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Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

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Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#401

Post by garganzol »

I'm on Mac now, but I'm pretty sure my next PC will be Windows-based.

I run both Mac OS (natively) and virtualized Windows (via VMware). The Mac OS side is more polished in terms of drivers/hardware integration. I'm a huge fan of that. Mac OS also handles website browsing and media entertainment. I like the way Bluetooth speakers just work when I power them on, BUT the overall media experience went downhill with recent Mac OS releases. Sudden disconnects from AirPlay without my consent, flacky mess between system / iTunes target audio devices. It gets worse with every release. Dubious improvements in macOS audio subsystem introduce more evil than good to the end consumer. That's why I'm pretty sure macOS won't last in the long run. The countdown had started when Steve P Jobs passed away.

The Windows part of my system is used during day to day business and I mostly do all my developments there (with a tiny bit of help from macOS / Homebrew / Unix utilities like curl).

To sum this up, to me Apple is like Titan who is destined to decay. At the same time, Windows and PC are the results of best efforts from thousands of companies. That's why PC has much more inertia and better long-term stability. In other words, PC has natural status quo while macOS is living in a bubble of a single company, so the end is nigh.

It looks like my next computer will be PC. It's so hard to leave the polished Mac's hardware but I won't have a choice presumably.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#402

Post by domenukk »

Razengan wrote: post #152
arkades wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UI remains a convoluted Escher'esque nightmare. Comments like this make it hard to take any side of the discussion seriously. /Neither/ of the OSes are "Escher'esque nightmare[s]." My elderly mother can kludge her way through both of them, more or less reliably - admittedly, with more trouble than using her phone, but not a lot more. Nothing that a tech-illiterate can reasonably use on a day-to-day basis qualif…

> Comments like this make it hard to take any side of the discussion seriously. /Neither/ of the OSes are "Escher'esque nightmare[s]." • macOS Finder: http://i.imgur.com/9Y5hK0e.png • Windows Explorer: http://i.imgur.com/ef7CnJ4.png Alright. Maybe not nightmarish, but one of these IS objectively more convoluted than the other. Let's start with something simple: WHY does the "Options" button on the Windows Explorer Ri…

macOS Finder, for me, has always been one of the worst parts of of macOS btw. Try navigating to a different drive or to enter a path directly (without knowing the keyboard shortcut) or openeing a shell window at a location or doing anything useful... Explorer is so good at what it does. Maybe it's less pretty, form follows function?

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#403

Post by ThomPete »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #380
jmcdiesel wrote: post #17

I used to be hardcore windows guy... Then 10 years ago I got a mac. I never went back.. But what am I saving money for right now? To build a nice PC again. Mostly because of the exact reasons in the article. I have a fondness for apple... but they have definitely lost their way. First, they were a computer company driven by a man who loved computers ("first" here is the Jobs return era) ... then they became a Compute…

>> The new "features" every cycle are more "lets put this phone feature on the desktop" What is it missing? It's been a while since I really wanted a feature in the desktop OS. All of the 'phone' features (besides launchpad) have made my life a lot easier (continuity, handoff, notification centre, even Siri from time to time).

I don't miss features I just miss refinement.

As a app developer who wanted to build an app which challenged what a mac can do with regards to productivity I had to basically leave the mac app store because they made it impossible for me to make it work in Sandbox mode.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#404

Post by comex »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #309
coldtea wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language. First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc. Second, whether some random web dev or embedded C dev or Java dev wants Swift or not is irrelevant to its intended audience and utility. It's not for "professional developers" in general, it's for Mac/iOS application developers, and thus, for Mac/iOS users…

> So? Millions of users do want it, judging from the huge popularity of Dropbox Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset. Giving us an odd cloud first strategy seems more suited for a phone or severely storage constrained devices. > Again, irrelevant. Lots of Mac users, and tons of pundits HAVE asked for a "new proprietary filesystem" to replace HFS+ Seem to remember th…

> Yet just about everyone uses local FS with cloud for backup or sharing of a small subset.

In most cases, not because they want to, but because that's how current software works. Both Dropbox and Google Drive focus on having their own special folder that gets synced; syncing the OS desktop and documents folders is possible but only with special configuration (on both Windows and macOS).

Cloud first makes perfect sense no matter how much or how little storage you have. It prevents you from losing data if your device is lost or damaged, and if you have multiple devices it allows accessing all your data from any device. If anything, its usefulness depends more on internet connection speed.

I do think Apple's specific cloud storage offerings could be improved for large devices. Currently the highest tier of iCloud storage is 2TB, which costs $20/mo; that's only twice as large as my MacBook Pro's SSD, and fairly expensive. But it's the same price/GB as both Google Drive and Dropbox, so it can't be that much of a ripoff...

