4 ms·

Microsoft and Apple are traditional enemies. Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers. The thing I don't get is why a con

by oofbey 4y ago

Microsoft and Apple are traditional enemies. Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers. The thing I don't get is why a consumer would want this. You want an _extremely expensive_ windows laptop. I guess the hope would be that the battery life is worlds better than anything you'd get in standard windows-land. But in reality battery life optimization requires paying careful to the devices and their drivers -- e.g. when parts of the system shut down because they're not in use. Not easy for a project like this. So I'd sadly guess you end up with an expensive windows laptop with battery life comparable to a standard windows laptop. But you get that nice minimal Apple industrial design. :shrug:

technovader 4y ago
You can't imagine why a Windows user would want to run it on better hardware? Or that there are Windows workflows that just don't work on OSX? Or want a fanless laptop with good performance?
- oofbey 4y ago
  TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all, except for playing games. If you're stuck using windows because the corporate overlords insist, then yeah that sucks. Also you can always run windows in a VM. Even on an M1.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    Windows has fantastic accessibility properties/support. They even have a blind dev working on Visual Studio (or did)[0] for awhile. Apple's accessibility options are not anywhere near on-par with Windows. Linux ... I honestly haven't ever tried a screen reader in Linux and I have a feeling it is 100% up to whichever dev implemented something with no centralized style of doing things. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc
  - dosenbrot 4y ago
    I’m with you. Many people constantly complain about windows but most of them still using it. They say it’s going to get better, but it won’t. You could spend five years trying to make windows run ob an M1 und MS would break it within an hour. I’m done with microsoft, they disappointed me to many times, never again. It’s necessary for some games but it’s getting better with linux (thanks to valve).
  - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
    > TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all I use Windows and Linux equally as often, and I don't see this changing. There are some areas in which Windows itself is far superior, e.g: - HiDPI and font rendering (ClearType is the best font AA solution I've ever seen); - gaming and 3D graphics (Direct3D is a straightforward API to program with; OpenGL is 'deprecated', and Vulkan is a mess); - multi-GPU support with Optimus and related switching technologies; - a catch-all OS API to program with (WinAPI goes as far as handling user folders, libraries, application configuration and data[0], whereas on Linux land it's just a mess of hopefully-defined environment variables and if not, everything is dumped into a dotfile/dotdir); - a nice shell[1] (IMO, superior to bash and friends) that is bundled with the OS to manage said OS, with object-oriented data throughput, strong(er) typing, and access to the .NET library; - as of Windows 11, increasingly unifying UI/UX experience with WinUI 3 (yes, it was a mess with Windows 8 and 10; Vista and 7 were the most recent OSes to drastically change the 'desktop environment', and Windows 8 was a very mild reskin of Windows 7, all things considered); - powerful ACL-based permissions model and 'hidden file' metadata bit, instead of expecting a dot prefix to mean 'hidden'; - a kernel structure that makes writing third-party device drivers straightforward, because there is no need to compile out-of-kernel drivers with headers; - vastly improved touchpad handling compared to Linux (yes, OS X is better still, but given that it will be increasingly difficult to 'hackintosh' after Apple's move to ARM, this is a moot point); Furthermore: - there are some software that are either industry-standard, or superior to the competition that only run on Windows/OS X, or even only on Windows (e.g. MS Office, Adobe suite, Visual Studio, Autodesk Maya/CAD; Active Directory); - there is less incentive to run Linux bare-metal when WSL2 exists; - Windows still holds a supermajority of desktop users, and it would do well for developers to use the OS that their users use, aka dog-fooding. I have never understood this hardcore anti-Windows dogma that so many hackers seem to have. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfolderid https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfo... [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/
    - majkinetor 4y ago
      Well said. On top of that, you can run majority of mainstream Linux tools on Windows, natively, without WSL. Contrary is usually not the case, you need Wine or VM. There is context for everything - Linux is great for servers and particularly IoT since you need lots of them, it doesn't make sense to pay for Windows Server in that case. Since Desktop can be used mostly free of charge nowdays, I don't really see a problem. And ofc. PowerShell is light years better then anything on Linux, not that it is much important now since pwsh is cross-platform.
GeekyBear 4y ago
> Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers. Microsoft released a touch version of Office for iOS before they had a touch version of Office for their own Surface hardware. This isn't the Ballmer/Gates era anymore.
- oofbey 4y ago
  Fair counter-point, but that's a pretty different situation. I should have said "MS has no reason to make Apple's laptop hardware more attractive." In 2014 when Office was released for iPad, the Surface had negligible market share. Microsoft was losing badly in the tablet space, so they were trying to catch up any way they could. At the time it would have been reasonable to plan for a future where Microsoft completely lost to Apple in the tablet hardware space, so they needed to protect Office (critical line of business) from becoming irrelevant in what was clearly emerging as an important hardware category. Yes even then they weren't so arrogant as to try to protect the fledgling Surface business by withholding Office from iPad - a move they certainly had used in the past. But today's laptop market is very different. Apple and Microsoft are still very much competing for dominance in laptops, which is an important source of revenue for both companies. It's a familiar pattern where Apple sells fewer units than many others, but at much higher profit margins. MS gets their tax from all these PC sales at high margin, but it's a small amount compared to Apple's huge hardware margins - and that's the key point why it's a bad idea. A consumer who buys a mac to run windows gives WAY more money to Apple than Microsoft. The secondary point is that every Mac sold erodes the waning dominance of Windows, bleeding out Microsoft's cash cow. Nadella wants (NEEDS!) you to believe Microsoft is kinder & gentler because he knows the days of Windows' hegemony are behind us and there's no stopping its slow fade to irrelevance. That doesn't mean they want to it to happen. Directing consumer's money into Apple's coffers unquestionably accelerates Microsoft's problems.
rollinggoron 4y ago
Why would Microsoft not want this? They make money off of selling Windows licenses, not selling hardware (Yes, I'm aware the Surface exists). The more available hardware to install Windows etc on, the more $ Microsoft makes.
- oofbey 4y ago
  Balmer or not, Microsoft is still in direct competition with Apple for much of its core business. So encouraging customers to buy a laptop where they get $50 for the windows license and if they're lucky another $100 in software sales, but their key competitor gets >=$1000 of profit -- yeah, it's pretty clearly a bad business choice.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    Not really. OEMs pay significantly less for Windows licenses than they are retailed for. And Windows sales to consumers haven't been a core part of their business for a while now. It's all about cloud and enterprise.
    - oofbey 4y ago
      Just looked at the earnings report and I have to agree with you. Windows + Office was 25% of MS's revenue in 2021, but I suspect you're right that the big majority of that is not consumer-driven. FWIW just 2 years back, Windows + Office was 40% of revenue, so this segment is very rapidly becoming less important.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Making sure that windows works properly and keeping it working for however long they want to support it has got to cost a bunch of money. The question is, will they ever sell enough Windows licenses for M1(/2/3/etc.) Macs to make up for that investment, let alone profit? I kind of doubt it.

