Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Testing the 12-inch MacBook's Performance with Windows 10

alexvking.com

156 pointsingve166 comments

> Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before.

So much this. I really admire how performance of Windows desktop is optimized. I can't compare it with OS X, but when compared to modern Linux DE's (Plasma, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon etc.), Windows desktop still has all the same modern bells and whistles (hw acceleration, effects etc.) yet it blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption.

I say I admire the effort on optimization, because things weren't that good even on Windows 7. I remember constantly having slight stuttering here and there on Windows 7 but Windows 8+ is completely smooth on the very same machine (which is now getting close to its 6th year), and this anectode shows that they must have taken the optimization seriously.

P.S: I'm not complaining on Linux DE's, they just have different priorities, and they're good deals considering their price.

I have to confess as well. My 8.1 machine is the first windows in 10 years I haven't either completely wiped or dual booted. I live in linux, but now use virtualbox on this machine. I bought it to be a travel rig- my main development is still done on a dual-boot (that now never boots into windows), but I'm liking it. I wish the virtualization was a bit smoother but it serves my purposes for now. I just like the win 8.1 experience enough that I don't want to deny myself easy access to it.

Have you tried the propietary graphics drivers in Linux? They improve things a lot. I'm using the Nvidia ones because Nouveau performance was very poor (not their fault, Nvidia is not very open to release specifications or code so they have to reverse engineer them) and everything is very smooth. And the battery life much better than Windows.

I'm already using proprietary Nvidia drivers but it doesn't seem to positively affect desktop performance that much on my machine (it's an old 2xxm card). I must say I'm happy with Kwin performance, it's just that Windows is much more smooth and uses somewhat less resources while doing that.

> compared to modern Linux DE's ... it (Windows) blows them out of water when it cames to both smoothness and resource consumption.

I'm not going to debate this, but I'll just try to assign blame. It goes one place: X.

As long as they all build on X, things will be suboptimal and I can't wait for initiatives and projects like Wayland and Mir gain more traction.

If you doubt anything I say about X, please watch this youtube video which has one of the key X-maintainers complain about how bad it really is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6PFjoYuml0

Hmm.. what do I have to do to experience those performance problems? I use Mint and Debian on my machines and I never have any problems. Nothing ever stutters or lags or whatever.

I mainly use Firefox, the Terminal, Gimp and Libre Office. No performance problems whatsoever. And I have pretty old machines. An over 5 years old lenovo laptop and a similarely old desktop machine.

Why would you ever want to experience performance problems?

The obvious answer to experience those problems is to setup your system the same way as the people experiencing the problems, same h/w, s/w config, etc. You can look at the configs of people reporting problems on forums, in bug reports, etc.

I know what you mean and the amusing thing is that it used to be the other way around. Back then in the older days of Gnome2 and KDE3 it was possible to use them with other window managers like Beryl and Compiz. These again also provided a 3D desktop experience and in their later development stage they were well optimized and stable. They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.

>They were the one who blew windows vista out of the water when it came to smoothness, resource consumption and hardware support.

Beryl and Compiz? I beg to differ. Besides a bitch to get running, and get running well, they were not at all comparable to Vista with regards to "resource consumption" and "hardware support".

This is just an anecdote, but I share the parent's experience, too. I bought a low-end HP laptop around when Vista came out (2006/07?). It ran with Aero Glass, but not very smoothly. But first compiz-quinn and then beryl worked perfectly, also with the same blurred transparency effect that was slow on Windows. Even when I enabled the crazier effects like wobbly windows, it remained smooth, and used not noticably more resources. The only place a slowness was noticable was when quickly scrolling (webpages, for instance). However, this is still a problem on any non-Windows compositing DE in my experience.

At some point, "they" started to rewrite compiz, and it went downhill, until it was so slow I could not use compositing anymore.

On the Windows side, there was a lot of tense discussion between Intel and Microsoft regarding Intel's popular integrated-graphics chipset being shipped at the time of Vista's release. The chipset didn't have hardware DirectX support and shouldn't have been certified, but Intel had promised their customers (like HP) the chipsets were fine and they were not anywhere near the end of the product lifecycles for either the chipset or the PCs. So Microsoft fudged the rules and a bunch of consumer-grade hardware ran like crap on Vista.

I agree and I'll leverage your comment to rant a bit so please forgive me :)

It's the old CADT [0] monster still at work. Windows desktop is the same old explorer shell which has been there since 1995? Only addition is dwm, which provides the modern graphical facilities. And Windows team has been constantly improving this same codebase for 20 years now.

While on the FOSS side, desktop developers are busy with the sisyphean task of rewriting or porting desktop shells and base applications again and again. OH, they've released a new version of graphics toolkit and the old one is deprecated. We must port the desktop now. Oh we also have to port all the applications now. Some applications were so hard to port that we've abondoned them and rewrite them instead. Actually, why don't we also rewrite the desktop shell while we're at it? Promise it'll worth it. We ported old apps but they're not consistent with the new ux paradigms of the new desktop so we'll rewrite them also... And just few years later when things start to calm down, there's a new release of graphic toolkit which will eventually deprecate the old version, ... oh not again.

Notice that I'm not talking about fragmentation or lack of resources. I'm glad we have more than one major DE, and I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above. Even with lack of resources, linux desktops had long long time to create really high quality products but they can't, because the ground below them is always shaking. Windows team on the other hand has been vetting, fixing, improving the same codebase for 20 years. They don't change the underlying toolkit every 5 year. They don't rewrite basic applications or port them to new libraries over and over (except new metro things, but they're seperate so my point still stands). Imagine what we would have now, if Gnome devs continued to polish and improve Gnome 2 and KDE devs continued to polish and improve KDE 3, just by using the same resources they've poured into Gnome 3 and KDE 4/Plasma 5 and their applications, respectively.

