4 ms·

A few years ago, I was holding out for a new MBP for ages, and when it didn't come I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Surface Book. I own the first-gen Sur

A few years ago, I was holding out for a new MBP for ages, and when it didn't come I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Surface Book. I own the first-gen Surface Book, and it's probably the best laptop I've ever owned, Windows or otherwise. The keyboard is great, the screen is fantastic, and while the trackpad isn't as good as the MBP it's a close second-place. The touch-screen and pen are nice, and they work well, but I never use them. I'm not much of a tablet guy anyway, so it was never going to appeal to me like it would to others. In terms of OS, Windows continues to improve while OSX deteriorates. I used to do a lot of work with .NET, so my opinion is probably biased, but I'd consider Windows to be a better development platform than OSX, especially with WSL. It's still a pain in the ass with some languages like Ruby, but it gets better every year, and if OSX continues to get worse I can see people ditching it and going with Linux or Windows.

vcanales 7y ago
Honest question; how is MacOS getting worse?
- EnderMB 7y ago
  For me, it's a mixture of a few things: 1. Improvements on OSX have stagnated, and any new features that have been added over the past few years have been a side-product of iOS. With all the talk of the OSX team at Apple being scrapped for a unified OS team, this kinda makes sense, since iOS is their cash cow, but it's not great for those that rely on a modern OS. 2. With every release there are new bugs, and Apple takes their sweet time fixing them. A prime example is the bug where a huge white block appears over your menu bar if you've got two monitors plugged in, and you're using an Electron app. I'd understand bugs like this on Windows, since they've got to cover thousands of different hardware types, but OSX is on one set of hardware. This should be a trivial bug to fix. 3. Finder seems to get worse and worse with every update. Nowadays, if I drag too many files from one place to another I have to kill it. No such problem on Debian or Windows. 4. Sometimes, Spotlight just "forgets" its index, and any time I try to find something I get unreliable results. They might seem fairly minor, but I feel less value from OSX updates than I do from Windows, and that perception is a dangerous thing.
deepaksurti 7y ago
> but it gets better every year? Also, can you say how/why it is getting better?
- EnderMB 7y ago
  Safety. I always use my dad as the perfect metric for this, because he fits the elderly tech stereotype perfectly. I can give him Windows or OSX and he'll usually butcher them into a mess. Their Mac is an absolute mess of toolbars and bloatware, whereas the Windows machine has zero issues after several years. Speed. Windows always used to have issues with installs getting slow over time. I've had the same base installation of Windows 10 on my Surface Book and it's as fast as it was the day I bought it, despite several hundred gig sitting on the hard drive, numerous VM's, and several IDE's. Stability. My Surface Book hasn't crashed in years, and my other Windows 10 machines have crashed so infrequently that I forgot what a BSOD looked like nowadays. Cleaner UI. I think toolbars are still a bit of a mess on Windows 10, but they dud a good job to get away from the mess that was Windows 8, and I'm yet to meet someone that struggles with Windows in the same way they struggle with other OS's. These aren't headline features, but they're the key points where Windows improves and where OSX seems to struggle. I still love the OSX UI, but I fear that we're not far away from things becoming more iOS friendly on the desktop, and parts of that fantastic UI being torn down.

vcanales 7y ago

Honest question; how is MacOS getting worse?

EnderMB 7y ago
For me, it's a mixture of a few things: 1. Improvements on OSX have stagnated, and any new features that have been added over the past few years have been a side-product of iOS. With all the talk of the OSX team at Apple being scrapped for a unified OS team, this kinda makes sense, since iOS is their cash cow, but it's not great for those that rely on a modern OS. 2. With every release there are new bugs, and Apple takes their sweet time fixing them. A prime example is the bug where a huge white block appears over your menu bar if you've got two monitors plugged in, and you're using an Electron app. I'd understand bugs like this on Windows, since they've got to cover thousands of different hardware types, but OSX is on one set of hardware. This should be a trivial bug to fix. 3. Finder seems to get worse and worse with every update. Nowadays, if I drag too many files from one place to another I have to kill it. No such problem on Debian or Windows. 4. Sometimes, Spotlight just "forgets" its index, and any time I try to find something I get unreliable results. They might seem fairly minor, but I feel less value from OSX updates than I do from Windows, and that perception is a dangerous thing.

deepaksurti 7y ago

> but it gets better every year? Also, can you say how/why it is getting better?

EnderMB 7y ago
Safety. I always use my dad as the perfect metric for this, because he fits the elderly tech stereotype perfectly. I can give him Windows or OSX and he'll usually butcher them into a mess. Their Mac is an absolute mess of toolbars and bloatware, whereas the Windows machine has zero issues after several years. Speed. Windows always used to have issues with installs getting slow over time. I've had the same base installation of Windows 10 on my Surface Book and it's as fast as it was the day I bought it, despite several hundred gig sitting on the hard drive, numerous VM's, and several IDE's. Stability. My Surface Book hasn't crashed in years, and my other Windows 10 machines have crashed so infrequently that I forgot what a BSOD looked like nowadays. Cleaner UI. I think toolbars are still a bit of a mess on Windows 10, but they dud a good job to get away from the mess that was Windows 8, and I'm yet to meet someone that struggles with Windows in the same way they struggle with other OS's. These aren't headline features, but they're the key points where Windows improves and where OSX seems to struggle. I still love the OSX UI, but I fear that we're not far away from things becoming more iOS friendly on the desktop, and parts of that fantastic UI being torn down.