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I can't believe anyone using macOS for their professional workflow would consider switching to Windows 10 despite all the criticism leveled at Apple's hardware

I can't believe anyone using macOS for their professional workflow would consider switching to Windows 10 despite all the criticism leveled at Apple's hardware (most of which I think is totally justified). I use Windows professionally (for .NET development) and I think Windows 10 is still light-years behind, with an unstable, jarring OS experience full of bugs and niggles and unloved and underdeveloped touch interface. I would love the opportunity to move to macOS and iOS professionally. Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison.

erokar 10y ago
If by "professional workflow" you mean programming, I agree. But I'd have no problem using Linux for that instead of MacOS. However, for many "professional workflow" means using the MS Office suite and a browser. For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
- H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
  I'd say that macOS tends to be more stable, and The office suite has an actual price instead of a shitty subscription model.
  - johnward 10y ago
    There are tools purposely missing from Mac like visio and project(?). I don't get why they are needed but my project manager does.
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    Does it have a price? The last time I checked it was free. OTOH, I don't see many professionals trusting Apple software in the long run (ex. Final Cut).
    - jsjohnst 10y ago
      It's only free to the original buyer of a new Mac since something like 4 - 5 years ago. If you've never bought a new Mac and registered it with your Apple ID, it's not free. I always thought it was free too, but learned otherwise recently from a colleague battling with it.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Visual Studio for Windows applications and XCode for iOS ones pin you to particular platforms. > For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS. "Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant."
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Dollar for dollar Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant.
    - gumby 10y ago
      I think this was flagged down because it was flippant but the statement is true and insightful. And I think it's is a big driver of why the App Store went to FTP. I've eaten €1500 meals at 3 star restaurants like L'Ambroisie and $10 Grand Slam meals at denny's. They fill different roles and both can be enjoyable. For years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was really quite good and which my wife loved to visit. I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good, I always felt the bill was 50% higher than it should have been. In the case of apps, most of them, for most users, don't justify the time put into them. Since that's true, people aren't idiots and won't take an up front risk on buying an app that doesn't work for them. That's why free download/in app purchase to really use has really taken off. Oh, and it's well worth it to me to pay for a Mac. The fact that it's true for me doesn't justify your decision to buy a Mac or contradict your decision not to.
      - astrodust 10y ago
        > I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good... ...supply and demand. That you were willing to eat there despite the higher prices suggests you found value in the food. You can bitch about higher prices all you want, but you paid them. Likewise, for a lot of professionals the difference between a $3000 MacBook and a $1500 Windows notebook over the lifespan of 3-4 years is inconsequential. You could easily make up the difference by brewing your own coffee versus getting something at a store.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  I've had fine experiences with Java, Javascript, and Python development on windows. I've developed also on Mac and Linux and after maybe a getting used to the the workflow on each system I haven't found the OS to be a major impediment for me outside of some tools and libraries only existing on certain platforms.
tolmark12 10y ago
I agree, I hate the state of mac hardware, but I would have a very hard time leaving the macOS for the windows OS
nextos 10y ago
Many would use Surfaces with Linux. They are excellent hardware, albeit tricky to run Linux on as they include some exotic components for touch recognition and dreadful Marvell network adapters. See https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/
EugeneOZ 10y ago
On 4k hidpi monitor fonts and UI looks great. And you can run windows on Mac :)
- astrodust 10y ago
  "Great" on Windows is "typical" on macOS. The approach to rendering fonts is completely different, where Windows tends to nudge things towards pixel boundaries and in so doing ends up distorting the type considerably. Font rendering on Windows is barely better than Linux.
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    It really depends on DPI of your monitor. I have both MBPr and Windows PC with 4k 24'' monitor. On FullHD I can't look at Windows, on 4k it looks great (UI looks more sharp than in macOS, fonts looks almost as good as in macOS). And Linux fonts rendering is not even near - last time I saw it, it was completely awful, although it was on FullHD monitor, not 4k.
    - trome 10y ago
      Seems just fine on my 1080p 22" monitor, or on this 26" 2560x1600 monitor beside it. Then again I'm a dirty Gnome user on Debian, so perhaps my vanilaness is saving me. But even a few years ago on my last A8 & 1080P 15.6" laptop it was fine, definitely much better than 1366 by potato.
      - EugeneOZ 10y ago
        I'm sorry if my words were offensive for somebody - it's all questions of personal perception.
        trome 10y ago
        Hah, was being sarcastic with the whole dirty Gnome user bit, no worries!
    - 10y ago
Thaxll 10y ago
Win10 is pretty stable, what issues are you referring to?
- astrodust 10y ago
  Windows itself isn't bad, but the driver ecosystem is completely rotten. Any muppet with a code signing certificate is apparently capable of writing driver code that gets injected into the kernel.
  - zapt02 10y ago
    But this isn't a problem if you buy quality hardware?
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Yes. It's often the case that a good motherboard will have some super generic driver either for the ethernet component or the on-board audio chip. It's truly astonishing how bad it is even with big name vendors like Asus.
- martijn_himself 10y ago
  I've had various issues on two separate clean installs of Windows 10 in the last two weeks, one of which was the start menu being broken, and the user profile being damaged to the point where I had to do a full reinstall. Official App Store apps don't install for various reasons (Onedrive) or become damaged etc. I guess this may be a case of 'grass being greener' as suggested by someone else in this thread. I just don't seem to remember having any of these issues on my 2010 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Then again, this is purely anecdotal.