Again I'll emphasize, I'm grateful for the efforts that went into linux DE's, and I don't blame their developers for shit they have to deal with (although some are partly responsible for it)

That was a long rant and thanks for listening.

[0] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

>> I don't think more resources or less fragmentation would change anything regarding the situation above

Well, as far as I can tell, lots of Linux people are hipstery special little snowflakes and fork things because some small thing isn't exactly as they want it, and that's where most of the fragmentation comes from.

Assuming that's largely accurate, why would it not be a problem?

What if we had, say, three major Linux distros instead of dozens of half-assed ones? How many tinkerer-distros does the world need? -As many as it takes to prevent Linux from ever conquering the desktop, it seems.

But seriously.. Please stop.

I totally agree with you with respect to distribution fragmentation. Fragmentation there is much worse and definitely harmful at this point.

My above statement was specifically about the desktop environments, and DEs actually fit into your scenario. There are only 2 major DEs which have most mindshare, followed by handful of smaller ones. So there is not a bad fragmentation in that area (at least historically, there is now more diversity compared to 5 years ago), and the major ones have been with us for many years, AFAIK since late 90's? That's not only plenty of time to turn both of them into kick ass desktops, but also create wonderful ecosystems around them with high quality applications. Yet all we see is rewriting or porting everything every few years.

Not clear it is the number of distributions that is the problem as they tend to package the same libraries, desktop environments and applications. I agree with grandparent post that it is the churn in underlying libraries and the downstream re-work for no increase in functionality that causes that is the problem.

PS: Linux is widely used everywhere except traditional 'desktops'. Existing mainstream DEs are pretty good (KDE5/Gnome 3.16/MATE 1.8) and provide a range of choice.

Yeah the OS X UI smoothness is great if the GPU is up to the task, like on my iMac it's flawless but in the case of this Macbook it's Intel Integrated graphics on a Retina display, and in my experience that can be less than flawlessly smooth in operations like Mission Control/Expose for sure, so it seems Apple has some catching up to do now. I also find Windows runs very well on low specced computers.

Safari on Mac OS is extremely smooth, from the looks of this blog it seems Microsoft has replicated that in Edge browser. Look forward to trying it.

My 15" retina Macbook with nVidia graphics can't get 60fps on yosemite either.

And guess what... We're using the same tools available to third party app developers, in an effort to ensure the dev platform is rock solid. The Start menu is just a universal XAML app. We don't have to do any special optimization on top of what the framework offers.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee working on the Windows 10 Start menu.

You guys have knocked it out of the park with the start menu. It's wonderful. Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use. I really like that you guys have downgraded the size a bit since earlier builds; really sleek and useful now.

> Besides occasionally having to kill explorer because it becomes non-responsive it's been an absolute pleasure to use.

Sigh.

You're talking about pre-release software.

Cool story. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 have similar problems. Windows 7 becomes slow with huge uptime. Windows 8.1 has countless bugs.

Well it does help that you can just email the perf people in devdiv and have the single largest concentration of low level windows performance experts available for free

The start menu is great code but mom and pop dev shop doesn't have hundreds of top devs available :)

But in terms of the original comparison, it's not like Apple's UI team doesn't have access to the OS performance people, either...

That's impressive. I've not tried Windows 10 yet but I hear nothing but good things about it. Keep up the good work!

I've had an odd bug where upon waking from sleep, my desktop displays the start menu persistently, without the ability to interact with it.

My current workaround is to lock the computer and unlock it again. This seems to work but it's really annoying.

It only occurs on my desktop PC and not my Surface (which has issues of its own).

Any clue if there's anything I can do here or should I just wait?

I think I recall seeing that one in the bug list. Sit tight.

And just FYI, we do look at the stuff that gets submitted through the built-in Windows Feedback app.

What's happening with search? Is using Cortana mandatory? What's up with always using web search? Why can't I turn this web search off? Do I absolutely must block off bing and all Microsoft services at the network level to stop this?

Well, I'm using Ubuntu/Gnome 3 on both my 6 year old gaming desktop and 4 years old i3/basic discrete AMD GPU laptop and I have to say everything runs extremely smooth and consumes a pittance less than 1GB RAM used with some stuff in the background

Gnome shell is CPU hungry and I can tell I'm not alone with that because I did a lot of google search on it. Even when dragging windows around, CPU usage skyrockets to 40-60% and it's not even smooth. And that's with gpu acceleration, I can't even imagine what would've happened if it were on software rendering. Not to mention memory usage of gnome shell only increases with time.

They are all known issues but shell developers blame proprietary Nvidia driver, maybe that's why you are more happy with gnome shell than I am :) (Though I still can't get how cpu usage skyrockets when dragging windows.)

I'm using Gnome shell and just tested what happens to the CPU usage when I drag around windows. The dragging itself was buttery smooth and gnome-shell never used more than 12.6% of one core. I'm using the libre radeonsi driver.

It's because of either different drivers, or your one core is faster than my poor little c2d core, or you're not moving it crazy enough :) Did you compare it with kwin? For example, on my machine gnome shell uses sth. like 40-60% while kwin is 10% at most.

I'm using a 4670K, so there is a difference, but I doubt that this is the explaining factor.

I know that gnome successfully offloads work to the GPU when I drag the windows [1] because I can hear it [2].

I don't have kwin installed, so I didn't compare.

[1] Yes, I also did move them wildly, too.

[2] My graphic cards has serious coil whine issues.

Totally unscientific: On my ancient Thinkpad T61p with nvidia graphics of some vintage and the proprietary drivers installed on Debian Jessie, I get around 12 to 20% on one of the two cores with vigourous mouse assisted window movement of an Iceweasel window. MATE desktop, compiz is not available in Jessie repos so using marco.

The overall user experience is smooth and pleasant. I doubt if Windows 8/10 would install on this machine (although it came with Windows 7). I have several Thinkpads of this vintage for the keyboards, not needing super powerful processors.

