Lot of people in this thread crapping on Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft is more brave or more innovative than Apple yet, but I know one thing, they are more brave and innovative than Microsoft five years ago. That's all that matters.
While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just need to keep iterating it. They also need to introduce a Surface product that the average consumer can afford--even Apple has done this with the Air line and the non-Pro line.
I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings, and provide a $1k Macbook Air equivalent, along with a sub $2k iMac equivalent, they'll win.
Microsoft also has one other major hurdle. They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks. They have to build an update to 10 that wins over the people they lost. They have to come out and say "Yes, we want your telemetry data, but we aren't going to force you to give it to us, so from now on, it's opt-in".
As far as Apple goes, I think they know they aren't innovating at the same pace. I think the headphone jack, the escape key, and touch bar are them trying to figure out how to innovate without Steve Jobs. I think Jony Ive is capable, but he needs room to fail to learn. Steve Jobs talked a lot about how as a company, you produce a lot of failures for each success. Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Either way, I don't care who the most innovate company is. I'd rather see them all trying to innovate, because the good stuff they come up with can only benefit the consumer.
> Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones.
This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows 10 still has some serious pain points that need to be worked out, specially on the Surface line with touch interfaces.
OSS runs by different rules. It's more about how many Devs can you attract you your project. The number of users is less important in a sense, though that usually has an effect on the number of Devs contributing to a project.
So Gnome and KDE need more Devs to become better, and people only have so much spare time, which is why having corporate backers is also critical to projects.
To me, its different philosophy, I never consider Apple very innovative technically. they have always been (even with jobs) more innovative on product strategy and marketing. Iphone wasnt the first of its kind, nor its Ipod. However, They have always choose the correct package for a stable technology that fits the mass.
Buying Iphone, Ipod, IMac, or air its more of a fashion statement than a Technical one, and coding does look cool on Mac, and time may be changing, but most people that i know who code on Apple product arent your typical computer science, nerds with no art back ground kind of coders.
> Apple product arent your typical computer science, nerds with no art back ground kind of coder
The art background comment is funny. I don't really know what all my colleagues studied in school, half of them probably don't remember. But I work with a lot of backend distributed systems people, very little visual UI type work. Most of us use macs because of unix. And that's important because we deploy to Linux. While not the same exactly, it's close enough to build comparable tools between both.
Apple has hands down, the best portable Unix on the market. They should play to that audience more, rather than just a side note.
I would also like to add, Microsoft are and had been innovative, they may not making some digital woman who you could talk to on the phone, but how to make OS more efficient and take the advantage on all the new hardware, how to fit windows this giant monsters on all the new hardware, in itself is pretty amazing.
Yeah. Honestly, I don't want Windows. What I want is a really solid durable hardware platform for running Unix. One day maybe I will try a surface with Linux, I wonder if MS has crippled that or not. Anyone know?
yeah, I know about the Linux compatibility in Windows. But I don't want Windows ;)
So Linux is good enough for me, but on the Laptop there are still many issues, like waking from sleep. Apple has an excellent product, but on the day that I decide that I need to switch, then I'll probably also try to contribute to help fix the Linux issues.
Opt-in will never happen for things like this. There are just too many people who don't care. Look at the rates of organ-donors when comparing opt-in to opt-out.
I'd be happy if they made things opt-out. As in you can opt out of them. I just had a miserable time getting my default documents folder to not be the onedrive folder so things stopped saving there and microsoft stopped complaining about me being over my pitiful 5GB.
I tend to agree. Windows 10 is better in some respects than earlier versions and worse in others, but right now most of those don't matter very much. The forced updates, forced telemetry, and emphasis on online services make it a non-starter for small businesses like ours. I've given up even feeling Schadenfreude when I read reports of friends or colleagues who have moved to 10 and then lost something due to a bad update or untimely reboot. Now I just feel a general sense of disappointment mixed with concern about what we'll order in future when we can't conveniently buy new machines with Windows 7 preinstalled any more.
Sadly, I don't anticipate any change in direction for Microsoft as long as Nadella remains at the helm. He clearly has a vision for how the future of Microsoft software and OSes is going to be, and it's clearly backed by the board who put him there, and a traditional desktop OS would seem to be in conflict with that vision. And at least for now, the business as a whole seems to be doing OK with this emphasis on services, even with the unpopularity of Windows 10.
