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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them.

I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a lot. I plan on getting either a Surface 3 or Surface 3 Pro soon, and will put my old MB Air on the shelf next to my Linux laptop to be used just as needed.

Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground. The comparison is especially bad for Apple re: cloud services: Office 365 is such a good deal for $100/year compared to iCloud, with way more and better services.

As software engineers, money for hardware, software, and cloud services might not mean much, but I think it is good to look at what the general public will be using.

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> That is changing

Recently I challenged myself to learn more about USB, HID devices and kernel development, so I partially reverse engineered and wrote a driver for the Xbox One controller. This is great and all, but it needs to be signed for people to use it without lowering a level of defense. Turns out you don't just need to be an Apple Developer, you also need to make a special request and regenerate your certificate, which needs to have a special extension, else it'll be rejected by the kernel signing system. Not the least worried I pony up 99€ (not a dev), submit a request, and an automated mail tells me I'll have a reply under 7-10 business days. So I wait 2 months, and, slightly worried since I have no reply yet, I submit again. That was 13 days ago[0].

I used to think that GateKeeper was great technology and that things will be okay. Now I have doubts: does Apple really care about its developers? How long before the kext-dev-mode boot arg disappears and kernel space becomes inaccessible to mortals?

[0]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller/issues/2

I think it's not just that the dev backdoors will go away, I think the whole OS is going away. It's pretty obvious to me that in the long run only iOS will remain. It makes zero sense to keep two semi incompatible operating systems around, and it's just the sort of radical move apple would do. Yes, there are a gazillion reasons to keep OS X around, but knowing apple none of them will matter enough.

Me from 4.5 years ago agrees: http://mattshaw.org/news/apples-dumbing-down-of-computers-a-...

I believe this is similar to Microsoft's driver model, where at the end of the day, they decide what's signed or not and thus what can hook into the kernel.

Stallman was prescient.

UEFI's secure boot enables Microsoft to force out other operating systems in hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

(+1 for the RMS reference)

> does Apple really care about its developers?

Yes, of course, or you wouldn't have the ability to do it at all. But Apple cares more about it's users and the experiences they users have, and things like GateKeeper help them sell users on a safer, walled experience. As an Apple developer (in that I've paid for a license, not Apple-employed) with parents and a grandparent who have a Mac, I much prefer simply telling them to only install stuff from the App Store and not worrying about downloading and running anything from the general Internet.

> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer.

Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like:

- International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or something, or change your keyboard layout and relearn how to type apostrophes. Everything else related to international text input is also much nicer in OS X.

- Trackpad quality: I've yet to find a trackpad as nice as the ones that come on Mac laptops

- emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.

I have never even heard of the emacs things. Can you explain further?

Many OS X keyboard shortcuts are Emacs-inspired, though they aren't extensible in the way that Emacs is.

http://www.cultofmac.com/247681/use-these-emacs-legacy-keybo...

You can extend them actually:

http://osxnotes.net/keybindings.html

Not just you — love the Emacs bindings everywhere. It always throws me off on Windows when I'm trying to C-n and C-p around, getting hit with new document and printing dialogs all over the place :)

One more for the keybindings here (actually, they're more like readline keybindings -- C-h being the biggest difference). I would rather like to know how to set up those keybindings pervasively on graphical Linux applications. (The terminal and Emacs already have them, of course, but not the browser.)

On a related note, I like the command key being solely responsible for most GUI application commands (so it doesn't conflict with the above), and would probably also want to incorporate that into an ideal Linux setup. I wonder if someone makes a Linux distro with this sort of thing preconfigured.

You can set emacs keybindings in Gnome apps. I normally do it when I get a new box, but always forget how. A quick google normally gets me there: http://askubuntu.com/questions/354489/emacs-gtk-keybindings-... Like this link, which apparently suggests it doesn't work in Gnome 3.6.

What I find intolerable on a Mac is the behavior of ctrl+left/right. I expect it to jump to previous/next word and nothing else.

The default Apple supporter answer would be: "Apple has had these bindings for longer than the defacto standard has been around", but Apple would do well to get with the program and make the defacto standard as used by the rest of the computing world the default.

I use a Windows keyboard with Mac in the office, for me the ALT key replaces the CTRL key.

I don't prefer it, but it works.

I just swapped the two and it feels more natural! I prefer having the cmd key next to the spacebar.

That's option (/alt) left and right (and has been, IIRC, for 20 years)

I use xkeymacs on my win boxes and I'm quite happy with it.

Woah, that's really cool! Thanks

> - International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu)

With Linux and Gnome, you can have several keyboard layouts, which are very easy to switch between (much like multiple languages on a phone keyboard). Usually I use the English International layout, one quick change (accessible from the global bar) and I've got all my accents (also speak and write in French) easily accessible. A bonus is that there's different international layouts if one doesn't suit you. é is simply ' + e. ç is alt , + c. And so on... Éïôàç

I'm sure OSX is a nice operating system, but Linux has very usable desktop options these days too. Windows, not so sure...

> - emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.

I think this one is only you...

International text input is the kind of thing that many Americans won't need too much.

I love the (limited) Emacs bindings. C-k is probably my all-time favorite.

> International text input is the kind of thing that many Americans won't need too much.

No, but as a non-American, I'm glad that free software has us covered...

> With Linux and Gnome, you can have several keyboard layouts, which are very easy to switch between (much like multiple languages on a phone keyboard).

It's the same on Windows

There's an app for the 2 software issues.

Trackpads are OK, but I like my vertical mouse and touch-screens for Windows.

There is? I've looked everywhere for an international keyboard that doesn't replace how the apostrophe key works in Windows but I've never been able to find it.

I also don't think there's an app to make every textbox behave in a standard way in Windows or Linux. If only it were that easy.

The trackpad is sadly only nice in OS X; the Windows drivers are mediocre and nothing special. Still, though, I think it speaks volumes that Windows users want to use mice all the time while Mac trackpads are so nice that there was enough demand for Apple to release one for their desktops.

The apple trackpad rules. I find it's amazingly productive.

No Windows trackpad has even come close.

There is a nice parallel here. Take advanced Mechanical CAD applications. Pro Engineer, Solidworks, Siemens NX, etc...

Back in the 90's, there was a lot of basic UX work being done on view manipulation. It's a hard problem in some respects. Modes, focus, picks, and a complicated thing to spin around and get into.

A company called SDRC spent a bunch of money on UX research. They ended up using a few of the function keys to trigger view manipulation. And it worked no matter what mode, pick, dialog, or anything else was going on. Most importantly, it only required mouse movement. No holding one button down while moving the thing. No finger fatigue after a lot of view manipulation.

Other companies didn't do this work, and their view commands were modal, or required complex mouse button hold + move operations.

