5 ms·

Today's macs are better than ever, and Windows keeps getting worse.

josefresco 3y ago
That might be the case, but not the cause of this small bump: "Apple’s growth in Mac shipments is said to in large part reflect constrained supply last year."
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  They cut m2 production in half because of low demand. So, they’re comparing themselves to a bad year
nXqd 3y ago
it's true. The year MAC has the best new reliable, and fast chip, PC has AMD with broken, burnt CPU / motherboard, Intel has a chip so hot to cool down.
- yourusername 3y ago
  Even outside hardware, a fresh windows 11 install before you decrappify it is such a bad experience. Clickbait integrated into the OS, sponsored apps pre-installed like it is a $100 android phone, constant attempts to upsell you to their cloud services.
- tayo42 3y ago
  What about the keyboard? I actually forgot how bad it was until I used one yesterday on one of the MacBooks
  - selykg 3y ago
    The new keyboards are better than the older butterfly keyboards and absolutely more reliable.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    The new Mac keyboards are fine really, they rolled back from the problematic butterfly keyboards to the older magic keyboards (whatever that's actually called, but it feels a lot better and is a lot more robust) - thankfully I skipped the 'butterfly era' completely when I switched from a mid-2014 13" MBP to a 14" M1 MBP.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    Apple had a dark period between 2016 and 2019 when the keyboards on MacBooks were complete and utter garbage, but in 2019 they admitted their mistake and dropped the butterfly keyboard. Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      wow was it really in 2019 they switched back, amazing how long that stuck with me lol
      - sgjohnson 3y ago
        Well, it was long 3 and a half years. Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    No worse than most other laptops, now. A little better than many of them. Not as good as back when Macbook Pros were still thick enough to hold a disc drive and the keys had a lot more travel, but nothing like the dark days of the very-loud, shitty-feeling, unreliable Macbook keyboards of a few years ago. Totally OK. (FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
- sliken 3y ago
  AMD had an issue, but really it was short term and has been fixed, seemed to only impact a few dozen CPUs and motherboard and only when overclocking a home built machine. Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed. With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.
sschueller 3y ago
It highly depends what you use it for. I much prefer linux on my desktop that anything else.
- blensor 3y ago
  I know we are the minority (maybe not necessarily on HN) but if I could upvote it multiple times I would.
- nortonham 3y ago
  yeah for me linux>>mac>>bsd>>chromebook>>windows I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    The second asahi is in a “finished” state im running Linux on my Mac.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      ideally, Asahi would never be finished any more than Debian is. And there will always be more generations of hardware. As long as Martin and others are willing to keep running the project there’s work to be done. It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet. Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!). NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.
jetrink 3y ago
Anecdotally, even the non-technical people in my life are starting to notice the decline of Windows after updating to Windows 11. My aunt, for example, has been a Windows user since her first computer in the 1990s and she recently told me that while she dreads learning a new operating system, she's planning to get a MacBook when it's time for a new laptop. I'm also a lifelong Windows user, but I told her that it was a good decision. I don't see a future for Windows.
- moolcool 3y ago
  Remember the ultra-cheap Windows XP machines that came loaded with weird bloatware? That's what a stock install of contemporary Windows feels like. I think Microsoft is doing so many things right, but the direction Windows is taking is not one of them.
- sliken 3y ago
  Same here. Had some family that were long time windows users, got asks a zillion times to upgrade to windows 10. They upgraded and hated it. Asked for help getting linux going. I installed ubuntu LTS, dragged all the icons except file browser, web browser and settings into the trash. Then got their brother laser printer working. They have been very happy since.
partiallypro 3y ago
Actually, Windows keeps getting better. WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. The Windows 11 interface makes Windows 10 look so dated. In some ways the interface is shaping up to look better then MacOS (still very inconsistent.) The main problems are they are yanking some legacy things that power users have loved. People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains. This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
- pxc 3y ago
  > WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
  - partiallypro 3y ago
    Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now. This isn't WSL1, which did have a confusing process. WSL has changed countless workflows, it's an important addition to Windows. I understand HN is full of Apple fanboys and Microsoft haters (reminds me of the old Slashdot days sometimes), but many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8. People that say it has gotten worse, are just simply incorrect. I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's decisions with Windows, mostly around the widgets, but I never use them, and I would bet most people don't. Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
themerone 3y ago
The Windows UI gets worse in that gets more dumbed down and Mac like, but I find it keeps getting more stable. I switched from from Macs to Microsoft Surfaces when they first came out and found them to be significantly more stable. I can't deny that new Macbooks might be the best hardware you can get, but I'm still going with a Framework running Linux for my next portable.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The frustrating part about Windows getting more mac-like is that the skin deep parts seem to be all that gets copied, and those are copied piecemeal instead of as cohesive wholes. If they’re gonna copy I wish it’d be things like all the little power user features that macs have had since OS X reached maturity.
- pxc 3y ago
  While lots of things in macOS are missing or broken, I more frequently see OS components spontaneously break down on Windows. On the Windows laptop I'm getting rid of shortly, I have to routinely kill dwm.exe because over time it comes to lag so much that it can't keep up with window movement. Colleagues report daily lockups of the start menu which further result in explorer.exe crashes when the Windows key is tapped. The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
  - themerone 3y ago
    I daily drove a high end Chromebook with Linux containers for a couple years and in a lot of ways it prevents an even better experience than windows. The stability of the base system was unbeatable. Apps running in the Linux container were more crash prone than bare metal, but that should improve over time. I successfully ran Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and a bunch of other tools with surprising success.
thefz 3y ago
I completely let go of OSX when Apple deliberately broke SMB for the.. nth time. The days of "solid unix os with a beautiful interface" were a decade ago, now it's a toy OS.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Mac OS is alright but it has it's flaws. IMHO it's not getting better over the years I've used it. The last few releases basically featured a whole bunch of things I neither care about nor use. Anything to do with widgets, i* apps made by Apple, ios integration (I have an Android phone), etc. I couldn't care less. I use it to run a browser + misc development tools. Could I use Linux for what I do? Yes. And I have. Why do use a mac? The hardware. Fast, beautiful, pleasure to use, runs cool, great battery, great screen, amazing touchpad, and they even fixed the keyboard (took them a while). Not a lot not to like about them. I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great. Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges. There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy. I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.