Macs really are some of the best Windows laptops you can buy - and now with full UEFI support Windows boots as fast as OS X.

Maybe... Still my Yoga 2 Pro feels and looks better than any Mac laptop I have own or seen. Touch screen is definetely a must-have to me. It is specially useful if you are developing for touch devices.

Touch screen on a laptop. Yuck.

Yeah, who wants a touch screen on a laptop that converts into a tablet? That's just crazy. Man, fuck those people for adding functionality that I don't even have to use in laptop mode, but which is essential in tablet mode.

I don't want a touch-screen on a tablet, either, because I don't want fingerprints on it when I'm reading on it. Which is why my Surface Pro 3 is essentially only a laptop, because using Windows 8.1 (and 10) in pen-only mode is unpleasant and slow.

I'd say the same about a phone, but I don't spend my day staring at my phone.

Can't say I've had the same experience. On all of my touch devices, I can only see the fingerprints if the screen is off and if it bothers me at that point, I just wipe it off.

Given the prevalence of touch devices these days, I'm surprised that I don't hear this complaint very often.

I don't mind a touch screen on an iPad. But my Surface attracts fingerprints like nothing else (I have generally oily fingertips--it's not a function of washing, it manifests very shortly after I wash my hands), and it's really hard to keep it clean. If I use it for a full day, I probably wipe it down six or seven times. It's super distracting when I'm writing code or something.

What's the problem with additional functionality on a laptop screen?

Nothing. I retroffited a soda fountain on mine.

Well if it as light as the increased weight from the addition of a touchscreen, I wouldn't mind having two!

However on a serious note, its not as bad as you think. Just have to get used to it and once you do that, there won't be a going back. Think of it as something that is supposed to complement your existing workflow and not as something that would replace it. You know like have a voice assistant on your phone, you don't have to yell everything at it, just some quick look ups.

I disagree, strongly. It is precisely as bad as he thinks, and what makes it worse is that it damages the viability of a pen-based workflow (which I am in favor of, because I do a lot of visual stuff and I use OneNote quite a bit).

I want to be able to disable it entirely and not smudge the crap out of a screen I'm trying to work on, but it's effectively impossible and when you do disable it it all falls back to keyboard controls and leaves you with a garbage pen exeprience.

Are the colors still messed up on the Y2P?

I was able to handle one yesterday, and yes, it seems so.

I haven't had any problems with colors so far (I compared them with my wife MBP and another HP Desktop we have at home). I did have weird color issues with my desktop XPS 2720 but were driver related.

For me, the only thing holding them back is not being able to switch between discrete and integrated graphics on Windows.

You can switch between them, usually using the control panel setting of the discrete graphics card (Nvidia in my case)

Manual switching? Ouch.

So that means by default high battery drain, heat issues, and having to manually switch on the discrete graphics card by hand every time you visit a 3D-utilising website.

People have been complaining about no auto-switch in Windows on Macbooks for years, yet they haven't fixed it. Tons of other laptops already support it (inc. Thinkpads).

Apple keep Windows "bad" on Macbooks on purpose. It is the only explanation for all the driver issues they have (but no other laptop manufacturer has).

I 100% agree. My Mac Pro is an amazing machine to run Windows. While I still prefer the workflow on 10.10, I am far from unhappy when I have to switch to using Windows.

Completely disagree -- the Apple trackpad drivers on windows are awful, and on a laptop, most of your time will probably be spent using a trackpad. Trackpad++, which the author of the article mentions, can help, but it's a horrible program for the following reasons:

1. The developer requires that you put windows into "test mode" (creating a non-removable desktop watermark) to install it at all, apparently to get around code signing restrictions

2. The developer requires that you install the completely useless "Power Plan Assistant" program in addition to Trackpad++

3. The software itself is terribly buggy, causing random 100% CPU usage spikes

Apple's windows trackpad drivers are indeed not that great, but I haven't seen a windows laptop yet that can provide a better trackpad experience in spite of the bad drivers.

Oh pretty much all of them have better trackpad experience than Apple drivers on Windows provide. Under OS X the trackpad is stellar, but on Windows the drivers are just awful.

The multiple finger related functionality doesn't work that well under Windows, but simply moving the cursor feels a lot better than most Windows trackpads I've used.

You're completely correct, and it's unfortunate that you're being downvoted. I'm guessing this is due to idiots who have never used Windows on a Mac laptop and think they know more than they do.

As a universal, parent's claim is patently false. I have an Lenovo X1 Carbon that is a testament to how crappy a trackpad can get. I have had a few PC laptops in the last 5 years (HP, Lenovo) but have never found one with an adequate trackpad. So, if could you please tell me which laptop I should try? This is quite easy to test.

I've heard good things about the new XPS trackpad, but haven't been able to try one in the wild yet.

Your issue is that you're misunderstanding the parent comment's claim. Izacus didn't claim that Windows laptop trackpads weren't bad -- the only claim made was that Apple trackpad drivers were worse. I've used a few friends' windows laptops, and while their trackpads certainly weren't good or perhaps even adequate (to borrow your term), they were without a doubt better than the Apple-laptop-running-windows combination, which I would classify as far below "adequate".

I have an X1 to test side by side with an rMBP running windows, and the X1 is categorically worse. Heck, I've tried many PC laptops (we have access to many at work) and haven't found anything that was as usable as an rMBP.

So, just name one laptop whose trackpad is better than an rMBP, I'll go try it side by side.

For some ungodly reason, I haven't seen any windows laptop with a nice trackpad that doesn't break in 6 months :(. At least my Acer netbooks have reliable trackpads (no gestures or anything, but ...)

I nave a Dell laptop and it has a great trackpad. Gestures work consistently, I use them all the time. The only real annoyance is that the material of the trackpad is not the most comfortable for finger swiping but it's alright.