- spaceisballer 10y ago
  Win 10 is pretty stable, but I for one had all kinds of issues when it just installed the Anniversary Update on it's own. I couldn't use my start menu without the computer locking up for about a minute. Spent a few hours researching it, tried multiple fixes which didn't work.
shin_lao 10y ago
Do you think your points are valid for an office workflow?
Aldo_MX 10y ago
This is definitely an example of YMMV, if someone claims that macOS is better than Windows because of a prettier UI and smoother font rendering, I simply laugh. For me it is more important to have a file manager that doesn't lock itself creating .DS_Store files in the middle of an I/O operation (ex. copying a folder from an external drive). To be fair, Windows has the same issue with Thumbs.db files, but I can't remember the last time it happened to me, in contrast, with macOS it is annoyingly easy to trigger error -36, just connect a clean drive and copy a big folder...
- santaclaus 10y ago
  If I'm staring at something for 10 hours a day smoother font rendering is a big benefit.
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Smoother means less legible, at least on low DPI screens. But it seems to be a personal preference as to what someone will actually like more.
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    The only time I've had any problems on windows is if the font is too small.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  Windows hasn't used Thumbs.db files on most drives since it switched to a central cache in Vista.
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    It still uses them, it was not difficult to find a screenshot from a recent version of Windows. http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ximg_54ef5249364a8.png.pagespeed.gp+jp+jw+pj+js+rj+rp+rw+ri+cp+md.ic.g75g1ownD1.png http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ximg_54e...
bangonkeyboard 10y ago
Two days ago, immediately after several programs crashed and shortly before the entire OS locked up, I managed to capture this: http://i.imgur.com/ecCPlcs.png http://i.imgur.com/ecCPlcs.png That is Crash Reporter crashing. The following is the last screenshot I was able to take before the system stopped being able to write files: http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png Sierra has been an absolute nightmare in every respect that I have been forced to reboot on a weekly basis. Apple's precipitous and continuing software quality decline is not an exaggeration or an illusion. It is flat reality. Professionals with any awareness should be evaluating their alternatives very seriously.
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Have you ever considered the possibility that your storage medium or random access memory is corrupt?
  - bangonkeyboard 10y ago
    The Mac has passed the hardware diagnostics at the Apple Store multiple times. The components are unchanged from Yosemite, which did not have these issues. The OS has been freshly reinstalled, with the same problems. This is also just one of a myriad of issues that have plagued the OS. Sierra has introduced me to new and wonderful ways to fail: http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png
    - evmar 10y ago
      If git is failing due to a system-wide file limit, that would explain why other programs are also failing. Perhaps some process has gone mad with creating files and if you find and delete those it will help things recover. (I agree with your general point -- just trying to be helpful in getting your computer back working.)
      - bangonkeyboard 10y ago
        I reached the same conclusion, and the prime suspect in my investigations is Safari 10. However, once the system has hit the file limit, it never fully recovers without a reboot.
EasyTiger_ 10y ago
I just installed Windows 10. My start menu by default was full of stuff I will never ever use. After deleting/uninstalling apps (where it would allow me) the OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable.
- bigtex 10y ago
  Wait until you get the random start menu no longer works bug. Not only does the start menu not appear, clicking on the File Explorer icon will take 30 + seconds to open, every time. There are links where thousands of people have posted various fixes but from my understanding MSFT hasn't actually fixed the underlying cause. To their credit they have released a utility that fixes the issue however.
- UK-AL 10y ago
  "OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable. " - I would like more details on this. I don't think I've heard of that before?
  - Aldo_MX 10y ago
    It does happen after an upgrade (ex. the anniversary update). Although it does not install Candy Crush, just a stub to install it, anyway, it is certainly unappealing.
    - UK-AL 10y ago
      Showing a featured app on the windows store tile != Installing an app.
      - Aldo_MX 10y ago
        It is certainly not "the" Windows Store Tile, they're annoying stubs like the "Get Office" one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Windows_10_build_14393_(Redstone).png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Windows_10_bu...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
UK-AL 10y ago
Grass is greener. You start noticing issues with Mac OS X as well once you start using it professionally.
Stratoscope 10y ago
> Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison. I've heard a number of people say this, and I'm always puzzled because it is exactly the opposite for me. Running on the same hardware (late 2013 MBPR 15"), Windows 10 font rendering is much more pleasing to my eyes. When I boot into OSX, the text looks terrible to me. (I'm still running El Capitan - has text rendering changed in Sierra?) One thing I did in Windows that I recommend to everyone: I went through the ClearType tuner and adjusted the settings to my taste. I picked darker and heavier text compared to the defaults. That really punched up the rendering; everything is so crisp and clear, much nicer to my eyes than the blurry text in OSX. I understand that OSX text rendering may be more typographically accurate, and I have some sympathy for that view. I appreciate good typography, especially after working at Adobe many years ago. (I built the first scalable font system for Windows, Adobe Type Manager.) But OSX text just doesn't look good to me. And of course I don't disagree with anyone who prefers OSX/macOS text rendering, since this is very much a matter of personal taste.
- pdimitar 10y ago
  I am no professional in typography nor have I used any other Mac than the Macbook 12" (2015), but putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen), I still like macOS' text rendering a lot more. Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text. Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes. However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    >> putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen) The reason why you notice the difference is because of the low DPI for the screen size on your Z35. Windows fonts render badly on those screens at small point sizes. If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.