A little company making 3D input devices grew a nice, profitable business out of poor UX design. Funny, their sales to SDRC people were nothing compared to the sales for most Mechanical CAD programs...

So, getting back to that track pad on Apple and UX in general. The Apple OS + track pad has it down cold. It's functional in nearly every use case, and it's low fatigue, and it's fairly discoverable as well as usable.

In Windows land, we get better mice to improve on poor UX. We get touch screens to improve on poor UX. And we get other things to improve on poor things...

People may not agree with all of what Apple sees as a value add. Totally get that. I personally won't touch the closed down iPad and iPhone. They aren't useful to me.

But, the UX on those is very solid.

I do the vast majority of my writing, coding and other non Windows specific work on a Mac Pro, and it's because that UX is there, and I don't need anything but the machine and a nice place to work.

When I go to power up on my Windows machine, out comes the mouse, and the utilities, and, and, and...

Not the same experience at all.

All that said, touch on the Surface does provide some options, but I personally don't find extending my hand any where near optimal compared to a quick gesture on the trackpad that is always right there, and that always does the same thing for the same gestures...

I use the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator[1]. This way, I can start from the current layout associated with my keyboard, and add the key I need. This way, It does not changes anything that I'm used to. It only adds new things. This might be what you're looking for?

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx

Every single Windows trackpad is shit, and the common feature of most of them is Synaptics. Windows laptop makers could probably get near double digit market percentage increases from fixing their shitty track pad situation alone.

Android and Microsoft phones and tablets' touch sensitivity is great, so it's not some secret of Apple's.

Yes, AutoHotKey can easily take care of the issue with accent keys and with the Emacs shortcuts you want to implement. A search for `autohotkey accent characters` shows many people using it for this purpose. You can implement all kinds of keyboard shortcuts with AutoHotKey.

On the topic of trackpads - maybe you could help me understand - when you use the keyboard and trackpad that's built-into the laptop, is it because you're forced to (in a plane) or because you prefer it? I imagine all Mac users who say they can't ever leave the Apple trackpad are environmentally limited to using whatever is built-in to the laptop.

In other words - when I work, I prefer 2 or 3 monitors that are situated about 2 feet from my face and a full size keyboard with numpad (Microsoft Natural). So, I just could never see myself reaching all the way over to the laptop that is driving all of this in order to use a touch pad. But even so, I find all touch pads including Apple's to be imprecise compared to my 5 button vertical mouse. I also have auto-scrolling on Windows which OS X doesn't really do (this is where you push the middle mouse button down and then as you move the entire mouse, things scroll, until you release the button).

I tried using an Apple wireless trackpad (magic trackpad?). Maybe you use one of those with your work setup?

Note that the emacs keybindings even work on iOS. I develop a coding app on iOS and when I use it with a bluetooth keyboard I always take advantage of the emacs-inspired shortcuts.

I think that's very subjective:

- International text input: I can't remember the last time I had to use accents or special characters not in my native language; a few greek letters for formulae, and generally I can use '/alpha' instead of α. Isn't having to use chars not in your language pretty uncommon?

- Trackpad quality: yes, I love using Macbook trackpads, but I use the mouse/trackpad very little anyway, and isn't something I find useful enough to miss much.

- emacs keybindings: sounds fantastic, but a) not many people use them and b) don't know if they'd be that great for Vim-ers like me.

Even if there are a lot of things that Mac might do better than Windows and Linux, I agree that the popularity of so many cross-platform tools and the web have nullfied a huge part of it.

Re: International text input:

I only use keyboards with the english international layout although I'm from Austria and the german layout would be the natural one. Therefore the keyboard layout in the OS is also set to english international. I do this because I program.

And still I'm very happy about the easy access for special characters, because in literally every email I have to use one of ß, ä, ö or ü.

> I do this because I program.

Really? I guess it might be different with the german keyboards, but I've had no difficulties programming on a Swedish keyboard.

English has lots of loan words using accents including common words like café and résumé and more uncommon ones like crème brûlée. It has native although uncommon accents, e.g. in coöperation. Personally, I also commonly type in Swedish which has the extra letters å, ä and ö in its alphabet, sometimes type in German (ö, ü and ß) and occasionally use an IME for 日本語 (Japanese). IME aside, losing direct access to the above accents, all of which are muscle memory by now, is one of the major reasons I probably wouldn’t consider a Windows laptop.

(I didn’t mention metakey access to typing typographically correct characters: –, “, ”, ‘, ’, … etc)

Sure, but people rarely type them out - I might ask you to meet me at a particular cafe, but less likely at a particular café.

Isn’t it chicken and egg though? People rarely type them out because they’re very hard to type out on a Windows machine.

Or you could type it in two strokes instead by typing ´ then e. Typographical punctuation should be the editor's concern when it matters.

> b) don't know if they'd be that great for Vim-ers like me.

They are: I am addicted to vim, and I use bash/zsh in emacs mode, so having the consistency is incredible.

Also having cmd+C for the GUI and ctrl+C for the command line is awesome. This last feature is one of the few things that kills Linux for me (ended up hacking on GTK, which turns out to have both an undocumented setting and an obscure compile time constant somewhere that ends up not working. And no, remapping every single app shortcut is not an option — I tried).

I'm a long time Emacs user, but I certainly am not aware that OS X supports Emacs key bindings in every text box. My initial reaction is to not believe you, but I will certainly try it out tomorrow.

It is actually pretty common knowledge that OSX has Emacs keybindings by default for text entry. (At least the basic text editing bindings, don't expect a full Emacs implementation and "M-x tetris".)

C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p all work.

EDIT: C-f, C-b work as well.

Are there any others?

Actually, I can tell you for a fact, I've hit M-b (∫) many times and been disappointed by it. I get why, but I'm still disappointed.

My favorite one is C-t (transpose)

And of course there's kill C-k and yank C-y

But sadly, no C-w.

I've never used emacs - Is that 'select word'? I have that system-wide by putting

  "^w" = (selectWord:);

into '~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict'. There's a load of information online about the customisation that can be put in this file. Here's a comment of mine with some links in it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6718604

Annoyingly, Xcode stopped paying attention to this file at some point around version 4, so now you have to maintain a separate version for that.

Only C-something works, no? I'm also still trying M-b / M-f regularly (with either Option or Command for Meta, which has surprising consequences every single time.)

C-t works though, and that's awesome to correct typos.

Ah, so here's the trick. However I have my modifier keys set up for my external (non-Mac) keyboard means I can't really use them. I use my Caps Lock in Emacs for the C modifier, but in OS X my Alt key is the one that works in normal text inputs.

> OS X supports Emacs key bindings

It's a NextStep thing. You can find the complete list in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. You can customize them in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict. The Cocoa API documentation has the details (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...). There's a graphical editor for the DefaultKeyBinding dictionary (http://www.cocoabits.com/KeyBindingsEditor/), but I've never used it.

