12 ms·

Microsoft is a company full of bureaucrats who don't care about their product. Apple is going to take over the computing world here shortly.

babypuncher 4y ago
Microsoft cares about their B2B products. While end users complain about Windows being a bloated mess, corporations still see no better alternative platform for deploying and managing a fleet of thousands (or tens of thousands) of machines.
- musictubes 4y ago
api 4y ago
It's worse than that. They're busy turning off their users with dark patterns, terrible UX, ads and spam in the OS, and endless amounts of unnecessary telemetry.
- cowtools 4y ago
  It's a false dichotomy. You could say the same about either company. Those are the inevitable consequences of proprietary software and vendor lock-in (my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)
  - eitland 4y ago
    Microsoft. They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse. Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      Apple forces safari on users in iOS, has icloud ads and integrations built into the OS, and sells devices with locked down bootloaders/filesystems that don't let you sideload your own programs. Who is the bigger threat here? The real threat to user freedom is the tribalism of picking the "lesser evil" when there are workable non-evil solutions like linux.
      - eitland 4y ago
        It doesn't force Safari. Chrome is absolutely allowed to create a browser and track users and monetize them on iOS. They just have to use the same rendering engine. I'm not Apples greatest fan (see my latest comment), but there is a major difference between iCloud or OneDrive being pre-installed, both which is OK with me, and Candy Crush showing up in the start menu on my work laptop or some stupid game altering my login screen, again on my work laptop. And yes, I too am a Linux user. Why choose between various dumb and evil options if nice is available? (I know, some people get as mad at font problems and alignment on Linux as I get on microlagging on Windows and boneheaded CMD-TAB on Mac, but each to their own.)
  - chongli 4y ago
    No, you can't. There are no dark patterns, ads, or spam in macOS. The worst you could say is that it has "terrible UX." I would then respond: compared to what? In my view, the only desktop-grade OS I prefer over the modern Mac is MacOS 9. It was much easier to use and understand from top to bottom. On the other hand, it lacked a lot of features I've come to take for granted (pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, protected memory, support for modern hardware, gestures, etc). I do really miss the spatial Finder though.
    - seabriez 4y ago
      Please purchase iCloud Subscription to backup this comment.
      - api 4y ago
        Yes Apple does push iCloud a bit but it seems fairly simple to opt out and after you do it stops bugging you, or at least that has been my experience.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      There are plenty of dark patterns in macOS. For example, macOS will trick users into thinking that the apps they want to use are either broken or malicious if developers didn't pay Apple $100 a year and Notarize apps. macOS has increasingly become a platform to sell iCloud subscriptions, as well.
      - seabriez 4y ago
        No "dark" patterns he says. Even after all the revelations, iFads just keep mindlessly worship Crapple. When in reality: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf "iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing." Power corrupts and when one company wields too much of it, shit will hit the fan.
  - malfist 4y ago
    I'm not even sure which company they're accusing of having those faults.
- dt3ft 4y ago
  I just had to hack/patch windows 11 in order to bring back "never combine taskbar windows" functionality which existed in windows 10. I am strongly considering switching over at this point. Removal of "never combine" is such a productivity kill that it baffles me how this thing rolled out at all. Who took over the wheel over at Microsoft and who left, that made this major breaking change take place?
  - seabriez 4y ago
    "Grass is always greener" effect. If you think there isn't weird UI shit on MacOS...
  - airstrike 4y ago
    Thanks for the heads up. I'm never upgrading if I can help it...
  - alluro2 4y ago
    Oof - I understand your gripe completely, Win 11 is downright perplexing with some of this stuff, but if you're someone who wants the "Never combine..." option, you'll probably hate MacOS dock, the way window and app switching works, lack of any options there, and general "We know better than our users" mentality all over the place...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- rhinoceraptor 4y ago
  Not to mention, up until a few years ago, most PCs did not come with TPMs, so they can't run Windows 11. And Windows 10 won't get security patches after 2025. I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Yes, Apple would have a difficult job displacing MS, but it seems that MS is set on helping them. I mean, who doesn't want ads on their work computer? /s
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  And yet, I and many of my friends will keep using Windows because the third-party Windows screen readers are better than macOS's VoiceOver in many ways. I have no doubt that other users have their own favorite (edit: or essential) third-party tools that keep them on Windows.
PraetorianGourd 4y ago
Please talk to anyone outside of the start-up/tech world and ask them about the technology they use. A majority don't give a toss about M1 or M2 or ARM vs. x86 or anything else that seems to get so many in the tech world so excited. They care about Excel, they care about backwards compatibility, they care about centralized management. Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Thankfully we don't need to trust in meaningless anecdotes about what those in the 'real world' do or don't know. The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users. So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for. And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.
- ezsmi 4y ago
  I agree that the world basically runs on excel, but given that, the world cares about excel’s performance. Especially as spreadsheets are only getting bigger. And then there’s this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-mac-powered-by-apple-silicon-18db14f2-4abc-4d93-96a4-72a01f6e9721 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-ma...
  - airstrike 4y ago
    Office for Mac is a non-starter for power users due to the lack of Alt-key accelerators. There are countless other missing features, but that alone is enough to never make the switch
    - reaperducer 4y ago
onphonenow 4y ago
No chance unfortunately. Windows 11 has pop up "notifications" that are basically ads all over. Unnecessarily hard to cleanup / customize in a biz setting. If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. But Microsoft just is better here currently on a lot of fronts - the last time I chased my tail here it didn't pay off. If Apple wants to compete for the business market I think they should! We need first class user account management that INTEGRATES with other stuff (ie, google email etc etc). Right now you can federate from active directory to almost anything (SonicWall/VPN for remote users, WiFi for onprem user devices, vSphere for VM management etc etc). If you sync to google you can then use google one click sign-ons everywhere on the web SAAS side. We then need office running perfectly. Then we'd probably do our legacy apps on some VMs and chrome for SAAS apps. We also need to be able to run MacOS virtually. We have remote users who talk to an on-prem VMs, separates their personal and work stuff, we can lock down and monitor the on-prem VMs and they can watch netflix with no worries using home machine. How does this work with Apple? It's easy with Windows. I think there would be some demand from smaller co's to make the switch if there was a solution which allowed what folks are looking for -> migration to cloud as offices go virtual with controlled "desktops" delivered to users while still allowing in office / warehouse / factory deployments.
- rtlfe 4y ago
  > If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.
- iostream24 4y ago
  Is Active Directory still LDAP compliant? Embraced and extended or compliant? Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there. Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems, Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple.. Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process
  - 4y ago
bob1029 4y ago
Just a few weeks ago I replaced my Surface Laptop 3 with a M1 MacBook and couldn't agree more regarding hardware. I can't speak for any xbox branded stuff, but any MS-branded computer I've ever owned has been trash. Microsoft might be terrible at this hardware business, but they do have a powerful presence in the developer & business community. I still feel like Microsoft is the strongest software company on earth. Consider that not even the confines of this M1 MacBook prevent me from being able to compile & run my .NET apps without modification. Apple's hypothetical hegemony does not cross over in the same way. Until Apple can get me to look at their Xcode offerings and think "wow fuck visual studio, GitHub, et. al.", I do not think their takeover of the computing world will begin.
pmulard 4y ago
I have to disagree on this. Microsoft has gone out of their way to support their legacy software on older systems, and it's a huge reason companies in the IT and IoT sector have stayed with them all these years.