That might be the case, but not the cause of this small bump: "Apple’s growth in Mac shipments is said to in large part reflect constrained supply last year."

barbariangrunge 3y ago
They cut m2 production in half because of low demand. So, they’re comparing themselves to a bad year

nXqd 3y ago

it's true. The year MAC has the best new reliable, and fast chip, PC has AMD with broken, burnt CPU / motherboard, Intel has a chip so hot to cool down.

yourusername 3y ago
Even outside hardware, a fresh windows 11 install before you decrappify it is such a bad experience. Clickbait integrated into the OS, sponsored apps pre-installed like it is a $100 android phone, constant attempts to upsell you to their cloud services.
tayo42 3y ago
What about the keyboard? I actually forgot how bad it was until I used one yesterday on one of the MacBooks
- selykg 3y ago
  The new keyboards are better than the older butterfly keyboards and absolutely more reliable.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  The new Mac keyboards are fine really, they rolled back from the problematic butterfly keyboards to the older magic keyboards (whatever that's actually called, but it feels a lot better and is a lot more robust) - thankfully I skipped the 'butterfly era' completely when I switched from a mid-2014 13" MBP to a 14" M1 MBP.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  Apple had a dark period between 2016 and 2019 when the keyboards on MacBooks were complete and utter garbage, but in 2019 they admitted their mistake and dropped the butterfly keyboard. Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    wow was it really in 2019 they switched back, amazing how long that stuck with me lol
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      Well, it was long 3 and a half years. Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
- bamfly 3y ago
  No worse than most other laptops, now. A little better than many of them. Not as good as back when Macbook Pros were still thick enough to hold a disc drive and the keys had a lot more travel, but nothing like the dark days of the very-loud, shitty-feeling, unreliable Macbook keyboards of a few years ago. Totally OK. (FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
sliken 3y ago
AMD had an issue, but really it was short term and has been fixed, seemed to only impact a few dozen CPUs and motherboard and only when overclocking a home built machine. Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed. With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.

sschueller 3y ago

It highly depends what you use it for. I much prefer linux on my desktop that anything else.