AltGr+e gives me é

It gives me €.

That's interesting, AltGr+4 gives me €, UK keyboard I guess.

On most OSes you can also compose using ´ then e for é.

So how do you do è, ê and ë in OS X? In Windows, it's the French keyboard (a mere Alt-Shift away), and e+', e+{ or e+}, a small price to pay for convenience. You can't get away from double keystrokes. Except for é, which is /.

Just hold e for e view seconds and chose which version you want.

It might be easier if you have to use it infrequently, however accents with deadkeys are much faster if you type. Can't imagine typing even a paragraph while having to pause, even for a second, on every accented character (mind you, in some languages such as greek, almost every word has an accented vowel, sometimes two).

I'm barely monolingual let alone bilingual, so I'm honestly curious: how does spell check do here? Are you able to type most words without the accents and let an auto-correct tool auto-magically correct things?

I can only speak about Greek. That doesn't work very well there because many times a word is accented depending on its role in the sentence or its grammar (and via versa).

So if you just apply automatic spell-correction, you have to proof read it afterwords, which is more of a hassle than accenting it manually -because it's a more cognitive work.

Correct accents in greek matter a lot. Reading incorrectly accented words make comprehending quite a bit painful and slow, my guess is because the brain expects something, receives something else and then tries automatically to make sense of what is trained to know it's wrong, slowing the whole process down.

Somewhat on topic: a while back I turned on international keyboard support on my iPhone. When I need to write something in French on the phone, I tap the globe icon on the keyboard, it swaps to AZERTY, and the autocorrect features start picking up French and correcting accents into the text for me. Is useful :)

on linux, using us-mac:

è: option/r-alt+`

ê: option/r-alt+i

ë: option/r-alt+u

(for example, option+` followed by e will do è)

i mostly use us-mac because i'm used to using option to type accents and because i can keep my en keyboard and type on pt-br without problems.

I vastly prefer the compose key method on Linux. You almost never have to worry about how to type a character. Type compose, hit something that vaguely looks like the accent you want, and then the letter.

Compose, ", e => ë

Compose, ', e => é

Compose, ^, e => ê

I so wish this system was available more universally.

What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Apple's consistent use of the "optional" characters is a lot like the old C-64 with the graphical extras available at the push of two buttons.

> What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Those are all covered:

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

Without looking anything up, I'd guess "compose-,-c" and "compose-o-a", for the first two, and that turns out to be correct.

I had to try a few things for the degree symbol, but I guessed it on my third try (it's "compose-o-o"). Once I knew that, my first guess for ¿ was "compose-?-?", which also turned out to be correct.

But as the other reply said, you can always look them up if necessary, which you'd almost certainly have to do with the Mac's system of "option + some arbitrarily selected key".

Apple does tap-to-click not too well, and doesn't do tap+tap-to-drag at all. So I have to use better touch tool, so I constantly drag shit accidentally. what a pain, both windows and linux do these out of the box.

tp+tap to drag works. enable it under accessibility settings.

> - International text input:

Just press the key for ´ and then e and then you have é. Tada!

"International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, "

In Windows too, English International uses the same key layout and activates the additional keystrokes for accents and non english characters (i.e Alt+e is é, or Alt+n for ñ)

Unless there's a menu that begins with the letter E, right?

Not really but it is my bad. It is really Alt.Gr + e instead of just Alt. +e

On the other hand, OS X comes with a terrible Japanese IME. The Google one that's available on OS X and Windows makes things better but until that came out Windows was just unquestionably way better for Japanese text input.

Really? I thought kotoeri was pretty decent, although I will forever remain an ibus fan when it comes to IME's.

It's hard to notice until you're really using it a lot, but it has a hard time with stuff like people's names that Windows does better with. I might be getting a little carried away saying it's "terrible" but I was a student in Japan for a while and the limitations became obvious and annoying to me under those circumstances.

Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards.

Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it.

A while ago the fingerprint reader just stopped working after a restart. After a full hour of debugging and restarting I gave up. The next day I figured I'd try one of my debugging steps again and it started working again.

On my Mac, the worst that ever happened was a corrupted HDD. Booted into recovery, used disk utility to find and fix the problem and never had issues again.

Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...

On the other hand, updating my Mac to Yosemite turned it into a slow stuttering mess - WindowServer memory leak forced me to reboot the Mac about every two hours or so or watch my desktop at < 1fps.

While Windows does have problems, latest Apple software is mostly worse bug and update-wise.

These kinds of issues are why I always suggest people do fresh installs of operating systems, and not upgrades.

I get similar memory leaks with WindowServer on a brand new macbook pro. The damn process is eating 4gb of ram sometimes...

I did a fresh install from a seemingly healthy, semi-recent MBP and Yosemite's WindowServer seemed to begin a slow strangulation on my machine.

Solved it by buying a top-of-the-line machine, which I'm sure Apple is loving.

Gotta be a hardware issue of some variety. I'm running Yosemite on a MBPro Retina mid-2012 with zero issues at all.

Hmmmm, possibly my slow-as-could-be hard drive. The SSD in my newer machine really does make a HUGE difference, to speak obviously ;)

I have the feeling my old machine is using a bit of VRAM when WindowServer starts getting too heavy.

I discovered a weird interaction between f.lux and fullscreen gaming. They seemed to fight about which gamma etc to use.

It was nothing you could see, and other than a jerky in-game mouse you did not notice it. And after an hour of playing, dying cmd+tabbing out to Safari to surf while waiting for respawn, WindowServer core dumped, logging out all users in an instant.

This is fixed in 10.10.3. The jerky mouse pointer problem still remains. I don't use f.lux anymore.

I used to do that, then I released how many pieces of software I have installed, and tweaked and adjusted to my preferences. Usually there is little benefit to an upgrade so I just leave as is (or use a rolling release Linux distro).

Updating my iMac to Yosemite fried the graphics card. It seems Apple is putting form way ahead of function, and as a result stuffing too hot components into too small space (the same iMac has previously fried the screen and the HDD to death).

This comment just made me realize why most computers sold today wouldn't work in vacuum of space. Even if we shielded it from radiation, they'd just fry to death.

Thanks! I was just thinking I might take a chance, but at this point I'm actually thinking about reinstalling what came with the machine. These new operating systems are literally making me angry.

And way back in time, Apple had even factory-disabled my second NVIDIA card on my MBP because it had created heating issues in tests. So, I installed gfx, or something, to get it working. And then, predictably, major major heating issues.

And it was easily solved! Apparently Apple (the rumor is Jobs ordered this, but who knows) didn't want the fans spinning too fast, which caused noise. So they governed the speed on those, too. Solved with SMC Fan Control.

I wasn't too happy about being somewhat deceived by their specs for my equipment, even if they thought their intentions were "good".

