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>It seems to me that Microsoft really makes no effort to improve subtle aspects of Windows and hardware integration.

Latest Windows 10 iteration is by far the snappiest OS I've used in a long time since it uses GPU acceleration for the desktop window manager. You can check this in task manager. The icing on the cake, if you gave a laptop with 2 GPUS(Optimus) is when you can run a demanding 3D app like a game in windowed mode in parallel with other stuff like watching videos on youtube and you can see in task manager how windows uses the external GPU to render the game and the integrated GPU to accelerate your web browser, all running butterly smooth.

>In fact, their OS is in such shambles and is a disoriented mess with respect to UI consistency.

True, but that's what you get with 30 years worth of built in backwards compatibility. I can run a copy of Unreal Tournament 1999 that was just copied off an old PC with no sweat right after ripping and tearing in Doom Eternal. Can you run 20 year old software on current Apple without emulation? Apple can afford to innovate in revolutionary ways when it dumps older baggage whenever it feels like it and start from a fresh drawing board without looking back, see intel to apple silicon transition. In 2 years x86 apps will be considered legacy/obsolete on Mac hardware. Microsoft can't really do this with windows so yeah, it's a mess of new GUI elements for the simple stuff and windows 2000 era GUI elements for the deep pro settings. The advantage is that if you're an old time Windows user you can easily find your way using the "old" settings and if you're new to windows you can do most configs through the "new" GUI without touching the scary looking "old" settings.

Gotta be a point at which you decide to do a complete rewrite and ship a copy of the old OS in an emulation layer. That’s what Apple did with early OS X. Ship with a very well integrated Windows 2000 or whatever in an emulated container and be done with it

> since it uses GPU acceleration for the desktop window manager

Uh, Windows started doing that in Vista.

Oddly enough a number of good Windows features showed up first in Vista. I think people just weren't ready for the barrage of security permission dialogs and having their printer drivers broken. ;-)

A lot of Vista's issues were driver quality-- Creative Labs and NVIDIA played chicken with Microsoft over the "no more kernel drivers" decision and it took a lot of time for the post-XP drivers to get even remotely good. Creative Labs never did get caught up-- they decided to just do the bare minimum necessary.

WDDM's ability to do that has been progressively enhanced since Vista. Today's OSX is about where Windows was during Vista, and it really shows on Macs that are older, but still supported, usually shown via latency in normal situations, eg, just moving a window around on the screen (something every OS gets correct except OSX).

Today's WDDM, however, is snappy as hell, even on my MBP from 2012, but OSX is, and always will be, a sluggish nightmare. Intel GPU alone, no Nvidia or AMD DGPU, old enough that it has no hardware scheduling features, isn't DX12 compliant, but with Win10, its still is just as fast as my brand new workstation build when it comes to just being a plain ordinary desktop.

Apple needs to fix their development culture internally, and it strongly shows in their software product quality. Sad, because the M1 seems like a cool chunk of hardware, could be a real winner if it wasn't held down by OSX.

Quartz has been GPU accelerated since 2002 my dude

Yes, it has. It doesn't mean it does it well.

Quartz today is Vista's WDDM of yesterday.

What part of backward compatibility to run legacy software prevents UI uniformity?

One issue that is very visible is the Control Panel versus the new Settings app.

A key feature of Control Panel was that it was "pluggable": vendors could add their own items, and often did. These are ordinary Win32 apps written to match the style of the era. Worse, some system control panel items have plugins in turn. E.g.: drivers can define extra "tabs", network cards have protocol-specific popup windows, etc...

There is just no way to update the look & feel of these to match the new Settings app style, most of the code is third party and ships as binary blobs.

The Microsoft Management Console (MMC), used mostly for Administrative Tools and server consoles has a similar problem.

Combined, these two make up the majority of the OS GUI!

The long-standing problem with Microsoft's internal culture is that it rewards people and teams for 'innovating' where innovation in many cases is just reinvention.

I worked at Facebook for years and it now has a similar problem. Developers are evaluated every six months on their 'impact', which results in many dropping boring work and joining teams that are doing new things, even if they aren't needed.

Similar with Google. I'm amazed at how Apple can take something as old as typography, breathe new life into it, and make everyone shocked and awed. Another one: I have yet to use a trackpad as good as theirs. It's good because it doesn't have any moving parts. It's all haptic feedback.

I can now record a 4K Dolby Vision HDR video with my phone and send it to my parents in a text message and it'll display flawlessly.

Windows struggles to correctly display Adobe RGB (wide gamut but not HDR) JPG images I've downloaded in 1999, now over 21 years ago and counting.

They'll get there... eventually. Maybe next decade, by which I mean 2030, not 2021.

> It really is beyond belief that an organization with so many employees can fail to adhere to a uniform vision and standard and focus on correcting details.

If you’re not spent time in a huge company, this might seem to be the case. But really, Apple’s uniform standard really is the exception. I’m sure there are other organizational costs for this, such as it being harder to take risks with products or execute quickly.. but gosh they are good at producing a cohesive, mostly consistent set of products. I deeply appreciate their attention to detail and long term commitment.

Apple has gone through their share of UI fads and APIs. And by dropping backward compatibility more often users see less variation.

Even on their own hardware (Surface Pro) I've ran into really annoying issues with DPI scaling, especially when docking/undocking from a secondary monitor.