by oofbey 4y ago

technovader 4y ago

You can't imagine why a Windows user would want to run it on better hardware? Or that there are Windows workflows that just don't work on OSX? Or want a fanless laptop with good performance?

oofbey 4y ago
TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all, except for playing games. If you're stuck using windows because the corporate overlords insist, then yeah that sucks. Also you can always run windows in a VM. Even on an M1.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  Windows has fantastic accessibility properties/support. They even have a blind dev working on Visual Studio (or did)[0] for awhile. Apple's accessibility options are not anywhere near on-par with Windows. Linux ... I honestly haven't ever tried a screen reader in Linux and I have a feeling it is 100% up to whichever dev implemented something with no centralized style of doing things. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc
- dosenbrot 4y ago
  I’m with you. Many people constantly complain about windows but most of them still using it. They say it’s going to get better, but it won’t. You could spend five years trying to make windows run ob an M1 und MS would break it within an hour. I’m done with microsoft, they disappointed me to many times, never again. It’s necessary for some games but it’s getting better with linux (thanks to valve).
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  > TBH I have a hard time understanding why people choose to run windows at all I use Windows and Linux equally as often, and I don't see this changing. There are some areas in which Windows itself is far superior, e.g: - HiDPI and font rendering (ClearType is the best font AA solution I've ever seen); - gaming and 3D graphics (Direct3D is a straightforward API to program with; OpenGL is 'deprecated', and Vulkan is a mess); - multi-GPU support with Optimus and related switching technologies; - a catch-all OS API to program with (WinAPI goes as far as handling user folders, libraries, application configuration and data[0], whereas on Linux land it's just a mess of hopefully-defined environment variables and if not, everything is dumped into a dotfile/dotdir); - a nice shell[1] (IMO, superior to bash and friends) that is bundled with the OS to manage said OS, with object-oriented data throughput, strong(er) typing, and access to the .NET library; - as of Windows 11, increasingly unifying UI/UX experience with WinUI 3 (yes, it was a mess with Windows 8 and 10; Vista and 7 were the most recent OSes to drastically change the 'desktop environment', and Windows 8 was a very mild reskin of Windows 7, all things considered); - powerful ACL-based permissions model and 'hidden file' metadata bit, instead of expecting a dot prefix to mean 'hidden'; - a kernel structure that makes writing third-party device drivers straightforward, because there is no need to compile out-of-kernel drivers with headers; - vastly improved touchpad handling compared to Linux (yes, OS X is better still, but given that it will be increasingly difficult to 'hackintosh' after Apple's move to ARM, this is a moot point); Furthermore: - there are some software that are either industry-standard, or superior to the competition that only run on Windows/OS X, or even only on Windows (e.g. MS Office, Adobe suite, Visual Studio, Autodesk Maya/CAD; Active Directory); - there is less incentive to run Linux bare-metal when WSL2 exists; - Windows still holds a supermajority of desktop users, and it would do well for developers to use the OS that their users use, aka dog-fooding. I have never understood this hardcore anti-Windows dogma that so many hackers seem to have. [0]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfolderid https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfo... [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/
  - majkinetor 4y ago
    Well said. On top of that, you can run majority of mainstream Linux tools on Windows, natively, without WSL. Contrary is usually not the case, you need Wine or VM. There is context for everything - Linux is great for servers and particularly IoT since you need lots of them, it doesn't make sense to pay for Windows Server in that case. Since Desktop can be used mostly free of charge nowdays, I don't really see a problem. And ofc. PowerShell is light years better then anything on Linux, not that it is much important now since pwsh is cross-platform.