Yeah, but they've been doing that for years. Remember all the people burning themselves with Macbooks?

> Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards.

That's strange. I'm now sitting in front of a Windows box that had W7 installed on it 3 years ago. I've upgraded to W8, then swapped the SSD in it (restored to the new SSD from image), resized the system partition many times (it's a Windows-Linux dual boot box), then upgraded to W8.1, then Windows 10. Oh, this is the 3rd GPU in the machine. I have never, ever had any problems with Windows itself throughout the 3 years. (I had problems with Linux though.)

I have an EUR 2500 Macbook Pro as well from 2013, and the Windows box has always been more responsive/usable.

Anecdotal, I know.

Just a heads up, you're probably going to have issues trying to go from the Windows 10 tech. preview to the actual release.

We'll see. MS claims I won't (http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/windows-technical-preview...). However, now in 2015 I can set up a Windows box in an hour or so thanks to Chocolatey (and to the coming OneGet).

(I have actually upgraded to 8.1 CTP I think, then continued all the way to 10)

I use linux at work and run Windows 7 in a VM. It's domain joined and my company pushes updates to it seemingly many times a month. This rears it head more often than not when I'm going home for the day.. Sometimes I can't be bothered waiting for updates to install so I throw caution to the wind and power the VM off when it says not to... Still ticking!

I run the opposite on my home PC, Windows host and linux guest. Been through multiple video cards and even an intel to amd switch. Also still running like a champ.

Anecdata :)

This is why I never shut down my laptop just before going home.

Twice now I've been stuck during a power failure with just a few minutes of battery in my UPS, and when I try to shutdown Windows, it goes into its "installing updates" thing. There's no way around it, and of course losing power during this is probably the most dangerous thing imaginable. Luckily, I escaped with my life on both occasions.

When I use to dual boot windows I never updated and always "restarted" by just holding the power button down (stupid, yes I know, but it's the only way to reboot it as fast as I'm used to when booted into Linux). Never installed updates and it always worked fine, until I wanted to install updates, then everything broke. I assume this was just caused by waiting too long between updates. My solution was to delete the windows partition and just use a VM.

My comment was anecdotal too, no worries ;)

Mo anecdote. I'm unable to update to Win8.1. It keeps asking me to, I've tried twice and it's downloaded everything, it installs, reverts, gives me error id 0x80070002 - 0x20009.

Googling: http://tipsandtricksforum.com/thread-154.html

"If you connected a second drive or any external drive to your PC (a SSD or HDD) the upgrade will fail if the second (original) drive is not disconnected."

Ok, I have a second internal drive but it's internal and I can't disconnect it easily. I must take my notebook in to update Windows?

Now I'm being badgered every week to update. This is not the user experience I'm looking for.

The problem here is not Microsoft. I am surface pro 3 owner and i have to say that is one of the best machines i have used. I wouldn't change it for anything. I agree that MS is heading in the right direction. The steps that they are taking are to my opinion great for everyone. I have been a linux user for almost 10 years and windows 10 might be the reason to switch back. We will see.

As for the driver issues, that is cause windows releases the software and then the hardware is provided by several companies which is up to them to not screw up there drivers. For apple they release one laptop and that is it. They only have to cater for that device which makes it a hell of a lot easier.

Windows 8, has made huge progress in every hardware aspect of the machine.

It absolutely is Microsoft's... well, not fault, exactly, but the way the ecosystem has evolved has been driven largely by choices they've made. If the ecosystem allows for buggy hardware driver releases to screw things up for customers, it's because MS made the choice, possibly by default, not to run an Apple-like ecosystem.

The reason I don't blame MS entirely for this is because it's clearly a trade-off. In return for the risk of unreliability, they got a vast increase in the number of hardware manufacturers willing to play in their ecosystem, precisely because MS can be fairly hands-off. This drives prices down, and increases the size of the market-place.

Where I do take issue with MS directly is that despite consciously being in the driving seat of an ecosystem like this for so long, it's taken them years to successfully isolate the user from buggy drivers. They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user. It's not a foregone conclusion that a screwed-up driver must inevitably lead to a bluescreen, or anything like it.

Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

> Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

...

> There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

Which of these arguments would you like to keep? You can't have both; or at least, they don't refer to overlapping time periods. And I'd take issue with either: in the first case, MS always had the option early on of carving a controlled niche rather than trying for wide appeal. That's exactly what early Apple did, and I'd argue that MS could have done precisely the same on PC hardware, if they'd chosen to. As regards the anti-trust argument, why don't we see that being levelled at Apple? An MS which chose to drive a more closed ecosystem probably wouldn't have been so utterly dominant as to run the risk of antitrust accusations, and again, that was their choice.

> They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

Again, that was their choice.

> And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

I'd argue that this sort of problem affects either sort of ecosystem.

>They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user.

Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time. As you stated, the decisions Microsoft took got them to their throne.

I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years. I was shocked to see it changed appearance in a screenshot in an article about Windows 8. And the "upgrade" to Yosemite has completely destroyed my wifi stability, made the system sluggish (Safari even decides to stop smooth scrolling after a few hours), boot time has pretty much doubled with the same amount of apps installed (SSD too).

>I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years.

I can reproducibly blue screen Windows 8.1 with the latest ATI drivers (as well as every driver for the last year and a half) by watching hardware accelerated Flash movies on an ATI HD 7770 GHz Edition. Swapping the card to a different ATI card fixes it. Swapping the card to an nVidia card fixes it. Swapping the 7770 GHz for another 7770 GHz does not fix it.

This only happens in Windows. It does not happen with the ATI drivers in Linux.

> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.

I've been running Win7 on a Dell Optiplex 980 for years, and have never had a BSOD. Except yesterday when I pressed Ctrl-Up arrow/Ctrl-Right/Ctrl-Down in Visual Studio. That was just asking for it :o)

(Ctrl-Up flips the screen).

I've been running Debian Wheezy Linux for years. A few minor issues in Word 2010 (it always opens on my top screen!) and playing GTA4. Never had a BSOD. :)

To me, as the user, whose fault it is could not matter less. I only care if the system works or not. In the event of a driver failure, knowing it's not MS's fault makes the failure no less impactful.

Do you think that Windows 8 made progress because your machine works or for technical reasons? Because driver issues seem to be pretty common on Windows 8. And the OS offer little support in fixing those issues when windows update fails to get the drivers right. Nor does the OS warn you or gracefully degrade when things are not working properly. I would much prefer the approach taken by Chrome that simply turns features off (like OpenGL) where support is lacking.

> Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...

Trackpoint. Makes it very hard for me to switch from Thinkpads.

Also, I'm growing quite fond of having a touch screen and a pen for my laptop.

