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* Free OS updates. * Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS. * Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI s

by mhenr18 10y ago

* Free OS updates. * Better touchpad support throughout the entire OS. * Vastly superior HiDPI support (especially if you're using a multi-screen, multi-DPI setup). I cannot stress how poorly Windows 10 performs in this regard. This has been a solved problem on the Mac for years. * Better colour management through the whole UI stack. * Better tablet support (OSX has had integrated support for tablet events since 10.4, on the Windows side there were still apps that broke when the Surface 3 launched almost a decade later due to using a third-party API for tablet events that needed custom drivers) * Core Audio. OS X has had the same set of audio APIs since 10.3, and they've been well regarded for years and years. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could argue Microsoft had finally caught up, and there's still people with ASIO driver compatibility issues. That's literally 12 years it took for Microsoft to catch up. * OS X had scrolling of inactive windows for over a decade before Windows caught up. I actually think it's something that was there in 10.0 but I only started using Macs at 10.3 so I can't be sure. * Spotlight. Spotlight is almost the perfect analogy of the difference between OS X and Windows, and I'm just going to look at one tiny feature of it. If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. Cortana isn't even available in every country. Meanwhile OSX has had that built into Spotlight since 10.4 and it works on every Mac ever shipped since then, no matter what country you're in. * File tagging. OSX has had this for over a decade, and you still can't do it in Windows. * An integrated C/C++ runtime library, like every other Unix ever. It wasn't until Windows 10 that you could ship C/C++ code without worrying about whether your end user had the right msvcr/msvcp DLL installed on their machine. I'll stop here, because there's so many things that OSX has had for a decade or more that Windows still hasn't caught up with that I wouldn't be surprised if Windows doesn't catch up after another decade.

addicted 10y ago
* Windows has free OS updates * Precision Touchpads are equally well supported in Windows. * HiDPI is better on the Mac * I don't know much about this. * Are you referring to Wacom style tablets? Not sure about that, but if tablets in general, OSX tablets don't even exist, so it's irrelevant. * Windows Audio APIs are as good as Core Audio now. * This really isn't that big a deal. In Windows it leads to different benefits, where my mouse could be anywhere, ubt I could still scroll the page I was reading. * Cortana is better than Spotlight now. I didn't know that Cortana would be completely disabled in countries that aren't supported. That sucks. * Windows has had file tagging since Win 7. There really isn't that much of a difference. There are places where Mac OS is better, and there are places where Windows is better.
- mhenr18 10y ago
  * You're right, but it took how long to get here? * The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines. * * * Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows. * There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX. * You've got to realise that anywhere where you think "this really isn't that big a deal" it's actually a huge deal to the people who use OSX daily and want a better Mac Pro because Windows doesn't care about the small things. * Cortana isn't better than Siri though, which is what it's actually meant to compete with. * To be fair, the feature was so undiscoverable that it took someone on Hacker News telling me about it before I knew it existed. A lot of my post was pointing out things that have been better on OSX for literally more than a decade before Windows finally caught up in a few areas. HiDPI is probably the biggest thing that Windows just won't catch up to for a while. The API compatibility requires Windows to support APIs that will stop HiDPI from working well, because old Windows had the ability to set DPI that affected certain UI components but not everything.
  - addicted 10y ago
    But that's the point. MS is catching up very rapidly now, while OSX is stagnating. My point about the scrolling isn't that it's not a big deal because it's a minor deficiency. My point is that it's a design choice, and many prefer the Windows method. Neither choice is inherently better. Despite having come in much later, Cortana is at worst about as good as Siri. For one thing, on the desktop, I can actually type in my Cortana requests. The fact that Cortana combines Siri and Spotlight makes it far more powerful and useful. It's kind of insane that Apple thinks people want different information when they ask the same question when they type it, or when they speak it. Windows has been a lot better than OSX in many ways as well. Especially since Windows 7. For one thing, it will take until next year before Apple gets a decent File System, instead of a kludgy mess. What's worrying for Apple is that Windows is improving a lot faster than OSX. The gap between them is narrowed very significantly, and personally, for the past few months, Windows 10 is a much nicer environment than OSX (and I've been using OSX exclusively for over a decade). I think the idea that Windows is so far behind OSX is just not true. Part of it is that this has been true for so long, and Windows 8 was so bad, that people believe it instinctly. Part of it is that people moving to Windows want it to be like OSX, and anything that is different is considered worse.
JdeBP 10y ago
> If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. When I've wanted to do some quick calculations on a Windows PC at a single keypress, I've pressed the calculator button on my keyboard and a calculator has come up. And this has been true since the turn of the century (for me personally; for Windows for several years longer than that).

