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Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

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Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#101

Post by culturestate »

jpgvm wrote: post #53

Microsoft has almost always been a more innovative company. 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 a…

Is Microsoft more innovative, or is Microsoft simply more publicly innovative? Apple (and tons of other companies, for that matter) simply don't make hay out of their R&D efforts until they have something sellable to announce.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#102

Post by humanrebar »

mhomde wrote: post #92
jfoutz wrote: post #15

There's no real underdog now. Microsoft has a pretty consistent track record of looking at other companies making money, and making a microsoft version of that. Bing, xbox, azure, and zune are pretty obvious examples. Surface doesn't seem to fit that mold at all. They're giving every indication of doing something new. I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good,…

Microsoft is an underdog in mobile devices. Google is an underdog in tablets/desktop devices. Apple is an underdog when it comes to services. It's like rock/paper/scissors :)

I don't know where Chromebooks fit in that list, but they're very popular.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#103

Post by cygned »

SamUK96 wrote: post #25
sidcool wrote: post #3

Not so fast. Let the respective products come to market. Armchair visionary technologists have already spelled death of Apple and Resurrection of Microsoft. Not so fast.

To be fair, Apple's last 3-4 Quarters have been huge consecutive disappointments, and this line up was their last chance to turn that around I believe. And they've clearly failed. Who will pay $1,500 on a laptop that has second-grade components, a rather standard keyboard, etc. etc. Heck, Asus' Zenbook 3 line costs around $1500 and it has the best possible components, better screen, better keyboard, better everything…

I have spent twice the money you stated for a new MacBook Pro 13". I'd say, the primary point is "it just works". I know, once it's been delivered, I'll install a couple of tools, transfer some files and it will work. It won't get slower, it won't crash, the hardware won't break. And I don't have to waste time keeping that thing alive.

Maybe I was just lucky with my previous Macs but that's the experience I've had in the last years.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#104

Post by TACIXAT »

whytaka wrote: post #26

Microsoft is innovative because you can now purchase a dedicated hardware peripheral for some software feature the touchscreen was designed to replace. Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company sho…

I had a MBP a few years ago. I installed the Boot Camp beta. When it went out of beta it locked up with no ability to change the configuration or installed OSs. The solution was to upgrade (30$) to the latest version of OS X. Which meant I lost all the software that came with the laptop since I didn't want to pay for it again.

I had an iPod touch. When I was using it on a certain network it couldn't hit the NTP servers. This set the time to 1970, and I couldn't change it manually due to some integer overflow bug. Trying to scroll those wheel things to the current date, it would start skipping 30 years forward and backward. The time not being set meant I couldn't use the app store, upgrade the OS, etc., rendering the device useless.

I'll stick to Linux and Android. At least I can fix those when they break.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#105

Post by intended »

rayiner wrote: post #96
whytaka wrote: post #26

Microsoft is innovative because you can now purchase a dedicated hardware peripheral for some software feature the touchscreen was designed to replace. Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company sho…

Not to mention this article is based on a product targeted at a niche minority of users. Nothing with a 28" screen is the future of how non-artists use a computer. Microsoft is selling one just mainstream computer (the Surface Book), and despite being a fifth gen Surface device it launched with major firmware bugs that took months to resolve. Apple, unsurprisingly, is selling Macs about five times faster than Microso…

Those macs, trace their history back to devices also targetted at this same niche of users, and after iteration lead to the macbooks you use today.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#106

Post by jfoutz »

notalaser wrote: post #85
jfoutz wrote: post #15

There's no real underdog now. Microsoft has a pretty consistent track record of looking at other companies making money, and making a microsoft version of that. Bing, xbox, azure, and zune are pretty obvious examples. Surface doesn't seem to fit that mold at all. They're giving every indication of doing something new. I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good,…

I've been reading all these Mac-related posts lately because I'm very seriously considering getting one. Why, you ask? Precisely because this: > A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia). You can get a Linux laptop with flawless…

So, if you're willing to drop 2k on an experiment, i'd say go for it. I'm leery of the new models because i use vim, and my fingers get cold and sweaty. Touch devices don't respond perfectly and i have fear about `esc` working reliably.

I've gone through my own versions of your frustrations, but i'll spare you the war stories.

my 2 cents. macos is bsd, hacked up in odd ways. if you want to edit something in /etc, you're doing something wrong. It's a little off putting figuring out where stuff is. /Library/Frameworks is common. There's no C compiler, without installing (part of) xcode.

You've got 2 choices for package management. macports is a shared nothing approach, everything is compiled against libraries compiled to /opt/local/. Or homebrew. brew tries to share everything with the built in libraries. Just be consistent, i lost some time to libiconv, postgress and haskell the other day. If i'd been consistent i'd have avoided the problem entirely. I've never used brew seriously, but lots of people like it. I swear fealty to macports.

The biggest loss for me was no tiling window manager (although i think some hacks exist to get the same effect).

osx is different. it will trip you up from time to time. a whole bunch of stuff is reliable in ways that were not reliable for me in linux. (take that with some salt, i haven't used linux as my desktop in quite a few years, and i think things have come a long, long way).

If it sucks, you can always go back to linux. That touchbar support might take a while to work right though, and no esc key till it does. ctrl-] will probably be your friend.