Reboots after update have been moved to a "Yeah, remind me later -wink- -wink-" popup, kinda like Windows 7 handled them. I'm not even in a country where we get first in line the big updates (Anniversary update took a couple of weeks to reach me, and it was a bit messy because the f*cker took like 4 hours once it decided to get installed ¬¬ ).
> I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings ...
The problem isn't so much the hardware but the OS. I have awful memories of Windows. I suppose it has gotten better, but I wonder if it's a realistic replacement to Mac OS X? Essentially, I want something that just works and where I can use common unix tools. Maybe the new Unix subsystem + an X server will do it.
Concerning the new MBP, I don't mind the touch bar or the specs but they are really expensive (esp. in Europe). If they don't get cheaper, I may try a windows machine.
To me that is a very tired phrase for Apple users. I don't begrudge anyone's preferences, until they force everyone else to jump through hurdles to get their machine to work the company's network and technology stack. I see IT guys almost every day being absorbed by people who claim to be more productive on their Mac. Every OS seems to work as well as the person using it. I prefer Linux on my Chromebook, but I don't expect hand-holding, and will break out the Dell when needed.
When this comes up a lot of my time is spent trying to tell this to people. Why don't I have a Dell XPS? It's faster and has more memory and bla bla.
The computer is a useful tool only when it has an OS. What you run on it is as important as the hardware itself. The combination of Hardware and OS is what makes the tool what it is, and comparing them each separately doesn't make any sense in my opinion.
And that is where Apple wins for me currently. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and Windows just doesn't have that unix base that I'm comfortable with. Sure I can get a terminal on it, but it feels like a program I'm running, not actually being in control of the machine.
Linux is my real fallback option, but then I don't get paid to worry about wether my local backups are working OK, or why my laptop won't sleep or wether my GPU is working etc.
I don't think Apple is going in the direction that will benefit a lot of developers, but they've got a long way to fall before they become a second choice for me.
>And that is where Apple wins for me currently. I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and Windows just doesn't have that unix base that I'm comfortable with.
It literally runs native Linux with Windows subsystem for Linux:
One big issue is still the 260-character path-name limitation. Deep source directories choke on that, especially if you copy them around for backup, etc.
You end up abbreviating class names in the file names and mess up searchability.
You end up using single letter directories like 'C:\b\' instead of 'C:\backup\', etc. as workarounds. It all feels very MS DOS.
yeah, and break all apps that use the old 255 char win32 api's.
another thing to note is that it requires the windows insider preview, which in my experience required auto reboots every few days. very frustrating so I had to revert....
Switching off of Insider Preview is a TERRIBLE experience of it's own: You can't actually revert back. you either have to restore from backup (which isn't mentioned when you switch to insider preview mode) or wait for the next mainline release, which may be 6+ months away, and you have to MANUALLY TRACK when insider syncs with main and then switch to main during the window in which they are matched.
If it is only fixed if you turn it on, it isn't really fixed yet IMO. You can't make public projects rely on it, etc. without turning off a big percentage of your users.
The telemetry data will continue to harm them so long as it's a mystery. They need to say what's in it. Maybe one of the EU data protection commissioners or an alert PCI-DSS auditor will ask the right question with legal force.
>They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks.
Why does this suck for users? This is actually one of my favorite aspects of W10.
MS does not have an iMac equivalent yet, but you can get an Air-equivalent Surface Pro for $1100. It does have some drawbacks over the air (which I guess has been merged into the regular MacBook now), but also has a number of advantages.
While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just need to keep iterating it. They also need to introduce a Surface product that the average consumer can afford--even Apple has done this with the Air line and the non-Pro line.
I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings, and provide a $1k Macbook Air equivalent, along with a sub $2k iMac equivalent, they'll win.
Microsoft also has one other major hurdle. They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks. They have to build an update to 10 that wins over the people they lost. They have to come out and say "Yes, we want your telemetry data, but we aren't going to force you to give it to us, so from now on, it's opt-in".
As far as Apple goes, I think they know they aren't innovating at the same pace. I think the headphone jack, the escape key, and touch bar are them trying to figure out how to innovate without Steve Jobs. I think Jony Ive is capable, but he needs room to fail to learn. Steve Jobs talked a lot about how as a company, you produce a lot of failures for each success. Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Either way, I don't care who the most innovate company is. I'd rather see them all trying to innovate, because the good stuff they come up with can only benefit the consumer.