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“I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

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Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#61

Post by ydnaclementine »

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course)

I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for development. Windows is less than stellar for development generally (ignoring .net/c# things), I'd be grumpy using windows for development even if they offered a zillion dollars. WSL probably makes it okish, but is still new

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#62

Post by hangonhn »

drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

Does anyone else have this issue? On a Macbook Pro with Touchbar, when you bring up Quicktime to do a screen recording, there are no controls to stop the recording on the screen. All the controls are now in the Touchbar. OK, brilliant. Except when I have the laptop closed and connected to an external monitor. It took me 30 minutes to figure this out. So I HAD to do my screen recording with the laptop open. Not the end of the world but wish there was a warning, etc. Maybe my MBP preferences are setup incorrectly but Apple does have a tendency to hide those controls too. :-/

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#63

Post by plainnoodles »

ydnaclementine wrote: post #61

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course) I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for developmen…

IME device/os choice is usually more around IT security than weird cultish things. I.e. my current job, we only use iOS/mac because then IT only has to worry about keeping a fleet of iOS/macs patched and secured. Instead of Windows and a million different linux distros.

I also personally think they picked osx because devs using windows probably won't care (since windows is already not great for dev), mac people are happy, and linux people are just glad they're not using windows.

(I'm personally in the "linux person relieved to not be using windows" camp).

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#64

Post by crooked-v »

hangonhn wrote: post #62
drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

Does anyone else have this issue? On a Macbook Pro with Touchbar, when you bring up Quicktime to do a screen recording, there are no controls to stop the recording on the screen. All the controls are now in the Touchbar. OK, brilliant. Except when I have the laptop closed and connected to an external monitor. It took me 30 minutes to figure this out. So I HAD to do my screen recording with the laptop open. Not the en…

It adds a menu bar icon to stop recording.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#65

Post by darzu »

ydnaclementine wrote: post #61

Naive question, today can you work at microsoft as use a mac for development on the job? (non windows specific development of course) I think about how if you work at apple, you're probably strongly pushed to not use an android phone (I'm sure some exist). Compared to google, you could probably use either android or ios (even with google "owning" android), or mac, windows, or their own flavor of ubuntu for developmen…

Yes, depending on the organization. Me and many others I know used OSX exclusively for development, but some orgs use Windows-only internal tooling (e.g. the Windows team.)

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#66

Post by iamstupidsimple »

exegete wrote: post #14
throwaway4good wrote: post #2

So what has changed? You can buy a Mac today even if you are working at Microsoft.

The author of the email probably technically “could” buy a Mac but why would he do that? The negative press would have been detrimental to Microsoft. The same is true today. Imagine the headlines that would get re-tweeted - “Microsoft head of platforms uses a Mac at home”

Similar to Eric Schmidt using Blackberry and iPhones over an Android phone:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/21/eric-schm...

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#67

Post by auiya »

drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

Isn't Apple walking-back that whole Touch Bar fiasco now?

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#68

Post by walrus01 »

Around the time this was written I knew a number of people who had bought a Mac because it was a nice BSD-like command line environment with a reasonable GUI. These same people also spent a lot of their times in ssh sessions to various Linux and FreeBSD servers.

MacOS 10.0 and 10.1 were buggy messes, but the successors were pretty good. Shortly afterwards, MacOS 10.4 and 10.5 improved on it a great deal.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#69

Post by GeekyBear »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #12

I've read enough of buggy behaviors on MacOS that I'm not sure I'd buy a Mac today. Wasn't their new filesystem a giant mess? Even the shiny new M1 had SSD wear problems in the beginning, hmm, great QA, guys!

Given that Windows Update has deleted user data for the last three years running, there really isn't room for people in glass houses to throw rocks.

Re: “I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft” (2004)

#70

Post by Ashanmaril »

auiya wrote: post #67
drcongo wrote: post #42

Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel…

Isn't Apple walking-back that whole Touch Bar fiasco now?

That's the rumor, but nothing official has been shown off yet
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