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Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

Well, how about this: because MS doesn't care. It's too late, the code is too large and too old, the developers are too new, no one knows what's going on and this whole thing is a giant rolling monster with parts flying out every second, killing innocent batteries.

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I would argue that the Windows NT kernel is both newer and more maintainable for Microsoft than OSX is for Apple. At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch.

This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC, TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing etc. These are all things that OSX took years to get after Windows got them.

And of course the smashing success of WinFS.

I don't really think that WinFS was a core OS kernel feature. It was built on top of SQL Server, so I doubt it even had a kernel-mode component either.

ReFS would be a better example. And that's just another example of how Microsoft is keeping their core technology up to date. Apple meanwhile is still using HFS+ which even Linus Torvalds called out as being utterly crap.

What doesn't Tovalds call out as being utterly crap?

For mobile applications Windows has been constantly behind Android and iOS. One part of Nokia's problems was that MS could not deliver drivers for new hardware. For example, Nokia could not move to high resolution screens because Windows could not handle them. Being constantly 6-12 months behind because software is not up to dates was devastating.

Stop comparing Windows, a desktop OS, to mobile-first optimised OSes like Android and iOS. Even Windows RT is not technically mobile-first optimised like those two.

Windows Phone 8 vs Android/iOS would be a fair comparison. Because WP8 has undergone the same treatment and has been optimised for high battery efficiencies whilst still retaining the Windows NT kernel at its core.

WP8 has always had support for high-resolution displays and Nokia et al have not had issues with it. WP7.x was a different story but that was a different OS kernel (WinCE not NT). During this time Microsoft was busy creating a minimised edition of the Win8 kernel that would be suitable for use on a smartphone, much like the work Apple did to OSX in order to create iOS.

If Microsoft markets Windows as a mobile platform I'll compare it to the existing competition. Sure, it might not be fair, but ultimately I'm looking for results, not fairness.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/meet

Search in a page with plenty of marketing blurb for "mobile". Zero results.

So since they aren't marketing it as how you perceive perhaps you should cut them some slack.

They market Windows 8 tablets side-by-side with the iPad.

At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch.

I don't think this is true at all. Sure, there's always been a BSD-style environment for compatibility, but Apple has never been shy about ripping and replacing legacy Unix-y infrastructure (see: launchd) or about adding new, "deep" APIs close to the plumbing (see: libdispatch).

> At the core of OSX is a ton of legacy Unix monolith written in the 70s that I suspect very few in Apple dare ever touch.

The Darwin kernel is regularly updated; for example Apple replaced Unix init and cron with launchd in 2005, achieved full POSIX compliance in 2007, and went to full 64-bit in 2009.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29

I admit I'm not super familiar with Darwin internals, but on most *NIX systems, init and cron are userspace programs. Does launchd need some special syscalls?

Darwin wasn't written in the 70s, and the foundations are regularly updated. The source code is publicly available. Your speculation that few in Apple dare touch it, as if it's some indecipherable monstrosity, is nonsense.

Why is it so slow to add new features and technologies then? It took them, what, like 3 years? To add TRIM support for SSDs? Their first attempt at ASLR was woeful and badly broken and even that was a year after Vista got it.

They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor, but every release of OS X sees low-level feature additions and updates. They're documented by Siracusa's mega-reviews as well as the OS X release notes. Nearly Apple's entire product line has been dependent on the flexibility of that foundation, from the PowerPC Macs to the Intel transition to the ARM squeeze, not to mention the recent ARM64 port. So, I don't understand why you think Apple can't or won't work on the foundation or why you believe it's a monolithic relic written in the 1970s, unless you're just referencing some vague bias against Unix in general.

You're really digging in on this aren't you? I wrote very clearly that it was only a suspicion clearly in an attempt to explain why they are so much slower at improving their OS kernel than Microsoft is. So any time somebody makes a suspicion you'll arrive and interpret it as though it was a statement of fact? Noted.

Meanwhile, you make woolly justifications of their slowness by making contradictions like this: "They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor" Comments like these are not helpful and do not add anything to the conversation.

They're slow. The reasons why this is the case is still not entirely clear. But even OSX fans get frustrated sometimes at how slow they are to add features that other operating systems got years before. The most vocal recent one I can think of was probably the TRIM support for SSDs.

Valuable legacy windows programs can run on a tablet.

From my perspective that shows that MS cares.

Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.

Why would you need "legacy apps" on a tablet?

The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems:

1) apps not optimized for touch

2) OS not optimized for touch

3) expensive hardware

4) inefficient hardware/small battery life

It seems to me that with devices like Surface Pro, the 1) and 3) problems are still ported to the new devices. I don't see legacy apps that aren't optimized for touch and on a 10" screen, as an "advantage" for Windows tablets. For all practical purposes, they are not.

Even if you want to do "work" with legacy apps when in "laptop mode" - are you sure you want to do that on a 10" screen? Because I'm telling you 10" is too small for productive work, and the keyboard is too crammed at that size.

Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial.

Because the customers want it.

They're intelligent enough to know that a tablet isn't going to be as productive as a desktop/laptop.

But they still want it.

Customers generally do not want to run Windows apps on their tablet.