I can imagine, must be the opposite of actually starting to work with the Trackpoint. I tried, I really did, but I never got it to work for me.

I've used MacBooks for years, but I still miss my Trackpoint. I cranked its speed and sensitivity up to max and trained myself to adapt to it. After that, I could do anything with just an imperceptible twitch with my fingers still on the home keys, thumb on one of three buttons. It's like the vim of mice. If I could get one as an option on my MBP, I'd do it in a second.

Everyone has different experience. I never had hardware problems with HP, Lenovo, Dell notebooks. It was built badly, it could broke something, but notebook worked well. With Macbook I had broken HDD which was replaced by warranty but it took almost a month without my working tool. And 2 years later sound just stopped working. Headphones work but buggy. I don't think I can pay for repair, probably will tinker with it myself.

My iPhone 4S had broken WiFi just after warranty expired. All cables from Mac and iPhone are in terrible state.

I don't really think that Apple hardware is better than others. Not worse than others, but not perfect. Choice is between OS X and Windows or iOS and Android. Otherwise there are many comparable machines.

> Everyone has different experience.

Yeah, I'm acutely reminded of this every time someone brings up Windows 7's predecessor. Apparently I'm the only person who ever lived on this planet who had absolutely zero problems with Windows Vista, and even liked it quite a bit.

Make that two persons, I remember that it was quite ok on my machine.

Absolutely the only one issue I had with Vista was that system file copying went a little slow, and you could get 2x+ speedups by just using Total Commander instead. Apart from that, I had pretty much problem-free experience with Vista.

If you had a powerhouse computer it was fine. The midrange laptop I had at the time was not happy with it. It also broke compatibility with most of the games I had.

I didn't have any problem with Vista either and I feel your pain, most people I speak with seems to love to hate Vista.

I also have a similar feeling when somebody tells me that Windows 8 was only good for touch devices (I enjoyed it in a HP 8710w and didn't miss the touchscreen at all)

My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening programs or files much faster. Then 7 combined the quick launch bar and the taskbar to include pinning common apps to the bottom of your screen (more like the OSX dock). So between launching 90% of your programs from the taskbar and search&query for the rest, the Start menu was mostly legacy...

...but with Win8 I've learned just how many people never stopped doing things the old way. Does a full-screen Start make sense? Not particularly. But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds. And while you're looking at the search results, you aren't really working actively on what's in your other running apps. Otherwise, you never really see it if you don't want to use it.

I'm glad 10 has shrunk Start back down because my minor complaint has always been that the full screen Start was just a little "jarring" but that's about it. If nothing else, it will make the old school Start menu die hards (read: the faculty I deal with) happier I guess.

> But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds.

Which I'm probably not doing if I'm going from one program with a WIMP-optimized interface to another program with a WIMP-optimized interface; context-switching to keyboard-driven mode is a bigger UX loss than the start screen is there.

The biggest problem with Vista for most people was that it was sold on computers without enough RAM. We have a couple in our office (thankfully not used regularly) where it's 1 GB and the integrated GPU borrows a quarter of it for VRAM.

Windows Vista on 768 MB of memory is not a happy thing.

I can imagine it. I guess the experience is sort of like the one I had with a cheap Android smartphone, where the hardware was too weak to handle the OS itself (and if you tried to connect to the Internet, you basically had to pull the battery out because it went totally unresponsive).

I'm not sure why such things happen. Selling a product where the hardware is below minimum reasonable specs for the software it needs should be banned, or something.

Nah, aside from some minor annoyances that ended up getting polished in updates I didn't have any issues with it either. When it came out I wasn't making much money so I wasn't running top of the line hardware by any means. Still, it ran OK on my PC at the time (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, and some low-ish end nVidia GPU). Still, even my budget Newegg Special was better than the real dogs some people were buying at the time (or some of the older computers they were trying to upgrade).

Vista seemed like it was built to leverage the current hardware of the time rather than run nicely on weaker systems that companies were still selling because they could passably run WinXP (slow CPUs, 256-512MB RAM, integrated GPU). It made sense because both OSX and Linux were capable of GPU acceleration of desktop windowing, aggressive use of caching things in RAM, etc. but too many users were still purchasing the absolute cheapest thing they could find that would still boot.

Then you had all of the hardware issues caused by companies not bothering to write new drivers for old peripherals and the software issues from applications that just assumed you were running as root/admin. I didn't have any old scanners or printers or anything that needed driver updates and very few of my important applications weren't updated to work under the new UAC setup.

In many ways, I feel like most of Vista's problems came from 98SE and then XP being "good enough" for so long that a lot of companies and users weren't used to needing to choose software and hardware more carefully.

Anecdotal evidence. Here's mine:

I never ever had any issues with any of my 3 desktop PCs or with mit X200 in the last 5 years. With my recent Thinkpad X1 carbon I had to boot only once into safe mode after upgrading some Lenovo provided driver after almost 2 years of use.

If you have a late 2012 or early 2013 MBP you will know that your MBP will restart every time you played a video from youtube because they had a faulty GPU and refused to acknowledge it. There are problems with everything including the chromebooks but Apple's focus on quality is making Microsoft think twice and as a result is lifting all boats.

Then again, upgrading has made the wifi on my mac mini go wonky, twice, and last week an upgrade made it stop recognizing the display's native resolution and downgraded it to 1024x768. Upgrades are always dangerous.

This is how every OSX/iOS developer feels when they update Xcode or an iOS SDK. And Apple forces you to update in most cases, so you can't avoid it. They are breaking stuff left and right.

It's funny you should say "Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards. Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it."

That's funny because …

I just surrendered my MacBook Pro to an Apple Store for service yesterday because the external display mysteriously stopped working and the system won't fully boot. The on-site service tech was super competent but totally baffled and sent the machine away for Apple to replace components until things start working again.

And today Apple just released OS X 10.10.3 Supplemental Update which has description "The OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Supplemental Update fixes a video driver issue that may prevent your Mac from starting up when running certain apps that capture video."

Hmmmmmmm.

Until an OS comes along that rivals OSX, I'll stick with Apple. I'm one of the few people I know that really doesn't put a whole lot of thought into hardware. Yes I need my machine to run properly but as long as there's a baseline achievement of performance I'm good.

Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

This is from a dev standpoint but at my job we're using MySQL and I develop from Linux. When I want to browse or modify data with a GUI nothing quite matches OS X's Sequel Pro.

The best I've found is DBeaver (or SQuirrel). IntelliJ is working on a thing called 0xDBE, but it feels even worse.

I could easily rattle off a handful of other applications that just feel better, even if slightly, on OS X. DaisyDisk and Transmit come to mind right away.

Try MySQL Workbench - this is what I miss the most after switching to Postgres

I've never used Sequel Pro so I can't compare them, but I've been very happy with SQLyog, when I was working with MySQL.