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#405

Post by _ao789 »

rusk wrote: post #293
rimantas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what fans (the real ones) do? They try to know more about the thing they are fans of, and to understand it. Your comment shows nothing of the kind.

Sorry but who wants to be some lame "fan"? We want the best tool for the job, too get that job done and we're willing to pay for it. The tools are no longer up to scratch or functioning as expected and we are voicing our concern.

I couldn't agree with you more on this statement. Said exactly as I feel.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#406

Post by megablast »

coldtea wrote: post #3

> But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small. So, like creating a full blown new programming language (Swift)? Or a full new filesystem (AFS)? Integration of Cloud storage directly to the desktop? Siri on the desktop? Saving RAM through…

> Take a look at Sierra: the only feature of note is Siri, which is half-baked as it is, and the things that did get ported over from iOS are half-done too.

I agree 100% with your point. If you want pointless changes to the OS that means you have to relearn a lot just to keep doing what you were doing, then yes, Microsoft is what you want.

If you want small incremental improvements that don't move around common functions for no reason, then stick with Mac OS.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#407

Post by comex »

coldtea wrote: post #396
optimiz3 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of Apple and Android C# apps (see Xamarin).

Which, again, is besides the point. The parent was mocking the idea that just because a language doesn't support a platform it can be called a "toy language". C# that he mentioned wouldn't be toy languages even if there were 0 Apple and Android C# apps. It would just be a totally professional Windows language with no Android/iOS support. C# was professional even when it only supported Windows (and partially FreeBSD),…

> C# was professional even when it only supported Windows (and partially FreeBSD), before Mono came along...

As well as the decade-plus when Mono existed but wasn't owned by Microsoft, making cross-platform support merely incidental or even a negative from Microsoft's perspective.

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#408

Post by Neeek »

UhUhUhUh wrote: post #202
AsyncAwait wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow I shut my laptop off and it booted backup to a failure message, I had to make another bootable USB and go online to find out how to do a fsck. I was using external monitors without issue for a month, and then one day the configuration changed to a point where I couldn't even use the laptop with it's built-in display. The sound and volume controls are a joke. I was prevented from installing any packages beca…

Seconding that. I have a hard time understanding why professionals would look down on an OS that gives the user pretty much all the power, which, let's remember was the seminal idea of personal computing. Interestingly, Linux comments are about 5% of the thread, which is also roughly the market share.

I 'm kind of more confused at everyone's seeming aversion to learning. Friends ask me why I go through the trouble of running Windows and Linux side by side with virtualization, or why I'm bothering to write my own blog site in python when Wordpress exists; why are you going the long way?

The answer is always "Because I'm learning cool new shit and enjoying myself".

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#409

Post by megablast »

ynniv wrote: post #249
coldtea wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a professional developer, I don't want a new toy language. First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc. Second, whether some random web dev or embedded C dev or Java dev wants Swift or not is irrelevant to its intended audience and utility. It's not for "professional developers" in general, it's for Mac/iOS application developers, and thus, for Mac/iOS users…

First, there's nothing "toy: about Swift. It's a full featured language on par with Rust, Go, etc. That's some amazing CoolAid you've got there. But I'll grant you that it's on the same level with a bunch of other new languages that also aren't in general use for serious long term products yet. But until Intel delivers boards that accept 32GB low-power RAM of the kind that goes into Apple laptops, we're not gonna get…

You want Apple to make their own CPUs?

Re: Why I left Mac for Windows: Apple has given up

#410

Post by throwawayish »

otterley wrote: post #13

The question I'm left asking from posts like these is: As a non-game developer, what practical advantages does Windows hardware and software provide over Mac? The writing doesn't make it clear to me. Sure, there are some interesting facts noted, but there's no connection drawn or relationship established between the facts and the impact on the author's ability to work, or the work product itself.

A PC (yes, true, technically Macs are now PCs, but they're still special PCs, or at least Apple says that) has mainly the advantage that it's cheaper while being faster. Now, to be fair, I don't like to use laptops (they're slow, limited and annoying), so I mostly refer to desktop hardware (best bang/buck ratio, easy to make very, very silent, very fast, easily extended).

Quarrel over operating systems is pretty pointless, if it doesn't run natively, slap a hypervisor on it and run whatever you like in a VM; for me that'd be a Linux or BSD, I'm not really opinionated there (although certain things run faster in Linux due to experience).

(Obviously I don't grok the laptop lifestyle, I don't understand the "work everywhere" mentality, in fact, I don't want it at all. It's called work place for a reason - at least for me. I do have a laptop (or half a dozen, who has time to keep record?), the mainly used one is a Getac unit with a carrying handle that weights ~3 kilos or so; at least it's silent, has a superbright screen and a battery that's larger than most ultrabooks by volume ;)

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