Apple's keyboard layout for a Boot Camp lacks some of the accents with alt+ - the basic stuff works, but anything non-ASCII or a dead key is broken. :(

does Windows 10 still support old legacy BIOS?

"Until thorough benchmarking is completed by me or someone else, I think the best way to put it is this: Task View often runs at 60FPS, while Mission Control never runs at 60FPS"

So, it seems that in this case a beta version of Windows works best than MacOS

"runs better"? I'm baffled.

I have a hard time understanding the equivalence. Is task view supposed to be representative of all windows programs ? Is Mission Control supposed to be the fastest OSX program ?

I don't use windows So I'll also have to ask, are these programs actually comparable in what they do ?

Yes, Task View and Mission Control are similar. I don't think that this speed comparison is very useful, but in my experience the graphics drivers under Windows are significantly better than on OSX or on Linux. (I run Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 10 on my retina MBP, and desktop graphics performance on Win10 is way better than the rest. By 'desktop graphics performance' I mean window management, scrolling of 2D content in browsers and other apps.)

However, Win 10 runs quite inefficiently on Apple hardware in terms of battery life.

On a side note, I find Win10 as the first Windows that is usable on HiDPI machines.

I'm using Windows 8 on both a rMBP (~220 PPI) and a 4K 28" monitor in the office (~150 PPI). It has worked fine for awhile, the only problem are some legacy apps (e.g. font forge, the font installer, and oddly enough, BootCamp!).

Yes, but Win10 will also bring display-dependent scaling, i.e. you will able to manually set a different scaling level per display.

Ya, that would be cool. I couldn't get a second display to work with my 4K...well, it sort of worked but was horribly distorted.

the graphics drivers under Windows are significantly better than on OSX or on Linux

An influence from its gaming heritage? I know that GPU companies definitely spend a lot more effort on improving their Windows drivers than on other OSs, because of gamers.

That and the fact that Apple just doesn't seem to care much about 3D support... the 3D stack is about 3 years out of date now, GPU drivers as well (and nVidia etc. can't update them). Yosemite had NO updates to the GPU drivers or OpenGL support at all and currently it's still about 20-30% slower on the same hardware compared to Windows.

If I'm a bit cynical, Apple is deliberately refusing updates just so they'll be able to tout huge 20% performance improvement of their proprietary Metal when they bring it to OS X.

Based on how buggy Yosemite is this should really be rephrased as a beta version of Windows runs better than a beta version of MacOS.

Except that Yosemite was released almost a year ago and Win10 is about to be released this year. A buggy OS is different than a Beta OS.

Yes 10.10 was released at least a year too early - it really should not be out of beta. I get daily "pizza wheels of death" with 10.10.3 on my Mac Pro. On the same machine I have yet to have Windows 8.1 crash. The hardware is fantastic, the software far less so.

btw did you do a fresh install? I'd always just upgraded and had no problems; until Yosemite. It's a bit more time consuming but Yosemite has worked great for me since I did a fresh install.

Interesting, I was in the same upgrade boat, but went back to 10.8 on my Mid-2011 MBAir. With only 4GB of ram, 10.10 was killing me, constantly spooling up the i7 & fan to screaming levels.

I did a semi-clean upgrade. I bought the Mac Pro late last year and it stil had 10.9 on it. I upgrade to 10.10 before copying across my user files and software from my laptop running 10.9. I have been trying to figure out what the cause is by looking at the crash logs without any success. I do find that daily reboots lessens the risk, other than this there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason.

I have been using MacOS of various stripes since 1990 (I am a biologist by background and biologists were one of the few groups that stuck with macs through the late 90s). Other than 10.1 Yosemite is the buggiest OS 10 release to date in my experience.

How buggy was it, really? I've heard several painful stories, but nothing concrete, except some changes Apple made to the DNS infrastructure.

The same kind of stories I've heard for every release since 10.4, about how the new one is so buggy, etc. Then, the next release comes and people wax nostalgically about how stable the previous one was.

I have about 50 to go by and given the stats, it crashes more often than Maverick and much more than Mountain Lion. Wifi is a constant pain (although iOS 8 is much, much worse with about 75% of the iPhones and iPads refusing to work with our Cisco network - no other OS exhibits this randomish behavior).

It also is a memory hog compared to Maverick and earlier. 4GB machines are noticeably sluggish (to the point of user complaints).

Ι've seen some wi-fi pain.

I've not have had any crashes yet. I had a few in Mavericks and Mountain Lion (grey screen about needing to restart etc) -- like 1 or 2 a month.

Yosemite likes to crash hard when it is put to sleep at home then plugged into a thunderbolt monitor at work. This has happened quite a lot to multiple machines and I have no clue. Add to that the buggy Finder from Maverick and I am getting complaints. Its time for another Snow Leopard.

I agree 100%. Apple needs to devote an entire release to stability and gaining back its reputation for stability. At the moment absolutely beautiful hardware is being ruined by cruddy software.

Yosemite was bad enough that I do not accept Apple updates until a few months have passed and I know what the fallout will be based on complaints on websites. List of broken things

a) Battery life on my macbook pro plummeted after the upgrade.

b) I get visual artifacts (black lines on screen and some flashing) when OSX auto switches between the intel gpu and the nvidia gpu.

c) Cannot get nfs transfers to work with acceptable speeds (they seem to top out at 2 MBPs)

d) Broke drag and drop in Qt because of some changes to the string supplied to the drop event.

e) Bottom of my macbook pro gets unacceptably warm. I dont recall it being this bad before the update.

a) same battery life as ever on mine. Even better actually.

b) Seen some occasional flashes. Not sure why it happens, but I think it's related to the color temperature mananging "Flux" app (they seem to stop when I don't use it).

c) Sure not some network problem? I've had succesful NFS transfers, but usually small files, so never bothered to check.

d) Shouldn't Qt fix it? If it didn't broke drag and drop in native apps, then Qt emulated it based on some assumptions that weren't guaranteed.

e) Never had this happen, even when using Compressor on all cores. Top left might get a little warm at those times.