If they did then Surface Pro would be the number one seller.

Existing windows applications are by definition best suited to desktops and laptops.

Our's would be such an application but even as it is there are certain aspects of its typical daily use that might/would be best served by a tablet.

At those times it would be nice for a user to be able to switch from one device to the other and then back again.

In fact, requests like this are becoming more frequent.

That's a very strong assumption... The only reason I have an Ipad rather than a Surface Pro, is because it didn't exists when bought my Ipad, sure thing that will be my future tablet in my next cycle, and I feel I am not alone. I think surface is not doing it better because it came into the game too late but it is a nice replacement for my heavy laptop and my Netflix viewer (namely Ipad)

If consumers want Windows tablets then they have a funny way of showing it.

> Because re-writing for a new platform isn't trivial

That's not the consumers' problem, is it?

> Because the customers want it.

That's not reflected in sales yet. If you're talking about the 100 Microsoft fans that upvote and comment all positive Microsoft stories on Reddit, HN and Verge - that doesn't count. We're talking about the market as a whole.

Also, even Microsoft themselves barely even promote the "legacy app" thing in their commercials. All they are showing is Metro. But if they think Metro is their tablets' competitive advantage, then why wouldn't the consumer just get an iPad or Android tablet instead - and for a lot less?

Mac apps can't run on iOS because of the architecture difference.

It's the same reason Windows apps can't run on Surface RT.

They could. Apple run PowerPC apps on Intel processors. The real answer is that they don't want them to.

Apple ran PowerPC apps on Intel processors. The real answer is that they don't want them to.

Rosetta is neither included nor supported in Mac OS X v10.7 "Lion" or later. Therefore, with Lion and later releases, the current Macintosh platform does not support PowerPC applications.

They don't need to. The transition is complete, any many apps had Universal binaries that ran seamlessly on both platforms.

"Valuable legacy windows programs can run on a tablet."

Simply because it (Surface Pro) runs the same OS ie regular Windows.

Reach out and save a battery today! With your help we can change the world. Please submit donation to help this innocent battery to get a better future.

They could name it Wattsi!

Yes, that's the correct answer. This problem today, on tablets especially, also comes from Microsoft's unwilling to use anything other than the full Windows on almost any product they have. So instead of starting something from scratch, they'd rather force all that legacy bloatware into devices that need very efficient software and have smaller batteries.

Therein lies the problem: Full windows is the only kind of windows there is. Today you still cannot boot a windows server without a GUI layer. Windows is utterly monolithic.

Apple were able to rip the top layers off OSX and ship it as iOS without too much trouble, because it's unix. (They didn't start from scratch.)

Windows, not so much. MS have been trying to do it for a decade or more, and they've failed for the reasons outlined by optymizer.

I disagree. WP7 would've been a much better and more efficient OS for tablets, and they already built that, but in the name of keeping OS licenses for tablets at ~$100 like for notebooks, and some kind of "unification strategy" (which still hasn't been realized yet), they've also made Windows RT for tablets and WP8 out of the NT kernel for phones. But even WP8 would've be better than Windows 8 or Windows RT (which is 95 percent Windows 8 anyway).

It's actually how Apple built iOS, too. But will they put WP8 on tablets? No of course not. Instead, they'll try and push Windows RT to phones, which is the totally wrong way to do it. But just watch it happen.

I thought Windows RT existed mainly as a way for Microsoft to send a signal to Intel. Am I reading too much from Intel's involvement in Tizen[0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen

To the contrary, Microsoft, Nokia and partners are actively looking at bringing WP8 tablets to the market. Thus completely sidestepping the Windows RT issue.

Not quite true. The Windows kernel is separated since a few years back and can be executed separately.

But probably the entire administration modules requires a GUI.

> Today you still cannot boot a windows server without a GUI layer.

Please give server core on Windows Server 2012[0] a try. They could use your feedback.

[0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh84...

Server core still has a GUI, it just doesn't run Explorer as a shell and doesn't have a bunch of GUI programs that come with Windows included. When you log in there's a cmd or powershell window floating there with the standard-issue non-themed graphical chrome.

The problem with Server Core begins at the description:

> "Server Core is a minimal server installation option for computers running on the operating system. Server Core provides a low-maintenance server environment with limited functionality."

Limited functionality is the key. In order to administer windows server, one is expected to use remote desktop. This is in contrast to a unix machine, where everything can be controlled via command line and configuration scripts.

It is getting better, as Powershell exposes a lot of functionality. But it is still not there yet.

While Windows's functionality in general is indeed pretty monolithic, you are generally wrong. In fact, there is (I believe since Windows Server 2008[1][1]) an installation method to get Windows without any GUI.

In fact examples like Windows CE (Now WP8) prove you wrong.

[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Server_Core)

No, the answer is certainly not correct. Even worse, it's purely speculative and shows that the auther doesn't like MS.

I think it's not about the OS, it's about the drivers. If you would trace the power consumption properly my guess would be that the WiFi module is the culprit. As the hardware is the same, the driver must be the place, where Apple has the edge.

This sounds very biased and uninformed. It really doesn't belong here. A simple look at the kernel level stability and perf gained from Vista => 7 => 8 => 8.1 show that it clearly isn't true.

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