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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

Building a hackintosh will give you a deep appreciation for how well Windows manages to work on such a dizzying array of hardware profiles.

Macs work so well because Apple controls the hardware pipeline from top to bottom - the fact that Windows manages to work so well without controlling any of the hardware pipeline is actually pretty incredible (and, it gives you a lot of appreciation for the work that Linux developers have done to provide a similar experience, as well as illuminating why some things still don't "Just work" like they do in Windows or OS X environments).

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First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers. The vendor manages the hardware profiles and puts them on the installer CD.

If manually managing drivers teaches you to "appreciate" anything, do yourself a favour and install Ubuntu, if should cure you from such folly. Even if you'll never use it a day in your life, it will show you that "managing a dizzying array of hardware profiles" might well be difficult, but it's NOT a discipline either Windows or MacOS even competes in.

EDITED to respond:

Yes, this was XP. But even back then, Windows was marketed (and had been for a decade) as the "just works" OS, hardware wise. I'm glad they've improved, but it took them long enough.

windows vista/7/8 have greatly improved the out of the box driver stuff. I believe a fresh windows 7 install has something like 7 gigs of printer drivers alone (!)

This is not correct, every time I have installed Windows 7 on different hardware the display is at native resolution, all USB devices work (keyboard, printer, mouse), sound drivers work and networking also works out of the box.

> First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is out, network is out. I had to burn a CD rom with the network driver to download the rest of the drivers.

That might have been the case with XP (and perhaps Vista), but with 7 & 8, basic things like video, USB, and networking have worked just fine out of the box. And I say this as an Ubuntu user.

What Windows version?

Windows 7 and 8, everything works out of the box. USB, video, audio, network. Everything.

This coming from somebody who's preferred OS is FreeBSD.

I built a computer last spring with Windows 7, and needed drivers for video, USB and audio. Video worked, but was slow in games until I installed the official drivers. Needed the sound drivers for the front panel jacks to work, and the USB drivers for the front panel USB ports, the USB 3.0 port, and the "fast-charging" function of the mainboard to work.

It was easier than setting up OS X, but not by far.

Have you ever tried building a hackintosh? If you don't have just the right hardware, the whole thing hard-crashes. It doesn't even boot with fallback drivers. It just says "nope, not what I expected, goodbye." Additionally, it only works on non-Apple hardware due to the efforts of a homebrew community - out-of-the-box OS X just plain won't run.

The fact that Windows XP would boot into an at least marginally-usable state on random hardware puts it lightyears ahead of OS X in that regard.

I've been running various flavors of Linux machines for 15 years now, as well. I'm quite intimately familiar with the driver woes there (wireless drivers still basically never work out of the box on $LINUX_DISTRO), but again, it's so far ahead of OS X in that regard, it's not even funny.

You're setting the bar extremely low. MacOS is explicitly not supposed to run on any other hardware configurations than exactly those sold by Apple. It was never it's intended behaviour. There is nothing to be ahead of, MacOS didn't even bother to get out of bed on race day.

That's my entire point. We frequently assume that most hardware "just works" because it follows some specification or another. It's not until you run into a system that just flat out blows up when it runs into unexpected hardware that the work that Windows and Linux developers do becomes apparent.

>First, Windows doesn't "manage" a dizzying array of hardware profiles, try to install a vanilla windows-copy. Literally nothing works. The display is 640x480. USB is o

Have you tried this with any windows released on the last 5 years? Everything works out of box with 7 or 8.

When you consider that Microsoft have an (at least small) team dedicated (full time job) to pretty much every area of hardware (e.g. printer team) who are given the active support of the manufacturers, it is indeed pretty impressive that Linux does as good a job as it does. :)

I don't know that it gives me a "deep appreciation," but it definitely makes me aware of a fundamental difference in business strategy. Microsoft is a software company that tends to dabble a bit in hardware. Apple is a hardware company that tends to dabble a bit in software.

Microsoft needs to build an ecosystem of well-supported hardware in order to survive. DRM aside, to do so it needs to enable hardware vendors to build whatever type of driver support they need. However as a (mostly) hardware company, it's in Apple's best interest to build an OS which works well on their hardware, and only their hardware.

There's nothing (that I'm aware of) about the Mach kernel that prevents anyone from developing their own drivers, but no company in their right mind is going to do that when they know that it will be nearly impossible to provide support for anything other than Apple-approved configurations.

Maybe because of Windows high market percentages, hardware manufacturers build their products around Windows experience, rather than the other way around.

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