babypuncher 4y ago

Microsoft cares about their B2B products. While end users complain about Windows being a bloated mess, corporations still see no better alternative platform for deploying and managing a fleet of thousands (or tens of thousands) of machines.

musictubes 4y ago

api 4y ago

It's worse than that. They're busy turning off their users with dark patterns, terrible UX, ads and spam in the OS, and endless amounts of unnecessary telemetry.

cowtools 4y ago
It's a false dichotomy. You could say the same about either company. Those are the inevitable consequences of proprietary software and vendor lock-in (my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)
- eitland 4y ago
  Microsoft. They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse. Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    Apple forces safari on users in iOS, has icloud ads and integrations built into the OS, and sells devices with locked down bootloaders/filesystems that don't let you sideload your own programs. Who is the bigger threat here? The real threat to user freedom is the tribalism of picking the "lesser evil" when there are workable non-evil solutions like linux.
    - eitland 4y ago
      It doesn't force Safari. Chrome is absolutely allowed to create a browser and track users and monetize them on iOS. They just have to use the same rendering engine. I'm not Apples greatest fan (see my latest comment), but there is a major difference between iCloud or OneDrive being pre-installed, both which is OK with me, and Candy Crush showing up in the start menu on my work laptop or some stupid game altering my login screen, again on my work laptop. And yes, I too am a Linux user. Why choose between various dumb and evil options if nice is available? (I know, some people get as mad at font problems and alignment on Linux as I get on microlagging on Windows and boneheaded CMD-TAB on Mac, but each to their own.)
- chongli 4y ago
  No, you can't. There are no dark patterns, ads, or spam in macOS. The worst you could say is that it has "terrible UX." I would then respond: compared to what? In my view, the only desktop-grade OS I prefer over the modern Mac is MacOS 9. It was much easier to use and understand from top to bottom. On the other hand, it lacked a lot of features I've come to take for granted (pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, protected memory, support for modern hardware, gestures, etc). I do really miss the spatial Finder though.
  - seabriez 4y ago
    Please purchase iCloud Subscription to backup this comment.
    - api 4y ago
      Yes Apple does push iCloud a bit but it seems fairly simple to opt out and after you do it stops bugging you, or at least that has been my experience.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    There are plenty of dark patterns in macOS. For example, macOS will trick users into thinking that the apps they want to use are either broken or malicious if developers didn't pay Apple $100 a year and Notarize apps. macOS has increasingly become a platform to sell iCloud subscriptions, as well.
    - seabriez 4y ago
      No "dark" patterns he says. Even after all the revelations, iFads just keep mindlessly worship Crapple. When in reality: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf "iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location. Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing." Power corrupts and when one company wields too much of it, shit will hit the fan.
- malfist 4y ago
  I'm not even sure which company they're accusing of having those faults.
dt3ft 4y ago
I just had to hack/patch windows 11 in order to bring back "never combine taskbar windows" functionality which existed in windows 10. I am strongly considering switching over at this point. Removal of "never combine" is such a productivity kill that it baffles me how this thing rolled out at all. Who took over the wheel over at Microsoft and who left, that made this major breaking change take place?
- seabriez 4y ago
  "Grass is always greener" effect. If you think there isn't weird UI shit on MacOS...
- airstrike 4y ago
  Thanks for the heads up. I'm never upgrading if I can help it...
- alluro2 4y ago
  Oof - I understand your gripe completely, Win 11 is downright perplexing with some of this stuff, but if you're someone who wants the "Never combine..." option, you'll probably hate MacOS dock, the way window and app switching works, lack of any options there, and general "We know better than our users" mentality all over the place...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rhinoceraptor 4y ago
Not to mention, up until a few years ago, most PCs did not come with TPMs, so they can't run Windows 11. And Windows 10 won't get security patches after 2025. I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Yes, Apple would have a difficult job displacing MS, but it seems that MS is set on helping them. I mean, who doesn't want ads on their work computer? /s
mwcampbell 4y ago
And yet, I and many of my friends will keep using Windows because the third-party Windows screen readers are better than macOS's VoiceOver in many ways. I have no doubt that other users have their own favorite (edit: or essential) third-party tools that keep them on Windows.