I'm a dev that uses Windows at work for development and the Mac at home for development and at work for general use. I've been a Mac devotee since 1984.

For an IDE nothing beats the sheer joy of Visual Studio and ReSharper. I use NetBeans for Java (I prefer it over Eclipse and IntelliJ). For MySQL I use Sequel Pro on the Mac but prefer HeidiSQL on Windows. For Linux dev work I'll spin up a VM on Fusion on the Mac or VirtualBox on either.

My point? There's nothing you listed that requires you to use a Mac. I completely understand if you choose to, but there's no need to discount Windows in the process...it's a great development environment for anything but Swift and Objective-C.

SQLToad is unmatched on Windows IMO.

If you ever need to use Postgres I recommend using the gui http://www.psequel.com/ which is a pretty decent port of Sequel Pro to the PG world.

> When I want to browse or modify data with a GUI nothing quite matches OS X's Sequel Pro.

I've moved the opposite way (Windows => OS X) and have used SQLYog Ultimate Edition [0] on Windows and like it a lot -- but find Sequel Pro underpowered and slower to use, and wish there was a better alternative.

0. https://www.webyog.com/product/sqlyog

Visual Studio and Microsoft Project mainly. But then Windows users don't get XCode.

- Xcode

- Sketch

- Pixate

- Framer Studio

- iTerm

- Fluid

- Keynote

- Pages

- Quick cast

- Cloud App

Granted I haven't looked into a lot of these to see if they've picked up Linux or Window's support. However I doubt any of the one's I've listed are all on Linux, which I'd for sure need to do any development work.

Some of these I'm sure have alternatives but the one app I just can't do without is Sketch. Gimp doesn't compare and wine + photoshop hackery on Linux is a nightmare.

Are you sure? Saying Xcode is only available for Mac is like saying "Visual Studio is only available for Windows, so I'll stick with Windows". I thought you'd come up with some movie maker stuff which might not be as good on Windows.

I used Xcode a few years back and it was a nightmare with the limited things it allowed me to do when compared to Visual Studio.

Really? You're going to pick out Xcode out of the whole list? I even clearly stated what the most important app I use is and it wasn't Xcode.

...however, if you're developing iOS and OSX apps you need Xcode. So I'm not sure what your point is.

XCode is a pretty good choice for writing Mac applications. I'm not aware of many accepted alternatives.

There really is only one–AppCode, and not really an alternative, because usually you end up using both.

My point is that you can really come out of these forced incompatibilities if you want. There are multiple IDEs to develop the same thing on Windows, but of course, Apple does not want that. That's why, the author of the article had to leave developing for them - in my very personal opinion, everyone should do that, in the hope that it will force Apple to strive for a common/universal development language.

Side note but, not sure why anyone would bother with wine + hackery these days. Virtualbox works perfectly fine for running any Windows apps you "can't do without". Throwing a few gigs of RAM at running a Windows VM to run these apps is not really an issue if you have a modern rig.

By "modern rig" are you including laptops? I've always been deathly afraid of running VMs on battery power; has this changed recently?

Nothing much has changed in the past couple of years. Wine is still a good go to option if your Windows application will work with it correctly.

More reliable approach for powerful machines, but for simple use cases Wine is fine:

- Only for a few apps, like Evernote. - Laptops on battery.

For Visual Studio I'd bet on VMs over Wine, but then I probably wouldn't be using Linux.

There's a pretty neat vector graphics app for Linux called Inkscape. I used it for some time when I worked on Linux and got used to it. Of course, I was happy when I could go back to Adobe Illustrator, but for a free app Inkscape is pretty great (and it's the only usable graphics app on Linux)

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back:

If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure.

Windows 10 is looking good. If it gets really, really good they might close the gap with Apple for professional users. Their glastnost/perestroika trend of opening up and embracing the dev community isn't hurting their reputation either. I really think Satya Nadella is turning the company around.

Thats exactly what I tend to do on a Windows machine, and I don't miss linux at all. Feels like having a VPS (which it really is) ready at all times with awesome bandwidth.

Absolutely!

I usually buy windows machines because of price/performance, and, to be honest, because I know how to make windows work for me and don't want to learn mac idioms.

However, the first thing I do is install git for windows, which gives me bash to navigate the filesystem, and then vagrant/virtualbox/ubuntu for development.

Have you given PowerShell a try? If so, how did you feel about it compared to using bash on Windows?

I don't think it is really possible to 'give Powershell a try'. PS is extremely powerful, but there's a lot to learn. It is not a drop-in replacement for bash at all because it's so different.

I highly recommend http://babun.github.io/ for Windows based development. It's a well configured cygwin install with many standard addons included. Helps me keep my sanity while switching between Linux, Windows and OSX.

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

There are lots of alternative solutions to share file systems between a VM and host ... is that all you're trying to solve? VirtualBox has it built in.

No, I'm also trying to share between my laptop and a remote server. (actually, I very rarely use VMs hosted locally)

I use a samba share, it works a treat and in the 3-4 years I've been running it I've never had much maintenance on it outside of the occasional update to the OS.

I think you confused everyone with your terminology in your parent comment - "guest OS" is VM speak.

I don't have a click&go solution because I don't have this problem, but you could certainly serve a Samba share out of the guest OS or something.

What's wrong with VirtualBox shared folders? Also, Windows-native sshfs-alike is SMB.

Set up samba? (thats how I work) What about NFS?

https://chocolatey.org/

Choco install git.install /GitAndUnixToolsOnPath Choco upgrade git.install

It is a beautiful world with and my slashes work both ways!

I run Fedora 21 w/ full screen Gnome 3 in VirtualBox, so I can use Linux desktop tools and no SCP is needed.

The touch screen even works with Gnome. Even rdp remoting into my Surface from my desktop to use the Linux guest has also been the best performing Windows to Linux remote control that I've used for the amount of setup time. On a gigabit network, it's really nice.

I use cygwin for ssh/scp, even if I don't need cygwin for anything else

You can map drives from a client over Remote Desktop if that's at all helpful.

Using (boot2)docker/docker-machine+virtualbox and mapping a volume to the host OS (which is trivial) might be viable.

I use it on OS X to do linux-only stuff (such as loop-mounting an ext4 image).

That being said, I just returned a surface pro 3 for a tablet. The display is nice, the feel is great, but the omg the resolution and font issues. Forget it, you consistently feel how much you have to deal with the OS itself to get it out of your way. Until tablet pcs are ready I still have a desktop win box and a mac mini and my tablet.

I'm also spoiled by the App Store concept. Windows needs to force it on developers. One tap installs on Android and great dependency tools like homebrew or Leiningen have made me never want to download stuff manually ever again.

The day Microsoft forces the app store on me is the day I stop developing for Windows.

