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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

#781

Post by nathan_long »

gx wrote: post #537
ozmbie wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a still computer company, because Phones ARE computers. For the majority of the population in developed countries, and almost all of the population of developing countries, smartphones are the only computer people have or need. I agree that Apple have shifted focus away from "making tools for people to create things and solve problems" towards consumption-oriented mobile devices. But those devices are still…

Wholly agree with you -- in fact I think we're at a turning point in smartphones catching up to being full fledged computers. I've written some thoughts about this previously, if you would care for a detailed elaboration: https://guan.sg/apples-2017/

> Imagine a world where the way desktops are meant to function is by plugging your ultraportable into any available set of peripherals: monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'm skeptical that this will work for everyone.

Everything is tradeoffs. When "must be tiny" is the top priority, performance and battery life necessarily suffer.

There will always be people - from gamers to video producers - whose top priority is performance. And for computer geeks generally, the weight difference between a laptop and a phone is not compelling, but having four times as many cores would be.

The portability difference between a mainframe and a laptop is immense - it changes your working life. The portability difference between a laptop and a phone is much smaller. It means you can do things spontaneously, because you can always have the phone with you. But if you're planning to work, the difference is minimal. Especially if the smaller form factor means you have to plan to have peripherals wherever you're going.

Eg, I can take my laptop to a cafe or a park and work. I couldn't do that with an "ultraportable" unless I bring my own peripherals. So it's actually less portable for the situations I care about.

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

#782

Post by simonh »

Touche wrote: post #564
memmcgee wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS apps are also more profitable than Android.

No one makes money selling phone apps.

"Apple's App Store has paid over $50 billion to developers"[0]

[0]http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12371006/app-store-50-billi...

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

#783

Post by hossbeast »

bogomipz wrote: post #51
hossbeast wrote: post #19

Probably switching from macOs to Arch Linux soon myself

I'd be curious if you are looking at laptops which ones you are looking at to run Arch on as a replacement. I'm in a similar boat.

I'm a big fan of the Dell XPS laptops for this use case.

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

#784

Post by fencepost »

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…

Are you talking about 1) or 2) in http://imgur.com/gallery/J3KPm

If it's 2, that's because other items can be added to that menu, such as LastPass and Bitdefender just to use the examples conveniently at hand.

And as a quick tip if you need to take a lot of screenshots on Windows - Greenshot is a great screenshotting program for Windows (and OSX, though I don't know how it is there), free, GPL, etc. Binds the PrtSc button and lets you select the area you want to capture as well as destination, format, etc.

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

#785

Post by bagels »

acdha wrote: post #695
bagels wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious statement, that windows update mines Bitcoin?

No - just my boggled speculation about the kind of work which would tie up a modern CPU for hours installing a few GB of files. (SHA-256 could hash each file in a couple seconds)

Decompression. They probably weighed compression time vs file size and realized that every byte not downloaded is money saved on bandwidth.

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

#786

Post by rimantas »

dang wrote: post #744
rimantas wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People declaring they are fans? Did you even read the comment I was replying to? > The tools are no longer up to scratch or functioning as > expected and we are voicing our concern. That's bullshit and you know it.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.

Except there was no such request. Also, "we" is such a nice word, helps to avoid taking any personal responsibility, doesn't it?

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

#787

Post by touristtam »

throwawayish wrote: post #410
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 poin…

> A PC (yes, true, technically Macs are now PCs, but they're still special PCs).

You obviously don't understand what those 2 letters stand for (hint it stats with Personal and ends with Computer).

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

#788

Post by ntsplnkv3 »

phaed wrote: post #551
ntsplnkv3 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8 was worse than Windows 10 which is worse than 7. I should have specified-to me Windows 8 and 10 are both poor, both much worse than 7. To be honest, I had an EASIER time with Windows 8 (company provided laptop) than Windows 10. Windows 7 was the pinnacle windows experience for me and it has gotten worse ever since.

What about windows 7 was so great? The start menu? Windows 10 has a 5 second boot up time, most all annoyances anyone has online can be configured away, and it is insanely stable (haven't had it once crash on me yet).

It took a familiar UI and improved it. It added features in an intuitive way. And many of the features of windows 10 could've easily been added to 7.

> Windows 10 has a 5 second boot up time

Man, I wish. My 10 system never boots up that fast. Meanwhile my Windows 7 desktop takes 15 seconds to boot up on SSD. Those 10 seconds just aren't that much of a feature for me-especially since my laptop/desktop are typically in sleep mode anyway.

> most all annoyances anyone has online can be configured away,

Yes, because we should have to do work to eliminate baked in ads and processes that share my information with who knows who.

Also, you can't even intuitively FIND settings. The Control Panel has some settings the Settings app doesn't have and vice versa. It's a mess. Why can't they all be in one place? Mac? one place.

I can't even get Windows 10 to update. Instead I have to constantly kill a rogue update process that decimates resources because I can't get a basic update to download and install properly.

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

#789

Post by DannyBee »

madeofpalk wrote: post #321
DannyBee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Byproduct of mobile." If you need evidence: Swift appeared in IOS first and still is not great on the desktop at all. APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS, and still in feature preview and pretty unusable in 10.12. It's "expected" it will be released for desktop in 2017 Siri on the desktop is mostly useless, as said here.

> APFS (not AFS) is the default in IOS Well, it will be when that beta iOS is released. Besides, it makes sense for any sort of file system to be released first in such a limited manner.

Uh You realize they make more phones than desktops, right? By like a factor of 10 at least :)

So the limited manner would be to release it to desktop?

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

#790

Post by TheKarateKid »

acdha wrote: post #695
bagels wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious statement, that windows update mines Bitcoin?

No - just my boggled speculation about the kind of work which would tie up a modern CPU for hours installing a few GB of files. (SHA-256 could hash each file in a couple seconds)

A MS engineer posted a lengthy blog post on why this is the case. The ridiculous time has to do with insane system state and dependency checking for every update and each one in history before it, since Windows Update allows you to add or remove every little update ever for the OS.

The Rollup updates that MS moved towards, even in Windows 7 now, is supposed to help this. However, a completely new solution is really needed to replace this antiquated one, like many other lingering parts of Windows.

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