erokar 10y ago

If by "professional workflow" you mean programming, I agree. But I'd have no problem using Linux for that instead of MacOS. However, for many "professional workflow" means using the MS Office suite and a browser. For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.

H4CK3RM4N 10y ago
I'd say that macOS tends to be more stable, and The office suite has an actual price instead of a shitty subscription model.
- johnward 10y ago
  There are tools purposely missing from Mac like visio and project(?). I don't get why they are needed but my project manager does.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  Does it have a price? The last time I checked it was free. OTOH, I don't see many professionals trusting Apple software in the long run (ex. Final Cut).
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    It's only free to the original buyer of a new Mac since something like 4 - 5 years ago. If you've never bought a new Mac and registered it with your Apple ID, it's not free. I always thought it was free too, but learned otherwise recently from a colleague battling with it.
astrodust 10y ago
Visual Studio for Windows applications and XCode for iOS ones pin you to particular platforms. > For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS. "Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant."
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  Dollar for dollar Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant.
  - gumby 10y ago
    I think this was flagged down because it was flippant but the statement is true and insightful. And I think it's is a big driver of why the App Store went to FTP. I've eaten €1500 meals at 3 star restaurants like L'Ambroisie and $10 Grand Slam meals at denny's. They fill different roles and both can be enjoyable. For years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was really quite good and which my wife loved to visit. I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good, I always felt the bill was 50% higher than it should have been. In the case of apps, most of them, for most users, don't justify the time put into them. Since that's true, people aren't idiots and won't take an up front risk on buying an app that doesn't work for them. That's why free download/in app purchase to really use has really taken off. Oh, and it's well worth it to me to pay for a Mac. The fact that it's true for me doesn't justify your decision to buy a Mac or contradict your decision not to.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      > I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good... ...supply and demand. That you were willing to eat there despite the higher prices suggests you found value in the food. You can bitch about higher prices all you want, but you paid them. Likewise, for a lot of professionals the difference between a $3000 MacBook and a $1500 Windows notebook over the lifespan of 3-4 years is inconsequential. You could easily make up the difference by brewing your own coffee versus getting something at a store.
tdb7893 10y ago
I've had fine experiences with Java, Javascript, and Python development on windows. I've developed also on Mac and Linux and after maybe a getting used to the the workflow on each system I haven't found the OS to be a major impediment for me outside of some tools and libraries only existing on certain platforms.