I'm not really a fanboy, so maybe my expectations are lower. I think Apple are doing a good job. I admire what I think of as Apple's unique quality: the product/marketing/tech strategy.

Apple insist on charging a premium. In addition they prefer to play the above median range of the market. Apart from first-to-market "freebies" they don't play for dominant market share. They insist on that premium, at the expense of market share and other trade-offs.

They don't play for check box ticking. They don't adjust to appeal to mobile service companies, IT purchasing departments or other buyers that make decisions about what other people will use. IE, it's not corporate sales departments dictating strategy according based on short term sales.

In order to get their premium they make stuff appealing enough to a subset of people that they are willing to spend their own money, pay that premium and get the thing that they decided they want for themselves. To make a stretched, contrived and over-complimentary analogy.. It's like a politician who wants to convince the voting public to join him in his position vs a politician that checks the polls to find out what his positions are.

Like I said, I don't have that much loyalty to Apple. I don't buy iphones because androids @ half the price are pretty good. I'd be interested if Apple puts out a laptop with a sub €500 price, but I'm not cranky if they don't have one. When they do happen to have a product that I buy for whatever reason, I'm usually on the fence mostly because of price but fairly well impressed once if I buy it.

But….I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking, and it's getting harder to justify buying a macbook. I still expect to get years out of the one I have, but I wouldn't be surprised if I opt for a €200 something when the time comes. Unless… Apple happens to be making something I'm willing to pay extra for at the time.

I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking

Possibly, But the high end laptop mark is eating into the workstation market from the bottom now that 32GB and and decent Quadro cards are common in laptops. At work basically all our CAD and 3D modelling people use laptops, whereas a few years ago they all had workstations. Same seems to be happening with video and music production. Even more and more of the gamers I know are option for laptops over desktop computers.

However a Macbook Pro is not a viable product when compared with a ThinkPad W540 in terms of features/price for 3D related work.

More expensive and less powerful GPU.

Oh agreed. Apple has no presence is this market. My point was about the market for expensive laptops in general.

As a gamer that is one of the reasons I never bought a Mac laptop even though I was a big NeXTStep fan.

My home is desktop free since 2003 and as you say, Apple does not fulfill such market.

Why not use your Linux laptop more? About 6 months ago, I installed Linux Mint on my Lenovo laptop, and I have barely looked at my MBP since.

I think it's called Victory Disease. When you think you have been winning all the time and it will continue, your way of thinking becomes polluted, less clear, biased, slow etc.

>Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground.

To keep this on the rails, I have to wonder exactly how much Apple has paid out to developers on the iOS platform vs Microsoft on their mobile platform. The very first reason the author of the linked article cited for his decision to pull out was competition, which combined with having the largest payouts by a large margin speaks to the health of the platform imho. Native vs. web apps has been debated endlessly, but the doomsday scenario for Apple's approach has which has been trumpeted for many years now has conclusively not come to pass. I suppose if you extend the time horizon out to some Nth degree that may change, but what has Apple been doing in the meantime? Making a ton of money and paying a ton of money to developers.

Interestingly, the increasing role of the web and other platform-neutral software has pushed me toward Apple products. I now care much less about the massive amount of software written only for Windows, so I'd rather just buy the Apple product that I know is going to be a reasonably solid experience from purchasing, to updating, to customer support if necessary, to even selling when I upgrade.

My Surface 3 Pro is my go to, take with me device. I always know I have everything I need, whereas I obviously don't with my iPad. Hopefully the next Surface Pro will have a longer battery life, it is still a few hours short.

I recently started using the Windows Chocolately package manager, strange name, but works great and makes setting up a new machine and maintaining utilities much more simple.

Chocolately + Boxstarter = ./build.sh

To build my work environment on a brand new install all I have to do is Start -> Run -> https://boxstarter.org/package/nr/url?https://raw.githubuser... as administrator.

See the following repo for more information https://github.com/ghuntley/dotfiles-windows/blob/master/des...

> Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so.

Just have a look at the enormous amount of open research available at http://research.microsoft.com and try to find the equivalent of Apple. That tells me enough.

I was afraid of what might happen to Apple after Steve Job's death. He said Tim wasn't a gadget guy. I am trying to give Apple a lot of grieving room, but enough is enough. I'm particularly irritated because I'm having OS X and iOS problems simultaneously. I'm actually so impressed with Microsoft lately, I'm thinking of putting all my meager savings on their stock. This is coming from a guy who literally thought Microsoft was evil.

Nothing new there. Microsoft has always been very open their research, and Apple hasn't. They prefer to talk about products they will actually ship vs. things that might happen at some point in the future.

Apple simply isn't doing the research, at all. You can see the results in things like Swift (and Swift's insane bugginess).

I wonder what self-respecting scientist would want to work in a company like Apple where publication of research results is prohibited?

For general consumers, Microsoft is catching up. But Apple never really gained marketshare there because of its high prices.

For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.

I work for a medium sized technology organisation (about 400 people) and lately you hear more and more developers talking about moving away from Mac. Most are going to linux some are picking up windows. I'd say it's about a 80-20 split.

The thing I really notice is how everybody with a mac has a machine that is newer than two years. Those who are hitting the two year mark are experiencing hardware issues, particularly lighting, which is needed for dexternal montitors, but it seems trackpad longevity is also an issue.

For most of us, the apps on OS X are also available on other platforms. The only thing I can't get on Windows that mac devs get is Sketch, but the designers post on invision anyway, so it isn't a huge loss.

I have a laptop from mid-2009 that's still good (it's a white MacBook). The only problem I've had has been the battery bulging and Apple replaced them under Applecare with no problems. The last I had replaced out of warranty for no charge. It's slow, but everything still works. I used it for my main machine until late 2012 (when I bought an i7 Mac Mini) and was my portable machine until late 2013. My Mac Mini has been pretty heavily used since 2012.

Everyone in my department at the university who switched to a Mac has had good longevity, most lasting about 4-5 years until they decide they want a new machine (but the Mac still works). I had two Mac Minis in the lab, one a G4 Mac Mini from 2002 and the other a first-gen Intel Mac Mini (it came with 10.4, I don't recall the year). I used the Intel Mac Mini until I graduated in 2013 and had no problems at all.

So, anecdotes are just that. My department consistently has been moving to OS X. Probably about half the professors have switched when there was just 1 professor who used it in 2007. Even my supervisor didn't switch until about 2010. He's still using the same iMac he bought then. The labs mostly use Windows because of the data acquisition software only runs on it as they tend to have specialized equipment that only wrote Windows drivers.

> I have a laptop from mid-2009 that's still good ... was my portable machine until late 2013.

I don't think this should count as a counterexample. You have switched laptops in 2013, and while there could be many valid reasons for that (battery life, more power for development, your old laptop does not support a new OS) it made you old laptop inadequate -- and hence the switch.

