .plist and maybe an application support folder (always in the same place). I never had to reinstall a single application in 11 years of using OSX. Moving to a different mac? Migration support just does a file based copy of your apps, plist files and support folders and everything is exactly the same as bevore. Want to copy an app without config? Just copy the .app file. These are all things that registry + complex program folders with write access make impossible.

> Windows's Virtual desktops are no worse than MacOS's.

Bit late but just to chime in on this, to my knowledge on Windows 10 you cannot:

- Save desktop arrangement so your setup persists through shutdowns.

- Assign apps to specific desktops so they always open straight on that desktop.

- Assign keyboard shortcuts so you can jump to specific desktops rapidly without sliding through or using the mouse, e.g. ctrl + 1-9.

If you can do any of these, then I would be genuinely grateful to hear how as I'm evaluating returning to windows as my main OS. Without these Windows virtual desktops are more of a proof of concept and are lacking the tools needed to make them actually useful and productive.

> Windows 10 has native PDF support.

All of my PDF's seem to want to open in Edge by default, which is a web browser. On macOS they open in preview, or quick look.

Why would most macOS users care about the Windows registry, Microsoft APIs, OS level PDF, or POSIX? Perhaps a programmer, but not an end user?

Seems like I would take a super powerful Windows or linux server any day over a lower powered Mac Pro just because of the OS if hardware specs were that critical.

Taking 10 vs 1 minute to render would be way more important.

BTW, Windows 10 has multi desktop and most apps work fine with high DPI.

You wouldn't be commenting on things working at high DPIs on Windows if you've been using a Mac for the past few years. It's really one of those things where a lot of Windows users think that it's fine, but once you see how well seamless and fully supported things are on OSX you realise just how much there is left to do.

Every single app integrates well and the scaling is flawless even for the few that don't support 2x mode. I have never dragged a window between screens on the Mac and seen it appear at the wrong scale.

I've done it about 50 times in the past week at my day job on my Windows machine. To be fair, that Windows machine drives a VR headset that you just can't use on OSX because no Macs have the compute power needed - there are definite wins to going with Windows.

It's just that the Windows mentality is to just get most things working and assume the rest is just something that most users won't care about, whereas the Mac mentality is to get it all to work together seamlessly.

I have seen that on Windows when dragging between monitors, but only if they are different resolutions. At work I use 3 monitors all 4k and they work flawlessly.

But yes some windows apps still leave a lot desired on 4k if they haven't been updated.

I've never dragged a window between screens on Windows because that's not something you do on Windows. You use win+direction. Something sorely missing from osx and third party software is nowhere near as good as the native Windows solution. I use both OSs almost everyday. Mac for work, and win for home. The fact that you mention dragging windows (a necessity on mac) in Windows shows that you probably don't use it very much or don't know how to use it conveniently.

I enjoy both OSs (the UX is basically 90% the same btw), they're fine. And there are areas where one works better than the other. By focusing on the issues with one of them without realizing the issues of the other just shows that you're probably not familiar with the other.

I'm not disputing your point, just showing your partiality. I've literally not had to "manually" resize or drag a window in Windows since Win7, but I do it everyday on mac. The Windows model for window management is just better, but you'd never hear it in these comments.

Not everyone uses the short cut keys. I never use them but I know they exist.

Actually I can't use Win + direction anymore because on Win10 it immediately nags me to pick what other window should fill the other half when I don't want to do that.

I use Windows more than OS X these days.

Regarding high DPI, I beg to differ. A lot of Windows applications look like shit on high DPI.

I don't like Microsoft and I like Apple about as much, but I have to be fair: almost everything on that list can be solved in two weeks if you distribute the tasks. Give it another month for polishing and testing.

Now fill the other 9 years and 10 months, minus two or three developers that are still working on some of the bigger items for another couple of months at most.

Some of these are valid, but:

* My Razer Blade 2015 has no problem driving its hidpi screen and my lodpi monitor, even at the same time

* My battery lasts 8 hours with a VM running, which is about as good as any MacBook I've ever had

* Multi desktop exists in Win10, Win+Tab lets you switch desktops

Windows isn't perfect, and I spent a long time on a combination of Linux and Mac machines, but my daily driver is Windows with a Linux VM for programming now and I'm perfectly happy.

And you don't notice any issues when you drag windows between the two monitors?