by mhenr18 10y ago

addicted 10y ago

* Windows has free OS updates * Precision Touchpads are equally well supported in Windows. * HiDPI is better on the Mac * I don't know much about this. * Are you referring to Wacom style tablets? Not sure about that, but if tablets in general, OSX tablets don't even exist, so it's irrelevant. * Windows Audio APIs are as good as Core Audio now. * This really isn't that big a deal. In Windows it leads to different benefits, where my mouse could be anywhere, ubt I could still scroll the page I was reading. * Cortana is better than Spotlight now. I didn't know that Cortana would be completely disabled in countries that aren't supported. That sucks. * Windows has had file tagging since Win 7. There really isn't that much of a difference. There are places where Mac OS is better, and there are places where Windows is better.

mhenr18 10y ago
* You're right, but it took how long to get here? * The APIs are there now, but the hardware isn't on many machines. * * * Yes, I'm referring to graphics tablets. I've had to deal with the APIs for that stuff myself and what was about 10 lines of extra event handlers on OSX ended up being well over 200 lines on Windows. * There's still driver issues that aren't present on OSX. * You've got to realise that anywhere where you think "this really isn't that big a deal" it's actually a huge deal to the people who use OSX daily and want a better Mac Pro because Windows doesn't care about the small things. * Cortana isn't better than Siri though, which is what it's actually meant to compete with. * To be fair, the feature was so undiscoverable that it took someone on Hacker News telling me about it before I knew it existed. A lot of my post was pointing out things that have been better on OSX for literally more than a decade before Windows finally caught up in a few areas. HiDPI is probably the biggest thing that Windows just won't catch up to for a while. The API compatibility requires Windows to support APIs that will stop HiDPI from working well, because old Windows had the ability to set DPI that affected certain UI components but not everything.
- addicted 10y ago
  But that's the point. MS is catching up very rapidly now, while OSX is stagnating. My point about the scrolling isn't that it's not a big deal because it's a minor deficiency. My point is that it's a design choice, and many prefer the Windows method. Neither choice is inherently better. Despite having come in much later, Cortana is at worst about as good as Siri. For one thing, on the desktop, I can actually type in my Cortana requests. The fact that Cortana combines Siri and Spotlight makes it far more powerful and useful. It's kind of insane that Apple thinks people want different information when they ask the same question when they type it, or when they speak it. Windows has been a lot better than OSX in many ways as well. Especially since Windows 7. For one thing, it will take until next year before Apple gets a decent File System, instead of a kludgy mess. What's worrying for Apple is that Windows is improving a lot faster than OSX. The gap between them is narrowed very significantly, and personally, for the past few months, Windows 10 is a much nicer environment than OSX (and I've been using OSX exclusively for over a decade). I think the idea that Windows is so far behind OSX is just not true. Part of it is that this has been true for so long, and Windows 8 was so bad, that people believe it instinctly. Part of it is that people moving to Windows want it to be like OSX, and anything that is different is considered worse.

JdeBP 10y ago

> If you want to do some math on Windows at a single keypress, you need to turn on Cortana which only became availble in Windows 10. When I've wanted to do some quick calculations on a Windows PC at a single keypress, I've pressed the calculator button on my keyboard and a calculator has come up. And this has been true since the turn of the century (for me personally; for Windows for several years longer than that).