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Comment by Rubayo | Hacker News Reader

Yet given all this, for a substantial cohort of customers, the Apple brand is still bought as a badge of "coolness".

I really don’t know how long I’m willing to buy this argument that Apple is a “luxury” brand or that Apple or its customers are disproportionately concerned about coolness or fashion. All the competing flagship smartphones have similar products at similar prices, including all the branded accessories, as well as extremely similar marketing and advertising. And at least in the United States, Apple has nearly a 50% market share, which makes it really hard to buy the narrative that people are only interested in Apple products because of Apple’s marketing and their desire to fit in or look cool.

I can't tell you how many comments I've gotten (in jest I know) about how their text bubbles to me are now green.

> Apple has nearly a 50% market share

What market are you talking about? I haven't heard the 50% market share number in the US. - iOS is 59.71% of smartphones in the US - macOS is 27.16% of Desktop PCs in the US

https://www.mobileapps.com/blog/android-vs-ios-market-share#... https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

I’m talking about smartphone market share. Most sources show around 40-50% market share in the US for Apple, sometimes spiking higher in quarters with popular iPhone releases.

The Apple brand is still where things mostly "just work". Sure, it's significantly declined in the last few years, but it's still ahead of Linux, and while Windows was great during the Windows 7 era and Microsoft definitely has the resources to compete, it seems like they're intentionally degrading the experience with Windows 10.

Why do you say they’re degrading the experience?

The other day I had a windows upgrade and suddenly had weather on my desktop. I thought it was some malware I’d downloaded. Nope, new windows feature with a confusing way to disable it so I had to Google it.

My next laptop will definitely be a MacBook.

I had that weather widget show up a few days ago as well. Beyond being unwanted it is also incompetent at the basics. I have my Windows regional settings correctly configured and yet this weather widget still showed me temperature in Fahrenheit.

To each their own, but I find it hilarious that the weather widget is the straw that broke the camel’s back for you not wanting Windows anymore. There are so many better reasons to move away from Windows.

Well me selling off my $1200 video card (my midlife crisis gamer “Ferrari”) and quitting video canes completely has a lot to do with it too. I just don’t have a compelling reason to stay. My work laptops have always been MacBook Pros, they’re nice, and funnily enough my favorite feature is things like iTerm that just doesn’t something as good on Linux.

Good luck with that. I hated Windows, then Linux, got a Mac, hated that as well, now I'm back and I hate all major operating systems. I'm back on Windows, at least I can run any application I want without Microsoft's approval.

Desktop computing is all going to shit really quickly, and we're powerless to stop it. Linux is our only chance but it's still a rag tag of unpaid volunteers with no real goal or vision, except for its kernel.

I only just now realized that weather icon isn’t malware. Thanks for letting me know.

Slightly off topic, but I do love the translucent terminal on the Mac. It is very cool

Pretty sure gnome-terminal and terminator both have this.

Quite a number of terminal emulators have this feature. Alacritty and xfce4 terminal as well.

As far as I know pretty much every Linux terminal emulator has an opacity setting so long as you have a compositor installed

And konsole

(And pretty much every Linux terminal)

And powershell (if I understand what is being described).

That would be Windows Terminal, the application inside of which PowerShell and other shells run.

It's a performance hog that provides little value.

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