You're looking at a different set of tradeoffs. you're a programmer, odds are very good everything you want is there. You can always run a VM if you get stuck. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. I do think rainbow free days are a little less frequent than either windows or linux, so it has generally been a win for me.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#107

Post by notalaser »

ensiferum wrote: post #100
notalaser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading all these Mac-related posts lately because I'm very seriously considering getting one. Why, you ask? Precisely because this: > A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia). You can get a Linux laptop with flawless…

I hear you. I used not to mind spending hours looking into issues in my Linux when something broke. Not anymore. I just want to actually spend my computer time doing stuff that I want to do (i.e. programming) and not messing with the system. I still love my Linux dearly but I'm just not willing to put infinite amount of time into it. My new laptop runs Win7 Professional out of the box and I'm not even sure if I'll ac…

The part that I find increasingly unpleasant (and unsettling) is that, overall, the quality of the entire experience has been declining.

Four years ago, suspend/resume was pretty much a solved problem on regular, run-of-the mill hardware. It worked out of the box, hardly needed any tuning, hardly had any performance problems. It was messy when it was introduced but by 2011 or so, we pretty much took it for granted.

Nowadays, it feels like the year is 2003 again (only I have a lot less hair so it's a weird kind of 2003). I bring my system out of suspend and the text on my desktop icons is corrupted (!?) and some network connections are mysteriously failing (this one is particularly nasty, and I have no idea what to trace it to; ICMP works fine, but TCP connections to some systems just don't work anymore because the SYN/ACK never gets to me. I initially thought this was my ISP doing something funky with their routing, but alas, my Windows laptop doesn't have this problem).

And this isn't really new and shiny hardware that would sort of understandably have these problems, it's a five year-old desktop.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#108

Post by pjc50 »

notalaser wrote: post #85
jfoutz wrote: post #15

There's no real underdog now. Microsoft has a pretty consistent track record of looking at other companies making money, and making a microsoft version of that. Bing, xbox, azure, and zune are pretty obvious examples. Surface doesn't seem to fit that mold at all. They're giving every indication of doing something new. I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good,…

I've been reading all these Mac-related posts lately because I'm very seriously considering getting one. Why, you ask? Precisely because this: > A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia). You can get a Linux laptop with flawless…

JWZ's comments about "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers development" look very apposite here, sadly. The "Linux desktop" that's succeeded is Android, which is also a mess in different ways. Everything other than bunch-of-xterms-and-a-browser will ultimately be updated into nonfunctionality.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#109

Post by chx »

alvarosevilla95 wrote: post #78
systemtest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought the first 13" Macbook Pro with the Thunderbolt port, expecting the whole world to switch to Thunderbolt in a couple of years. It was predicted that there would be Macbooks in the future with only Thunderbolt ports, as it could connect to everything. Guess what, that didn't happen. It became a high-end niche market. Not saying that that's where USB-C will be going but I have a bad feeling about this.

There's a big difference between thunderbolt and thunderbolt 3/usb c. The former was proprietary by Apple/Intel, and very expensive, so no one else added it to their machines, and onlu very high end accessories included it. Usb C is the new standard that is already being adopted by most manufacturers, so I'm very confident it will spread quite fast. Not saying that launching a professional laptop in 2016 with just 4…

Thunderbolt 3 is still insanely expensive. The Akitio Thunder2 PCIe Box is $229.00, the Thunder3 Pcie Expansion Box is $299 and if you wanted to do a go-around by buying a converter, that's also $70 -- the StarTech.com Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt Adapter is $73.99. By economies of scale TB3 ought to be cheaper but it is not. Other docks are even more expensive, the Powercolor Devil Box is $375 and the Razer Core is $399 but only if you buy a Razer laptop otherwise $499. To compare, an M.2 to PCIe DIY solution from a noname company without warranty is roughly $100 so the $229 price is pretty OK. The TB3 box, however, needs to drop to half price and then we are talking.

And Thunderbolt of yore was not Apple only by far, HP, Dell, Lenovo all had mobile workstations sporting it. Heck, the Thinkpad T430s had it. Of course, it's all different now, practically all $1000 and over laptops have TB3.

Re: Microsoft is now a braver, more innovative company than Apple

#110

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

lmm wrote: post #58
MrScruff wrote: post #9

This is a bizarre comparison. The Surface Studio is not in competition with the MacBook Pro. It's closest analogue is something like the iPad Pro with a stand I guess. Apple will not be making a direct competitor to the Surface Studio because they aren't going to make a touch screen MacOS (the right decision IMO). I mean the Studio looks nice if you're an illustrator but there's no obligation to compete with every ni…

As a happy Surface Book user, I don't see how the Surface Studio is niche? I don't use the touchscreen that often, but it's great to have it - why would you ever not want touch to work? And there are some things that are a lot better on a touchscreen. In 5 or 10 years every desktop computer will look like the Surface Studio. At the moment it's a premium product (but so is everything Apple makes).

> In 5 or 10 years every desktop computer will look like the Surface Studio.

Disagree. Maybe a lot of 'home' desktops will, but there will still be a need for alternative form factors. In fact, I think desktop computers will look a lot more diverse than maybe they ever have in 10 years time. I think we'll have a bunch that look more or less like the Surface studio, for use by illustrators, graphic designers, etc. But we'll also have computers that are optimised for writers, developers, etc. These will have great keyboards. They'll probably have a smaller, non-touch screen (I certainly don't want a touch interface on my desktop, and I hope that option remains). I hope they'll all have really, really good screens that are as 'flexible' as the studio (or the old iMac G4).

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