One of the developers at my work can't do fine tuning of our styles because his Windows multi-display setup won't re-render apps at 1x when he drags them to the lodpi monitor. Instead it renders the app at 2x and downscales it to 1x, blurring everything.

I'm actually not sure, I'll have to try that when I get back to my office. I always have a VM on one monitor and Windows on the other, so I never move things around. I might have to eat my words...

> Constantly changing APIs based on Microsofts internal politics vs. the very stable Cocoa

Really? Mac OS also has a very long history of deprecated and thrown out of the window APIs and SDKs.

That's what bothers me about the article. I can't think of a single piece of professional production software that is Mac only, apart from Apple's own apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic. Those are great apps but they have equivalents on Windows, and some of the Linux pro audio and video apps are getting really good.

As for web development, there is nothing you can do on a Mac that can't be done on Linux or BSD apart from testing in Safari, and Safari has a smaller user base than IE/Edge. Hell, even Windows is improving in this space.

I guess one could argue that macOS is a more aesthetically pleasing environment to work in, to which I counter that I'd rather work in BeOS/Haiku as I find it more aesthetically appealing than any other OS. In other words, that's purely subjective.

The only one I knew of was Sequel Pro. But JetBrains' DataGrip now fills that void.

* Free OS updates.

* Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS.

* Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years.

* Better colour management through the whole UI stack.

* Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4, on the Windows side there were still apps that broke when the Surface 3 launched almost a decade later due to using a third-party API for tablet events that needed custom drivers)

* Core Audio. OS X has had the same set of audio APIs since 10.3, and they've been well regarded for years and years. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could argue Microsoft had finally caught up, and there's still people with ASIO driver compatibility issues. That's literally 12 years it took for Microsoft to catch up.

* OS X had scrolling of inactive windows for over a decade before Windows caught up. I actually think it's something that was there in 10.0 but I only started using Macs at 10.3 so I can't be sure.

* Spotlight. Spotlight is almost the perfect analogy of the difference between OS X and Windows, and I'm just going to look at one tiny feature of it. If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. Cortana isn't even available in every country. Meanwhile OSX has had that built into Spotlight since 10.4 and it works on every Mac ever shipped since then, no matter what country you're in.

* File tagging. OSX has had this for over a decade, and you still can't do it in Windows.

* An integrated C/C++ runtime library, like every other Unix ever. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could ship C/C++ code without worrying about whether your end user had the right msvcr/msvcp DLL installed on their machine.

I'll stop here, because there's so many things that OSX has had for a decade or more that Windows still hasn't caught up with that I wouldn't be surprised if Windows doesn't catch up after another decade.

* Windows has free OS updates

* Precision Touchpads are equally well supported in Windows.

* HiDPI is better on the Mac

* I don't know much about this.

* Are you referring to Wacom style tablets? Not sure about that, but if tablets in general, OSX tablets don't even exist, so it's irrelevant.

* Windows Audio APIs are as good as Core Audio now.

* This really isn't that big a deal. In Windows it leads to different benefits, where my mouse could be anywhere, ubt I could still scroll the page I was reading.

* Cortana is better than Spotlight now. I didn't know that Cortana would be completely disabled in countries that aren't supported. That sucks.

* Windows has had file tagging since Win 7.

There really isn't that much of a difference. There are places where Mac OS is better, and there are places where Windows is better.

* You're right, but it took how long to get here?

* The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines.

* Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows.

* There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX.

* You've got to realise that anywhere where you think "this really isn't that big a deal" it's actually a huge deal to the people who use OSX daily and want a better Mac Pro because Windows doesn't care about the small things.

* Cortana isn't better than Siri though, which is what it's actually meant to compete with.

* To be fair, the feature was so undiscoverable that it took someone on Hacker News telling me about it before I knew it existed.

A lot of my post was pointing out things that have been better on OSX for literally more than a decade before Windows finally caught up in a few areas.

HiDPI is probably the biggest thing that Windows just won't catch up to for a while. The API compatibility requires Windows to support APIs that will stop HiDPI from working well, because old Windows had the ability to set DPI that affected certain UI components but not everything.

But that's the point. MS is catching up very rapidly now, while OSX is stagnating.

My point about the scrolling isn't that it's not a big deal because it's a minor deficiency. My point is that it's a design choice, and many prefer the Windows method. Neither choice is inherently better.