GeekyBear 4y ago

> Microsoft has no reason to make Apple's hardware more attractive to customers. Microsoft released a touch version of Office for iOS before they had a touch version of Office for their own Surface hardware. This isn't the Ballmer/Gates era anymore.

oofbey 4y ago
Fair counter-point, but that's a pretty different situation. I should have said "MS has no reason to make Apple's laptop hardware more attractive." In 2014 when Office was released for iPad, the Surface had negligible market share. Microsoft was losing badly in the tablet space, so they were trying to catch up any way they could. At the time it would have been reasonable to plan for a future where Microsoft completely lost to Apple in the tablet hardware space, so they needed to protect Office (critical line of business) from becoming irrelevant in what was clearly emerging as an important hardware category. Yes even then they weren't so arrogant as to try to protect the fledgling Surface business by withholding Office from iPad - a move they certainly had used in the past. But today's laptop market is very different. Apple and Microsoft are still very much competing for dominance in laptops, which is an important source of revenue for both companies. It's a familiar pattern where Apple sells fewer units than many others, but at much higher profit margins. MS gets their tax from all these PC sales at high margin, but it's a small amount compared to Apple's huge hardware margins - and that's the key point why it's a bad idea. A consumer who buys a mac to run windows gives WAY more money to Apple than Microsoft. The secondary point is that every Mac sold erodes the waning dominance of Windows, bleeding out Microsoft's cash cow. Nadella wants (NEEDS!) you to believe Microsoft is kinder & gentler because he knows the days of Windows' hegemony are behind us and there's no stopping its slow fade to irrelevance. That doesn't mean they want to it to happen. Directing consumer's money into Apple's coffers unquestionably accelerates Microsoft's problems.

rollinggoron 4y ago

Why would Microsoft not want this? They make money off of selling Windows licenses, not selling hardware (Yes, I'm aware the Surface exists). The more available hardware to install Windows etc on, the more $ Microsoft makes.

oofbey 4y ago
Balmer or not, Microsoft is still in direct competition with Apple for much of its core business. So encouraging customers to buy a laptop where they get $50 for the windows license and if they're lucky another $100 in software sales, but their key competitor gets >=$1000 of profit -- yeah, it's pretty clearly a bad business choice.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Not really. OEMs pay significantly less for Windows licenses than they are retailed for. And Windows sales to consumers haven't been a core part of their business for a while now. It's all about cloud and enterprise.
  - oofbey 4y ago
    Just looked at the earnings report and I have to agree with you. Windows + Office was 25% of MS's revenue in 2021, but I suspect you're right that the big majority of that is not consumer-driven. FWIW just 2 years back, Windows + Office was 40% of revenue, so this segment is very rapidly becoming less important.
MBCook 4y ago
Making sure that windows works properly and keeping it working for however long they want to support it has got to cost a bunch of money. The question is, will they ever sell enough Windows licenses for M1(/2/3/etc.) Macs to make up for that investment, let alone profit? I kind of doubt it.