tolmark12 10y ago

I agree, I hate the state of mac hardware, but I would have a very hard time leaving the macOS for the windows OS

nextos 10y ago

Many would use Surfaces with Linux. They are excellent hardware, albeit tricky to run Linux on as they include some exotic components for touch recognition and dreadful Marvell network adapters. See https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/

EugeneOZ 10y ago

On 4k hidpi monitor fonts and UI looks great. And you can run windows on Mac :)

astrodust 10y ago
"Great" on Windows is "typical" on macOS. The approach to rendering fonts is completely different, where Windows tends to nudge things towards pixel boundaries and in so doing ends up distorting the type considerably. Font rendering on Windows is barely better than Linux.
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  It really depends on DPI of your monitor. I have both MBPr and Windows PC with 4k 24'' monitor. On FullHD I can't look at Windows, on 4k it looks great (UI looks more sharp than in macOS, fonts looks almost as good as in macOS). And Linux fonts rendering is not even near - last time I saw it, it was completely awful, although it was on FullHD monitor, not 4k.
  - trome 10y ago
    Seems just fine on my 1080p 22" monitor, or on this 26" 2560x1600 monitor beside it. Then again I'm a dirty Gnome user on Debian, so perhaps my vanilaness is saving me. But even a few years ago on my last A8 & 1080P 15.6" laptop it was fine, definitely much better than 1366 by potato.
    - EugeneOZ 10y ago
      I'm sorry if my words were offensive for somebody - it's all questions of personal perception.
      - trome 10y ago
        Hah, was being sarcastic with the whole dirty Gnome user bit, no worries!
  - 10y ago

Thaxll 10y ago

Win10 is pretty stable, what issues are you referring to?

astrodust 10y ago
Windows itself isn't bad, but the driver ecosystem is completely rotten. Any muppet with a code signing certificate is apparently capable of writing driver code that gets injected into the kernel.
- zapt02 10y ago
  But this isn't a problem if you buy quality hardware?
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Yes. It's often the case that a good motherboard will have some super generic driver either for the ethernet component or the on-board audio chip. It's truly astonishing how bad it is even with big name vendors like Asus.
martijn_himself 10y ago
I've had various issues on two separate clean installs of Windows 10 in the last two weeks, one of which was the start menu being broken, and the user profile being damaged to the point where I had to do a full reinstall. Official App Store apps don't install for various reasons (Onedrive) or become damaged etc. I guess this may be a case of 'grass being greener' as suggested by someone else in this thread. I just don't seem to remember having any of these issues on my 2010 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Then again, this is purely anecdotal.
spaceisballer 10y ago
Win 10 is pretty stable, but I for one had all kinds of issues when it just installed the Anniversary Update on it's own. I couldn't use my start menu without the computer locking up for about a minute. Spent a few hours researching it, tried multiple fixes which didn't work.

shin_lao 10y ago

Do you think your points are valid for an office workflow?

Aldo_MX 10y ago

This is definitely an example of YMMV, if someone claims that macOS is better than Windows because of a prettier UI and smoother font rendering, I simply laugh. For me it is more important to have a file manager that doesn't lock itself creating .DS_Store files in the middle of an I/O operation (ex. copying a folder from an external drive). To be fair, Windows has the same issue with Thumbs.db files, but I can't remember the last time it happened to me, in contrast, with macOS it is annoyingly easy to trigger error -36, just connect a clean drive and copy a big folder...

santaclaus 10y ago
If I'm staring at something for 10 hours a day smoother font rendering is a big benefit.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Smoother means less legible, at least on low DPI screens. But it seems to be a personal preference as to what someone will actually like more.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  The only time I've had any problems on windows is if the font is too small.
WorldMaker 10y ago
Windows hasn't used Thumbs.db files on most drives since it switched to a central cache in Vista.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  It still uses them, it was not difficult to find a screenshot from a recent version of Windows. http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ximg_54ef5249364a8.png.pagespeed.gp+jp+jw+pj+js+rj+rp+rw+ri+cp+md.ic.g75g1ownD1.png http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ximg_54e...