I'm finding Mission Control a bit slow too. The whole Exposé thing was a lot snappier when they still called it that.

That said, in Task View on Windows do the iconified windows still play live content? E.g., under mission control, a video window will continue playing video live in its preview texture. Does this happen on Windows too?

Yes, they do.

I was on a Youtube binge last night watching Windows 10 videos. It looks really impressive. Automatically switching between tablet and desktop mode when you dock appears to actually work - perhaps it is possible to make a UI that works for both use cases!

The Cortana feature is slick and I'm tempted to cancel my Amazon Echo order and get a Surface (which has a free Windows 10 upgrade).

I was never a fan of the OSX Dock. When switching between apps, I always misclick and startup a new program accidentally. I prefer the traditional windows dock. Two features I would surely miss if I switch back to Windows would be in-app window switching (cmd ~) and the placement of of the cmd key on the Mac keyboard versus the awkward stretching of my pinky finger to reach the control key on Windows.

App window switching only really works in OSX because the window manager is different. Whilst it would transfer to Windows, I don't think it'd make as much sense.

> "possible to make a UI that works for both use cases!"

That was what Windows 8/8.1 tried to do, but apparently people didn't like at all ( never understood that, to me is a fine OS)

People didn't like it because it wasn't adaptive to the present use. The tablet and desktop views were the same regardless, which made for some poor UX. Square peg, round hole.

> People didn't like it because it wasn't adaptive to the present use. The tablet and desktop views were the same regardless, which made for some poor UX. Square peg, round hole.

I think the whole thing is very subjective. I have a way better UX with Windows 8/8.1 that I had with Win7 and with OSX.

The change resistance effect should not be dismissed too, people tend to be scared when a change is dramatic.

> "possible to make a UI that works for both use cases!"

"People didn't like it because it wasn't adaptive to the present use. The tablet and desktop views were the same"

Isn't that more 'multiple similar UIs in a single executable' than 'same UI on tablet and desktop'?

If so, it seems the only difference with OS X/iOS is that Microsoft thinks a tablet now is powerful enough for desktop applications. Looking at size and weight of the latest MacBook, they probably are right.

I think the title should be renamed: Testing Windows 10’s performance with the 12-inch MacBook.

>Little design touches have really improved the way things look, such as the switch to circular account pictures on the login screen

This is the thing I and many other Windows users hate with passion, see rants like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/35zsgk/excuse...

https://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-sug...

https://windows.uservoice.com/forums/265757-windows-feature-...

Finding random people on the internet to complain about change is as hard as finding grains of sand at the beach. The real question is what percentage of users will actually even notice a week after release, much less actually be inconvenienced in some measurable way.

The links were provided because these discussions contains arguments (good and bad), it was not about quantification.

Yeah, it's just that I remember people saying the same thing about Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, etc. (or each OS X release on the Mac side, since 10.1 or so – I think everyone agrees 10.0 was over the top).

Some people initially have strong negative reactions to something familiar changing but those tend go away quickly as the new version becomes familiar and then the same people will rant about the next version. Remember the “Fisher-Price My First OS” jokes when Windows XP came out? I'd bet you could find similar cracks at Windows 7 from some of the same people who are now saying the XP UI was the Platonic ideal of Windows.

ArsTechnica actually did the legwork looking through their forums when the now-staunchly-defended Windows XP was approaching EOL:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04 /memory-lane-before-everyone-loved-windows-xp-they-hated-it/

The author described Windows 10 as 'kind of gorgeous', which was somewhat surprising. Until now the most generous thing I've heard someone say is that it's not finished. (Seriously, though, the UI is very unpolished at this stage, even for Windows. I wouldn't be concerned if not for the fact that RTM is only a few months away.)

Yes, new + different = bad.

It's actually a UX improvement: a lead designer at Microsoft talked about how "people aren't squares" in a recent blog post [1]. I'm not sure it looks that great, but once you know the logic behind it it's a lot more interesting.

[1]: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/windows-...

My rebuttal is that an account ID picture is not necessarily a portrait photograph. Oh, sure, social data miners like Facebook want you to only use a photo of yourself for a profile picture. But many people -- such as on Twitter -- don't.

Profile pictures I've used are a photo of my computer, a still from a movie, an animated GIF of a flying pig (alas no one I know of supports animated profile pictures), and yes even a photo of myself every once in a while.

That said, complaining about the shape of the profile picture is pure bikeshedding. Big deal. How much time on your computer do you spend staring at your own picture? (Please don't answer that.) Although if given the choice I'd prefer rectangular. My computer screen is a rectangle. The area reserved to display the picture is a rectangle. Does a click in the invisible rectangle register as part of the picture? And most of all, it's easier to crop a photo to appear circular when displayed in a rectangle than it is to show a rectangle inside a circle. So the "safe" default should be a rectangle.

If they were being honest, the actual reason is that circular avatars have been trendy and the norm for new designs on the web, iOS, and Android for the past 3 to 4 years, and the two primary reasons they became popular were because border-radius became supported widely enough around that time, and because photographs of faces arguably look better in a circular frame, at least according to current tastes.

Here's a quora thread from back in 2013 discussing it:

http://www.quora.com/Why-are-many-UI-designers-using-round-p...

it's a crippled device for windows.

windows 8 with touch enabled devices is another level. even if you only ever use touch so little. with touch and pen it's another level yet.

