Agreement or disagreement - my point is each company does both good and bad. What people choose to see is somewhat colored by your previous position/bias just l

Agreement or disagreement - my point is each company does both good and bad. What people choose to see is somewhat colored by your previous position/bias just like everyone else. Will be the devil's advocate here. Microsoft advanced personal computing for the majority especially outside the US where Apple pretty much was non-existent for a long time. I would argue through its life Microsoft has advanced personal computing more than most of the other tech firms. Growing up every office, every PC, every time I tried to code mostly it was on an IBM-compatible machine. Apple for a very long time wasn't very competitive IMO from a product perspective, and I think recent developments are overhyped compared to some of the big innovations of the 80's, 90's (i.e. Windows 95 was big, moving from Windows XP to Mac OS is a lot less so IMO). In fact on an Apple machine most people are just doing what they did previously on their Windows machines - just needing more power to do so (surfing the internet, office productivity, etc). I'm glad that Apple are trying another CPU, just like I'm glad AMD do and Intel did in the long distant past. Competitiveness, not culture is what drives companies to do this. But w.r.t development/coding they aren't the leader, and their walled garden doesn't personally make their dev tech stack endearing. I don't agree they are the fastest all the time (even with the M1), and I personally don't like MacOS despite being forced to use it for work daily for many years. I see the M1 somewhat as a TSMC victory and their 5nm process + Apple wanting total control to differentiate/move away from a competitive PC market to a monopoly like one. At least Microsoft wanted/encouraged PC competition and didn't charge that much for Windows on top even back in the 90's/2000's. For a long time you could get PC's that were faster for cheaper than Mac's. While Apple's approach to vertical integration has an advantage short term w.r.t efficiency its definitely allows an "embrace and extinguish" strategy - long term having hardware as interoperable commodity (CPU, GPU, etc) is better for competitive priced computing IMO. As a buyer more suppliers means a more competitive market - vertical integration is something most companies would love to pull off as it product differentiates and creates economic margins. Apple is the worst on this aspect. They aren't an open platform and the only thing capping their price and forcing them to improve is because they are still the underdog market share wise and they want to beat the PC market. Not a fan of the Apple ecosystem lock in but that's just me, its worse than Android/Google. Obviously they all have bad points but that's my point. All these companies have their good and bad sides. I just feel the hate Microsoft gets a lot more hate vs other tech companies. Especially given recent changes, is a bit over the top.