Despite having come in much later, Cortana is at worst about as good as Siri. For one thing, on the desktop, I can actually type in my Cortana requests. The fact that Cortana combines Siri and Spotlight makes it far more powerful and useful. It's kind of insane that Apple thinks people want different information when they ask the same question when they type it, or when they speak it.

Windows has been a lot better than OSX in many ways as well. Especially since Windows 7. For one thing, it will take until next year before Apple gets a decent File System, instead of a kludgy mess.

What's worrying for Apple is that Windows is improving a lot faster than OSX. The gap between them is narrowed very significantly, and personally, for the past few months, Windows 10 is a much nicer environment than OSX (and I've been using OSX exclusively for over a decade).

I think the idea that Windows is so far behind OSX is just not true. Part of it is that this has been true for so long, and Windows 8 was so bad, that people believe it instinctly. Part of it is that people moving to Windows want it to be like OSX, and anything that is different is considered worse.

> If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10.

When I've wanted to do some quick calculations on a Windows PC at a single keypress, I've pressed the calculator button on my keyboard and a calculator has come up. And this has been true since the turn of the century (for me personally; for Windows for several years longer than that).

Yeah, I don't really get that either. I have been using Windows, OS X (I mean macOS) and various Linux distributions for years.

Each one of them comes with their own particular set of quirks/warts and I can't objectively say one is so superior that I'd rather use it to the exclusion of the others.

Unix

Windows 10 has Linux subsystem now, which is Ubuntu 14.04. I would say it's at least on par now with MacOS.

Windows also has an annoyment-subsystem now, reminding you to use Edge once a day when you start Chrome. That is why I am switching my last desktop to Linux in the minutes I write this post. I will not accept an OS that tells me what I should use.

I am also a Windows 10 user but I have not been asked this way to use Edge or IE. Are you sure it happens even after setting your default browser to something X?

Can't tell you, Edge has been my default because it is ok, but I use Chrome sometimes.

I saw this while using Firefox on my wife's Windows laptop yesterday. "Firefox is using 75% of your battery. Switch to Edge." Notification pop up from the battery indicator. Really obnoxious dark pattern.

Edge uses less power than Firefox for similar browsing patterns. Why is the OS monitoring your battery life and making suggestions to improve it (this is not the only suggestion it will make) a "dark pattern"?

It does similar things with boot times (measure and report about slow startup apps) and IE add-ons. I want my OS to make suggestions about changes I could make to improve my experience.

Because it wasn't measuring and making suggestions, it was a scare tactic. I should have screenshotted the notification - I've seen notifications before like what you're talking about, 'X program is causing Y system issue, consider Z.' That's not what this was. It was more along the lines of those bouncy 'Your Computer Has A Virus! Click here to Scan!' banner ads of yesteryear.

Of course Google also throws up annoy-popups every time you go to their site from a non-Chrome browser.

That is annoying, too. But it is not "in my system".

Believe me, it's not. Even when the userland gets updated to 16.04, it's still heavily dependent on the Windows kernel, and the networking stack (for example) will not be the same.

The WSL will never replace a native Linux OS. Period. But it will be pretty useful for some lighter use cases. As a dev, I'm still not convinced it's good enough, given the recent issues with Ruby and Node.

I'm fine with Unix support not being as good as native Linux, but is it as good as MacOS?

macOS runs a BSD-like userland atop a Mach kernel. It's not Linux, but it is a damn sight more field-tested and reliable than the Windows kernel...

I'm actually surprised at the question, considering the number of devs who work on macOS (and I'm not talking about front-end folk).

What issues are you talking about? I was about able to run a full Rails installation with MongoDB, Redis and Sidekiq without issues.

But, I kind of agree actually, the only true issue was advanced socket issue with PhantomJS. Like for some reasons, Capybara/Poltergeist can't connect to it. It's the only reasons I am back to MacOS. But, I think I will switch as soon as it fixes. It should be soon.

Probably this, which has since been fixed:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/26054

I'm running current stable (full disclosure: MS FTE here), and there are still a few hang-ups that I know are being addressed (and some already fixed) in the Insider Previews.

I had to leave the Previews because I needed to pin down a few things, and mostly use Docker for Windows instead of WSL for work. WSL will not run Docker containers directly (for instance), but I managed to get the CLI to run in WSL to control them inside the Docker VM. Well, until the last Docker upgrade reset the configs... :)

Enjoy running those 10 year old GNU Utils that come with your Mac. LOL

Meanwhile Windows now has everything Ubuntu does.

Thanks Open Source!

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