I've used Linux laptop with touch screen hacked in since 2006. had tons of tweaks. and win 8 still bowed me away. it is even integrated with a remote desktop (RDP) client on ios and android. when i connect to my HTPC in the living room (only place i have a reason to have windows installed) the touch input from the tablet just shine. i can use the remote device as if i was holding a surface 3 or something. there's no hacks and extra menus on the client to do anything. just touch solves all the needs you have to use the box

While we're talking about windows, any advice on how to make it developer friendly outside of .net? (Say for people whose main tools are bash, vi and a compiler)

Step one: Install Cmdr http://gooseberrycreative.com/cmder/

Step two: If on !Win10, use the chocolatey nu-get package manager (https://chocolatey.org/), but if on Win10, I _think_ the native package manager will be a drop-in, tho I'm not sure.

That is literally _all_ you have to do to get 90% of what I do on a linux terminal into a windows console.

I'd like to add Babun [1] as an alternative to Cmder. Not that I don't like Cmder, but Babun comes with a preconfigured Cygwin and a lot more tools out of the box.

[1] http://babun.github.io/

Didn't you forget to add Cygwin there?

Unless you have to execute (ba)sh-native scripts in Windows, I find Cygwin way too cumbersome. As I mentioned above, UnxUtils gets you the tooling without the path delimiter headaches.

Be careful with Chocolatey, it will install the software without unchecking those nastly tools: search bars, etc. To be honest, it makes Chocolatey absolutely unuseful.

Source for this? I use Chocolatey on Win7 and haven't had anything unwanted installed. No Ask Toolbar (from multiple JRE and JDK installs), etc.

Agree about Cmdr, but I'd add PyCmd[1] and UnxUtils[2]. I've never had much success with Chocolatey (probably due to corporate firewall issues). Gets me acceptably close to bash.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/pycmd/ [2] http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Chocolatey has been awful for me. Also Cmdr is not well unmaintained and it's a far cry from the Linux tool-chain. People will be better off with Babun or straight Cygwin - http://babun.github.io/

Cygwin

Install MinGw

How about Linux on the new MacBook? It's a nice machine and my old lenovo looks a bit "unhipsterish" when I work in a cafe. Also it's heavier. But I live in Linux, so I would have to be sure it works.

You could look at a Yoga 3 with a Core-M processor: similar to the new MacBook but with more ports, touch screen, tablet functinality and less than half the price http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-Yoga-11-6-Inch-Notebook-Silve...

There is a performance hit because it has a an M-5Y10 instead of an M-5Y71.

Depends how much you want to pay to look "hipsterish". I would pay more to look non-hipsterish ;-)

Depending on the cooling system of the laptop and what kinds of applications you use, a 5Y71 can be slower than a 5Y10.

More details: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9117/analyzing-intel-core-m-pe...

I'm running Linux on a Dell XPS 13 (dev edition, FHD screen + i5 for power savings). Plenty of power for most of my laptop use, big "infinity" screen (thin bezel) making the machine small but screen big, and overall positive experience.

It's also driving a 34" screen right now, and not breaking a sweat. http://imgur.com/WvGwGo9

Has anyone tested linux on the 12-inch macbook yet? How straightforward is it (or isn't it) to install?

I haven't been successful. The latest Debian and Ubuntu images don't have a recent enough kernel to support the trackpad, keyboard or even NVMe SSD, it seems.

Windows 8.1 runs quite smoothly on my 2 year old Mac Mini via Bootcamp. However, I do have problems runs Steam games from Windows due to the lack of a dedicated DirectX video card. I use the setup mostly for testing and for playing Project Spark. Does anyone know if the dedicated video card on the latest Macbook Pro supports DirectX games?

Also, I think he meant to say "Cmd+Shift+4" as the OS X screenshot shortcut or "Cmd+Shift+Ctrl+4" to copy screenshot to the clipboard.

It's a little thing, but Cmd+Shift+3 is actually the shortcut to send a screenshot of the entire screen to the desktop. Cmd+Shift+4 is great for selecting a region.

It supports DirectX fine, Macs use regular GPUs. Did you not install the drivers?

> Without a PrintScreen key, I had to download some software to let me take a timed screenshot. One thing I miss from OS X is the Cmd+Shift+3 shortcut.

I believe the shortcut you're looking for is Cmd+Shift+S. Courtesy of OneNote, it's the equivalent of Cmd+Shift+4 on Mac OS.

Or you could just press start and open the snipping tool

Im running Windows on MacBook for 4+ years. I have Bootcamp installed, and I switch between OS X and Windows 8.

I use Windows for .Net development only. When it comes to programming Ruby, or just to surfing the web, I prefer Mac OS X. The UI/UX for Windows really sucks comparing to OS X. No gestures support, you'll need to use mouse instead of TrackPad.

You can tune your Windows (use third-party tools like trackpad++, write some autohotkey scripts), but you won't get this feeling that you're at home.

(FYI: I'm ~4 year Mac user and I've been using Windows/Linux since 1994).

I'm now tempted to buy a Macbook Pro so I can install Windows 10!

nit: this is the new Macbook, not a Macbook Pro.

Why not just an Asus Zenbook then? Really good hardware, and comes with Windows and a keyboard that has a Windows button.

Eh, macs have a Cmd key which is basically the same thing. The real question is whether or not it has a physical right mouse button. Right-click+drag is basically impossible (without a separate mouse) on apple hardware, which is sort of its biggest drawback in my eyes.

it does have a physical right. Happy owner of an Asus Zenbook for 3 years now

You'd be better off with a Surface Pro or something from Lenovo in my opinion. Macs are crippled for Windows since Apple can't be bothered to provide proper drivers. They keyboard is also all out of place and mislabeled for Windows and there's no docking station.

Yeah. Last review I read Windows 8.1 was getting 1/2 the battery life of OS X on Macbook. From what people can tell this is because Apple's Windows drivers lack the ability to put components into lower power states and graphics card switching remains broken.

Apple wants Windows to be worse than OS X on Apple's hardware. That's what it really boils down to. They're either apathetic or want people to believe that OS X is inherently better.