bangonkeyboard 10y ago

Two days ago, immediately after several programs crashed and shortly before the entire OS locked up, I managed to capture this: http://i.imgur.com/ecCPlcs.png http://i.imgur.com/ecCPlcs.png That is Crash Reporter crashing. The following is the last screenshot I was able to take before the system stopped being able to write files: http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png Sierra has been an absolute nightmare in every respect that I have been forced to reboot on a weekly basis. Apple's precipitous and continuing software quality decline is not an exaggeration or an illusion. It is flat reality. Professionals with any awareness should be evaluating their alternatives very seriously.

jjawssd 10y ago
Have you ever considered the possibility that your storage medium or random access memory is corrupt?
- bangonkeyboard 10y ago
  The Mac has passed the hardware diagnostics at the Apple Store multiple times. The components are unchanged from Yosemite, which did not have these issues. The OS has been freshly reinstalled, with the same problems. This is also just one of a myriad of issues that have plagued the OS. Sierra has introduced me to new and wonderful ways to fail: http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png
  - evmar 10y ago
    If git is failing due to a system-wide file limit, that would explain why other programs are also failing. Perhaps some process has gone mad with creating files and if you find and delete those it will help things recover. (I agree with your general point -- just trying to be helpful in getting your computer back working.)
    - bangonkeyboard 10y ago
      I reached the same conclusion, and the prime suspect in my investigations is Safari 10. However, once the system has hit the file limit, it never fully recovers without a reboot.

EasyTiger_ 10y ago

I just installed Windows 10. My start menu by default was full of stuff I will never ever use. After deleting/uninstalling apps (where it would allow me) the OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable.

bigtex 10y ago
Wait until you get the random start menu no longer works bug. Not only does the start menu not appear, clicking on the File Explorer icon will take 30 + seconds to open, every time. There are links where thousands of people have posted various fixes but from my understanding MSFT hasn't actually fixed the underlying cause. To their credit they have released a utility that fixes the issue however.
UK-AL 10y ago
"OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable. " - I would like more details on this. I don't think I've heard of that before?
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  It does happen after an upgrade (ex. the anniversary update). Although it does not install Candy Crush, just a stub to install it, anyway, it is certainly unappealing.
  - UK-AL 10y ago
    Showing a featured app on the windows store tile != Installing an app.
    - Aldo_MX 10y ago
      It is certainly not "the" Windows Store Tile, they're annoying stubs like the "Get Office" one. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Windows_10_build_14393_(Redstone).png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Windows_10_bu...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

UK-AL 10y ago

Grass is greener. You start noticing issues with Mac OS X as well once you start using it professionally.

Stratoscope 10y ago

> Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison. I've heard a number of people say this, and I'm always puzzled because it is exactly the opposite for me. Running on the same hardware (late 2013 MBPR 15"), Windows 10 font rendering is much more pleasing to my eyes. When I boot into OSX, the text looks terrible to me. (I'm still running El Capitan - has text rendering changed in Sierra?) One thing I did in Windows that I recommend to everyone: I went through the ClearType tuner and adjusted the settings to my taste. I picked darker and heavier text compared to the defaults. That really punched up the rendering; everything is so crisp and clear, much nicer to my eyes than the blurry text in OSX. I understand that OSX text rendering may be more typographically accurate, and I have some sympathy for that view. I appreciate good typography, especially after working at Adobe many years ago. (I built the first scalable font system for Windows, Adobe Type Manager.) But OSX text just doesn't look good to me. And of course I don't disagree with anyone who prefers OSX/macOS text rendering, since this is very much a matter of personal taste.

pdimitar 10y ago
I am no professional in typography nor have I used any other Mac than the Macbook 12" (2015), but putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen), I still like macOS' text rendering a lot more. Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text. Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes. However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?
- slantyyz 10y ago
  >> putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen) The reason why you notice the difference is because of the low DPI for the screen size on your Z35. Windows fonts render badly on those screens at small point sizes. If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.