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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

What can't be emphasized enough here is how much Windows created this. They went from the 95-XP arc, some of the best operating systems from a user's perspective, to 7 (another hit), to now windows 10 and 11, which turn your device into a slow always-connected ad platform that you don't really control.

In other words, Windows became one of those toolbars that we all have to remove from our grandmothers' browsers.

For me, the answer was Linux, but for a lot of people who don't want to use a terminal daily, MacOS is the answer.

If you are a user, Windows hates you. MacOS doesn't.

Edit: I forgot Windows 8 and Vista. Memory holed due to trauma.

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I this overinflates the importance of the HN crowd a bit.

Yeah, a lot of software engineering types switched to MBPs because the OS isn't a steaming pile of garbage and it reliably works with the hardware. The former can't be said for Windows these days and the latter is generally hit-or-miss with Linux.

But I wouldn't be surprised if that's a rounding error when you're talking Macs doubling or tripling their market share. I'd imagine most people walking into an Apple Store in their local mall and buying a Mac with Apple Pay on their iPhone don't really know or care about the telemetry added in Windows 10. I still think Apple deserves the vast majority of the credit for the success of Mac.

They might not know about telemetry, but they probably recognize:

My Windows PC is slow, ad-ridden, buggy, and unpleasant. Also, the physical device feels cheap and the plastic is separating on the corner, and the hinge is broken.

Hey. Look at that super sleek aluminum MacBook there…

> They went from 95 and XP, some of the best operating systems from a user's perspective

I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it, 95 especially. 98 OSR2 improved quite a bit on the situation, but I don't recall having a great time with 95. It was still a glorified DOS extender in many ways, often slow to start up and shutdown, PC hardware and drivers were a mess and system stability therefore poor. This was right at the beginning of the concept of "PnP" in the PC world (plug and play) and it was a cruel joke most of time.

Windows 2000 being from the NT line was peak Windows in many ways. I resisted XP but it was ok for most people admittedly.

> I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it,

I was trying to figure out how to express myself, but I think you got it.

98SE was still pretty bad because pre-NTFS filesystems would decay over time (of course so would ext2, but linux generally crashed a lot less).

As someone who grew up with Apple computers, yes the overall fit/integration was not as good as Apple's but it did have some semblance of preemptive multitasking (which System7/8 did not have).

The "UI that runs on DOS" was a feature not a bug for legacy game/software support.

XP, yes. 95, not so much.

For me, the answer was Linux, but for a lot of people who don't want to use a terminal daily, MacOS is the answer.

Not only do I use the terminal daily, I live in the terminal on my Mac.

I consistently hear from Linux users they wished there was a terminal emulator as good as iTerm2 for Linux.

Well kitty is pretty damn good if you want to give them a recommendation.

Apple's fortunes changed largely due to making the ipod PC compatible.

It was effectively the trojan horse of the Apple eco-system.

Secondarily it was due to Apple switching from PowerPC to Intel chips, allowing it to compete more broadly with support for Windows.

As an aside, Windows 10 is largely a pretty great operating system.

Most of Apples market share growth occurred in the Vista/7 era. Probably a bit more due to Windows 8, but overall Windows 10 probably had minimal effect. Most casual users and the press has been pretty positive on Win10.

You can tell all this revisionist history is written by people who did not experience it. Macbook market share grew among developers because it had a BSD shell and worked well with the web and mobile stacks of the mid- to late-2000's that were built on open source. Among non-developers it was an upsell from the success of other Apple products, especially upselling from the iPhone to the Macbook Air for which there was little hardware competition. User-facing parts of the operating system was not a reason in any of this.

Fully agree. Didn’t mean to imply that Apples growth was specifically due to Vista or Windows 7, just that it mostly occurred then and not as much in the Win10 era.

Both the BSD layer _and_ the polished interface let me switch to Mac OS X in 2004 as a developer. Trying to get a nice Linux GUI was too much of a time sink for me then.

You forgot Vista, the Wii U of Windows

I always thought Windows ME was the Wii U of Windows.

Microsoft was expecting people to line up around the block and fork over $100 for Windows ME and everyone was just confused.

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