I find it funny that Windows 10 runs well on a MacBook yet it's terrible on my gaming desktop. Color profiles refuse to work, there's no way to prevent auto updates, auto updates completely reinstall the whole OS which can take 30+ min and reboots the computer without asking, video drivers break on every update, games are far less stable than with 8.1. To top all that off it seems to be stuck in some kind of update loop where it reinstalls the OS every night.

You signed up for that. It's a beta. It warns you about the forced auto-updates on the page to download the ISO.

It's almost as if it's a technical preview that's not ready for release yet.

Interesting read. And one takeaway is that someone is missing out on a huge opportunity with the trackpad driver :-) But the really interesting thing is the software vs hardware design challenge at Apple. From a revenue standpoint MacOS is really a small business at Apple, but its Microsoft's "iPhone" (aka one of their main revenue drivers), so it isn't surprising that Microsoft is investing more than Apple in that space.

> and one takeaway is that someone is missing out on a huge opportunity with the trackpad driver

GDI+ is the culprit here more than any one company's driver. Windows won't have an as-nice-as-OS-X experience with touchpads until GDI+ is either overhauled or dead and buried. Which makes me sad, because there are really nice things going on with Windows right now, but the feel of using it is janky and weird to me.

I've been using a '14 Macbook Pro Retina for the last five months - its been a great machine, but I do notice a bit of lag in some cases.

For the longest time I just attributed it to software - I'm hopeful that the next version of OSX is able to optimize for HDPI displays.

how is the gpu - anyone test it with anything that uses it moderately/heavily? how is it at driving external displays? (How many did you use, and what resolution)? Is scrolling, hd video, etc smooth?

I ask because out of the specs the gpu seems integrated and quite low-power (for the resolution it runs at.)

Hi, I typically run my MacBook connected to a 1200p monitor, and it behaves great. I've run all sorts of video content on the computer, up to 4K, and it plays it fine. Scrolling is smooth, though occasionally it'll hiccup here or there. Generally, I'm quite impressed with the performance. My review on the website goes into some more detail about day to day usage, if you're curious.

thanks! what kind of content/load would it hiccup on?

I've had some bad experiences scrolling through super high-resolution scanned PDF documents. Those cause beachballing for several seconds in between each page. However, this seems to be a known issue in Preview, and it happens on other, more powerful Macs. I haven't tried with a more optimized PDF reader.

Otherwise, if you have a very busy webpage with a lot going on, (and ads going), scrolling might not be entirely smooth.

What about the OS license? Did he buy it separately?

If you have a Windows 7/8/8.1 license it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10. If you don't have any of the above, than yes, you will need to buy a license.

I suppose the author bought a Windows 8 (the articles claims that he did a clean Windows 10 install starting from Windows 8) license at some time in the past, since a Mac doesn't come with a Windows license.

Is there any information on the international availability of the new MacBook? It's been over a month since the US release, and Apple continues to ignore the existence of other countries.

Obviously the guys at microsoft with a lot more experience in software development will create a superior product. This shouldn't be a surprise as OS X is merely a mod of components derived from linux.

Why is this down voted to oblivion? It is the hard truth, albeit he meant to say Unix not Linux. OSX is merely an "okay" OS. The points in the article about Mission Control being slow and laggy are completely true in my experience (2014 MBPr 16GB 512GB). Windows is architecturally a better OS than OSX.

It's just trolling. Describing OS X as a Unix derivative is roughly as accurate as describing Windows 10 as DOS-based.

If he wanted to have a nuanced conversation about OS architecture, he could talk about something specific rather than huge generalizations with terms which make it clear he doesn't know enough of the details to be qualified to make such broad statements.

Similarly, talking about one benchmark on one device for a feature which many people don't even use is not a good foundation for comparing the merits of entire operating systems. That's like saying you should buy a particular car because it has awesome door handles, as if there are no other possible factors which you need to consider.

But OS X literally is a Unix derivative. Its precursor NeXTSTEP was built on top of the Mach kernel and BSD.

In comparison, Windows 10 has its roots in the Windows NT lineage (starting with NT 3.1, and including Windows XP), which is separate from the DOS-derived Windows line that ended with Windows ME.

(That said, I agree that he was just trolling.)

I don't disagree that it's a Unix – Apple even got it certified in years past – but it's not that simple:

Mach is not a Unix kernel and the Mach interfaces percolate up to the higher levels for many tasks which aren't covered by the POSIX layers.

The bigger difference, though, is higher up. While you certainly can compile POSIX code on OS X, most of the applications which people run use Cocoa and that owes far more to the NextStep side of its lineage than the Unix bits.

The better comparison might have been Win32 rather than DOS, where most of the interfaces were designed by the Win95 developers even though they were also implemented on top of the NT kernel. I've often wondered how much better things would have been in the late 90s/early 200s if David Cutler's team had been able to get the Win95 team to follow their generally much better instincts rather than the other way around. If nothing else, they wouldn't have needed to spend a decade duct-taping security onto a single-user design.

That's an interesting point, and indeed NT has a curious history in that regard - Microsoft was originally planning an OS/2-based API as the dominant one, and it was only due to the success of Windows 3.0 that they ended up adapting the Windows API to 32 bits.

Microsoft has always been dominated by backwards compatibility constraints so there probably wasn't much scope for a massive redesign of the API, as it was in their best commercial interests for 16 and 32 bit Windows APIs to match as closely as possible, to ease porting of third party software.

Backwards compatibility was definitely a driving factor for a lot of bad decisions back then. Here's a great example of how they wanted to avoid breaking a few apps written for a Win95 beta build:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/03/55532...

