Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

And yes, I realize this will be dead, and I am completely okay with that. I achieve my purpose posting in hidden silence.

Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.

Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways. They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else. They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company). Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.

Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.

Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better. Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.

I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack. I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.

MS Research is a brilliant department but it is (was) completely disconnected from the main business.

And yes, NT driver model is super robust.

Any reason to believe MS does this more than Apple does?

> their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level.

MS making their own hardware looks to be at least partially a response to that.

> - build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition

Again, this really isn't the advantage it used to be. MS first-party surface hardware is really high quality.

> But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.

Apple has long offered an excellent direct user experience but extremely poor interoperability. You're still not allowed to run their OS in a VM or on third-party hardware, nor develop programs for Apple systems on non-Apple systems - and if you want a different configuration than the very limited choice Apple gives you, tough. There's plenty wrong with MS but I feel like they're at least somewhat open to alternatives if I don't like their way of doing it. Apple is very much "our way or the highway", which is not where I want my software to be.

Currently my work laptop is an HP ProBook, and just as much to blame for my poor Windows experience as Windows it self is.