The only reason why I switched laptops was because I got a new one as part of my work. I'd still be using it otherwise.

I still have my Mid 2009 Mac book pro. Best Machine ever and still using it. I replaced the CD drive with an SSD and the performance in general of the computer improved a lot. The only issue is that the battery is too old and only last 2 - 3 hours.

> The thing I really notice is how everybody with a mac has a machine that is newer than two years. Those who are hitting the two year mark are experiencing hardware issues, particularly lighting, which is needed for dexternal montitors, but it seems trackpad longevity is also an issue.

Having worked at a company with +50 MacBooks used for 3-4 years, it was really uncommon to see hardware failures besides batteries or power supplies. So I guess we can't generalize out of one experience.

>The thing I really notice is how everybody with a mac has a machine that is newer than two years. Those who are hitting the two year mark are experiencing hardware issues, particularly lighting, which is needed for dexternal montitors, but it seems trackpad longevity is also an issue.

Yeah, no. I have 10 year old Mac (damn, 15 year old) that still work perfectly, as well as 7, and 4 year old. Not to mention that Macs, in general, retain their aftersale value better, so that they commonly "experience hardware issues" does not play well.

The reason some people get newer machines every couple or years or so is that the Mac ecosystem favors newer anyway -- you get quite updated specs etc every two iterations (usually the first iteration is speed bump upgrade), and sometimes things work only with the newer models (e.g. a feature that needs the later bluetooth chipset and wont work on the previous bluetooth generation, etc.).

I think the representation on Hacker News is somewhat skewed towards OSX developers, I'd be surprised to learn that OSX has ever outstripped Windows or Linux in terms the platform the people develop on. Certainly not as something developed for as there are a vast army of developers out there who target embedded systems, set top box, micro-controllers, industrial platforms etc.

What surprises me is the sheer amount of professionals that buy a MacBook Pro, and install Windows on it.

They just want the hardware. They do not want to learn how to use a different operating system.

I'm not talking about marketshare. I'm talking about superiority.

I have been using Windows religiously for 15 years. I moved to OS X last August and it's way "too" superior to windows/linux.

> I'm talking about superiority.

You misspelled 'personal preference' there.

Well for software development the only problem with Windows is that it isn't unix and a lot of the web dev world lives on unix. In my experience Windows 7 is much more stable than for example Yosemite, though I would really prefer to use some linux distro.

Osx just seems to have a lot of problems with very basic stuff like beach balling various system dialogs, failing with external displays etc.

The hardware is nice, especially the trackpads are way better than the stuff for example Lenovo puts out. Though I have to admit that I really don't like aluminium as laptop material.

Idunno, after running a MBP for almost five years, IMO Windows software is better. Most of it's not very pretty, but in terms of pound-for-pound productivity shortcuts and features-in-general, Windows designers/programmers seem to favor productivity over cheesy gimmicks (or, this contemptible trend of data sparsity)

After I became more focused in the Java and .NET world, the OS started to matter less to me.

Same would apply to most modern programming stacks that come with batteries.

Given that I used to like Windows, before getting into the UNIX world. As it was huge improvement over plain *-DOS for someone with Amiga envy.

Going back wasn't a big deal specially given the Windows office requirements.

I enjoy playing with Macs since the LC days at the university, but always was put off by the hardware combination that was given at their price range.

For me the GPU/CPU combo is quite important.

> I think it is good to look at what the general public will be using.

The general public really isn't using Office 365 or Surface 3 though.

I've not heard of people running IntelliJ on a Surface. I'd be curious to know how well that works.

I have some complaints on the Surface Pro 2, but mostly related to the TypeCover keyboard. Haven't played with SP3.

Sorry, I've gotta say: you know that things like "SP3" in Microsoft-land typically mean "Service Pack", right? It's so easy to get confused in acronym-city already, shouldn't we avoid creating more? :(

With the keyboard, it is just a Windows machine - it should be fine, but thanks: I will do some research.

I run Visual Studio and Web/PhpStorm (essentially built on IntelliJ, I think?) on a Surface Pro 3 often. Mine's an i7 with 8gb RAM. More powerful than the 13" Ultrabook I replaced with it, and much more powerful than the MacBook I was using before the Ultrabook.

I have felt no pain on my i5 Surface Pro 3. It outperforms the decent rig my office provides. I run multiple instances of VS, leave stuff open all the time, massive Chrome tab abuse... The fans only come on while streaming video AND compiling, etc. It doesn't hiccup or grunt.

I wasn't 100% sold on the price/value ratio when I bought it, but now am totally happy I did. Great machine.

I developed on Android with IntellIJ IDEA and an awesome Surface Pro 2 for almost a year, until a move to a new job made me switch to a MacBook Air. Amazing, amazing little thing.

Running Android Studio and VS2015 side by side with no hardware problems (development-wise) on my Surface Pro 2. (Being honest, Chrome's significantly more of a resource hog than the two combined).

My only problem was an incompatibility with a specific virtualisation technology in the Surface to reduce boot time and Intel HAXM.

There's also a problem with bluetooth lag/packet loss when maxing out the WiFi.

I'm running an Apple Bluetooth keyboard and generic bluetooth mouse when I work from home, Type cover on the go. The Type cover is terrible for the price, but it's an OK keyboard. The touchpad leaves much to be desired.

Microsoft is heading in a good direction. I do like Surface 3 and 3 Pro. But the battery life of Windows laptops (including Surface) is still not good enough. We have to admit Apple does well in Macbook's battery life.

If you're looking for battery life, it'd be worth it to look into the thinkpad x250. It claims to have a 20 hour charge, and real world tests [0] stand by that claim.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-two-day-laptop-battery-is-he...

Just out of curiosity: is using IntelliJ on the HP Stream a good experience? Considering a similar purchase (chromebook C720p) but afraid of performance issues...

My gripe with Apple is all these Operating system upgrades in iOS and OS X. I understand the need to change, and security is of utmost importance, but don't alienate your customer base with OS's that need hours of tweaking, and then you still have programs that don't work, and missing files. I can't imagine Steve Jobs would be running the ship this way. Are their products still the best-- yes, but the margin is closing in my little world.

> Office 365 is such a good deal for $100/year compared to iCloud

o_O

Was the whole post in a sarcastic tone, or just this part? Serious question.

Office 365 for $100/year is the 5 license pack, that gives you 5 accounts with each 10TB onedrive storage + desktop office licenses + all the office online stuff.

You can get the 5 pack on amazon for $70. I personally think that's way better than iCloud although I mainly bought it for storage, because if you need more than 1TB that becomes by far the cheapest available option.

Not sure how the extra services from iCloud and office365 compare, don't use either all that much, but both seem kinda equal and lacking compared to google or dropbox.

So I'd certainly call that a nice deal.

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