That's a bit silly but it also meant things like dutifully porting the real-mode Windows messaging system's feature which allowed any app to execute code in any other app:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatter_attack

Like, say, sending a message to the anti-virus software running as SYSTEM to get root…

The most entertaining bug I found was one of the times they failed at portability: one of the Win32 APIs to enumerate the contents of a directory worked 100% of the time on the Windows NT systems our development team used but returned no results on Windows 95 unless you had enabled network sharing (you didn't even need to share something; just starting the service was enough). This manifested in a very confused user wondering why our open dialog showed C:\ as empty when Explorer showed their files were still there.

This post backs up the statement you hated so much though. That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point.

OSX is a strange OS to use. It looks and feels good at first glance but when you have used it for a year, one really longs to return to a pure Windows environment. OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

The OS X Beachball is exactly the same as Windows's busy cursor. That's a Windows feature that was never removed, you just don't see it much usually if things work properly. As of Vista Windows has a spinner rather than an hourglass.

Describing it as "just a mod" rather downplays the significant development effort that OS X has undergone since its inception. The code originally borrowed from Mach and BSD only applies to some parts of the kernel, and a few userspace programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

> That OSX is just a mod of various components plus an old era Unix kernel at the core. You literally validated the point.

Mach is not an “old era Unix kernel” and OS X is not exactly a vanilla Mach:

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch_xnu....

It has a BSD subsystem but plenty of other different things, like a completely custom device driver model (IOKit).

Secondly, you just called everything above the level of the kernel a mod, when that's where most of the code and almost all of the significant differences live. Is Android also “just a mod” on top of Linux?

> OSX has weird bugs like the beachball cursor which is something that simply shouldn't happen in a modern OS. The last Windows to have a global lock like that was 9x.

Windows 10 and most X window managers have the same thing for the same reason: you see the busy cursor when an application stops responding to events within some defined timeout. It's not due to the Win95/Mac OS Classic-like “global lock” you're thinking about but rather access to an unresponsive shared resource. I most commonly see it due to either doing blocking network I/O in the main thread (e.g. Outlook) or making the mistake of assuming that the filesystem won't block which affects just about every app with a network home directory or flaky drive, but it's also common with things like web browsers using a large cache directory where the startup blocks for awhile while the file system churns through millions of files.

The beachball on OSX frequently causes the whole UI shell to freeze solid. This literally never happens on Windows. Also all IO on Windows is asynchronous. It doesn't support synchronous IO.

> The beachball on OSX frequently causes the whole UI shell to freeze solid.

The beachball is a very infrequent occurrence on OS X, and if it does happen, it usually doesn't freeze the whole shell. If you're seeing it a lot, this is often an indicator of faulty hardware. That being said...

> This literally never happens on Windows.

Not true, the exact same thing can and does happen on Windows, with similar rarity.

> Also all IO on Windows is asynchronous. It doesn't support synchronous IO.

I'm not super-familiar with Windows IO, but at the very least it has blocking, synchronous C stdlib file I/O, and blocking, synchronous WinSock network I/O. Also, anything asynchronous can be trivially be made synchronous, whether it is a good idea or not.

Sigh. You can't blame hardware when it's an as-new MBPr. Every Mac lover seems to blame it on something else when it is just a crappy OS that is the root cause.

On Windows it is extremely rare - maybe once a year, but you'd have to be a power user for sure. On Mac, it is usually a weekly occurrence. Hell, I had it happen last night in fact just by trying to mount a DMG file (a freshly downloaded TeamViewer DMG if you must know). It decided to go to the beach instead. After a full reboot it finally let me mount it. It really is a joke of an OS.

If you're not familiar with Windows IO then why try to cobble together a response? It is true that the Windows kernel does not support anything but asynchronous IO. It simply does not support it. Yes, user-mode land implements synchronous wrappers as a convenience for lazy developers or to aid in porting software from other lesser platforms.

> The beachball on OSX frequently causes the whole UI shell to freeze solid. This literally never happens on Windows

As TazeTSchnitzel said, this happens on both and is quite rare. If you're not just trolling and actually see this on a regular basis, it's either a hardware problem, misconfiguration, or something like using an unreliable LDAP server (this was the last time I saw it, back somewhere around 10.5 and, surprise surprise, Windows clients also wedge solid with a slow/flaky domain controller – I see this every time I use a Windows 7 domain client on a VPN).

> Also all IO on Windows is asynchronous. It doesn't support synchronous IO.

Please contact the folks at Microsoft so they can correct the first hit on Google:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

Remember how we were talking about backwards compatibility? All of those traditional ReadFile/WriteFile/etc. calls aren't going away anytime soon. Even the teams at Microsoft who work on things like Outlook, Word, IE, etc. use synchronous I/O a lot since it's so much easier and there's no major downside on a local file system, particularly now that even a cheap computer can dispatch thousands of IOPs.

It begins with “obviously” then says a few silly things. What does “with a lot more experience in software development” mean? Does that mean that the team at Microsoft is generally later in its career than the team at Apple? That’s kind of weird and unsubstantiated. Maybe it is trying to say that Windows is more mature, because it has been around longer? Yet, both operating systems are better from the result of many significant overhauls and redesigns, rather than refinement alone. Even determining which one is older would be a pointless discussion, since there are so many different ways of measuring the age of different components.

Finally, “merely a mod of components from Linux”? I don’t think anyone cared about the distinction between BSD and Linux or GNU user space tools. Things like a kernel with a multiuser system and different permissions are the types of improvements that were once difficult to handle on most consumer machines, yet they were also incorporated into Windows with NT. UNIX is part of the Mac OS being a modern operating system. Even if you lose the weasel word “merely”, OS X is not only a window manager or desktop environment, at a low level there are significant architectural distinctions between OS X and FreeBSD, and differences between OS X and FreeBSD compared to Linux that were developed at Apple.

The point is not that they cannot be compared, but that they have actual merits to compare rather than weaselly arguments as though we were in a 1990s chat room or forum.

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