blensor 3y ago
I know we are the minority (maybe not necessarily on HN) but if I could upvote it multiple times I would.
nortonham 3y ago
yeah for me linux>>mac>>bsd>>chromebook>>windows I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  The second asahi is in a “finished” state im running Linux on my Mac.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    ideally, Asahi would never be finished any more than Debian is. And there will always be more generations of hardware. As long as Martin and others are willing to keep running the project there’s work to be done. It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet. Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!). NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.

jetrink 3y ago

Anecdotally, even the non-technical people in my life are starting to notice the decline of Windows after updating to Windows 11. My aunt, for example, has been a Windows user since her first computer in the 1990s and she recently told me that while she dreads learning a new operating system, she's planning to get a MacBook when it's time for a new laptop. I'm also a lifelong Windows user, but I told her that it was a good decision. I don't see a future for Windows.

moolcool 3y ago
Remember the ultra-cheap Windows XP machines that came loaded with weird bloatware? That's what a stock install of contemporary Windows feels like. I think Microsoft is doing so many things right, but the direction Windows is taking is not one of them.
sliken 3y ago
Same here. Had some family that were long time windows users, got asks a zillion times to upgrade to windows 10. They upgraded and hated it. Asked for help getting linux going. I installed ubuntu LTS, dragged all the icons except file browser, web browser and settings into the trash. Then got their brother laser printer working. They have been very happy since.

partiallypro 3y ago

Actually, Windows keeps getting better. WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. The Windows 11 interface makes Windows 10 look so dated. In some ways the interface is shaping up to look better then MacOS (still very inconsistent.) The main problems are they are yanking some legacy things that power users have loved. People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.

manuelabeledo 3y ago
> People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains. This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
pxc 3y ago
> WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
- partiallypro 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now. This isn't WSL1, which did have a confusing process. WSL has changed countless workflows, it's an important addition to Windows. I understand HN is full of Apple fanboys and Microsoft haters (reminds me of the old Slashdot days sometimes), but many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8. People that say it has gotten worse, are just simply incorrect. I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's decisions with Windows, mostly around the widgets, but I never use them, and I would bet most people don't. Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.

themerone 3y ago

The Windows UI gets worse in that gets more dumbed down and Mac like, but I find it keeps getting more stable. I switched from from Macs to Microsoft Surfaces when they first came out and found them to be significantly more stable. I can't deny that new Macbooks might be the best hardware you can get, but I'm still going with a Framework running Linux for my next portable.

jwells89 3y ago
The frustrating part about Windows getting more mac-like is that the skin deep parts seem to be all that gets copied, and those are copied piecemeal instead of as cohesive wholes. If they’re gonna copy I wish it’d be things like all the little power user features that macs have had since OS X reached maturity.
pxc 3y ago
While lots of things in macOS are missing or broken, I more frequently see OS components spontaneously break down on Windows. On the Windows laptop I'm getting rid of shortly, I have to routinely kill dwm.exe because over time it comes to lag so much that it can't keep up with window movement. Colleagues report daily lockups of the start menu which further result in explorer.exe crashes when the Windows key is tapped. The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
- themerone 3y ago
  I daily drove a high end Chromebook with Linux containers for a couple years and in a lot of ways it prevents an even better experience than windows. The stability of the base system was unbeatable. Apps running in the Linux container were more crash prone than bare metal, but that should improve over time. I successfully ran Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and a bunch of other tools with surprising success.

thefz 3y ago

I completely let go of OSX when Apple deliberately broke SMB for the.. nth time. The days of "solid unix os with a beautiful interface" were a decade ago, now it's a toy OS.

helf 3y ago
[dead]

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Mac OS is alright but it has it's flaws. IMHO it's not getting better over the years I've used it. The last few releases basically featured a whole bunch of things I neither care about nor use. Anything to do with widgets, i* apps made by Apple, ios integration (I have an Android phone), etc. I couldn't care less. I use it to run a browser + misc development tools. Could I use Linux for what I do? Yes. And I have. Why do use a mac? The hardware. Fast, beautiful, pleasure to use, runs cool, great battery, great screen, amazing touchpad, and they even fixed the keyboard (took them a while). Not a lot not to like about them. I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great. Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges. There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy. I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.