PraetorianGourd 4y ago

Please talk to anyone outside of the start-up/tech world and ask them about the technology they use. A majority don't give a toss about M1 or M2 or ARM vs. x86 or anything else that seems to get so many in the tech world so excited. They care about Excel, they care about backwards compatibility, they care about centralized management. Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.

threeseed 4y ago
Thankfully we don't need to trust in meaningless anecdotes about what those in the 'real world' do or don't know. The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users. So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for. And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.
ezsmi 4y ago
I agree that the world basically runs on excel, but given that, the world cares about excel’s performance. Especially as spreadsheets are only getting bigger. And then there’s this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-mac-powered-by-apple-silicon-18db14f2-4abc-4d93-96a4-72a01f6e9721 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-ma...
- airstrike 4y ago
  Office for Mac is a non-starter for power users due to the lack of Alt-key accelerators. There are countless other missing features, but that alone is enough to never make the switch
  - reaperducer 4y ago

onphonenow 4y ago

No chance unfortunately. Windows 11 has pop up "notifications" that are basically ads all over. Unnecessarily hard to cleanup / customize in a biz setting. If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. But Microsoft just is better here currently on a lot of fronts - the last time I chased my tail here it didn't pay off. If Apple wants to compete for the business market I think they should! We need first class user account management that INTEGRATES with other stuff (ie, google email etc etc). Right now you can federate from active directory to almost anything (SonicWall/VPN for remote users, WiFi for onprem user devices, vSphere for VM management etc etc). If you sync to google you can then use google one click sign-ons everywhere on the web SAAS side. We then need office running perfectly. Then we'd probably do our legacy apps on some VMs and chrome for SAAS apps. We also need to be able to run MacOS virtually. We have remote users who talk to an on-prem VMs, separates their personal and work stuff, we can lock down and monitor the on-prem VMs and they can watch netflix with no worries using home machine. How does this work with Apple? It's easy with Windows. I think there would be some demand from smaller co's to make the switch if there was a solution which allowed what folks are looking for -> migration to cloud as offices go virtual with controlled "desktops" delivered to users while still allowing in office / warehouse / factory deployments.

rtlfe 4y ago
> If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.
iostream24 4y ago
Is Active Directory still LDAP compliant? Embraced and extended or compliant? Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there. Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems, Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple.. Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process
- 4y ago

bob1029 4y ago

Just a few weeks ago I replaced my Surface Laptop 3 with a M1 MacBook and couldn't agree more regarding hardware. I can't speak for any xbox branded stuff, but any MS-branded computer I've ever owned has been trash. Microsoft might be terrible at this hardware business, but they do have a powerful presence in the developer & business community. I still feel like Microsoft is the strongest software company on earth. Consider that not even the confines of this M1 MacBook prevent me from being able to compile & run my .NET apps without modification. Apple's hypothetical hegemony does not cross over in the same way. Until Apple can get me to look at their Xcode offerings and think "wow fuck visual studio, GitHub, et. al.", I do not think their takeover of the computing world will begin.

pmulard 4y ago

I have to disagree on this. Microsoft has gone out of their way to support their legacy software on older systems, and it's a huge reason companies in the IT and IoT sector have stayed with them all these years.