Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 226 posts

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

#71

Post by Ashanmaril »

nindalf wrote: post #51
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…

With any luck the Touch Bar is on its way out. The M1 MacBook Air doesn’t have it and is honestly a better laptop for that sole reason.

That was mostly based off the base-model 13" MacBook Pro from before which didn't have a touchbar.

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

#72

Post by tomduncalf »

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…

Interesting point about the new dialog button layout. I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right, it is a step back in that regard!

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

#74

Post by thehappypm »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #16

A friend of mine preferred Apple for hardware and Microsoft for software. About a decade ago he bought a MacBook and installed Windows 7.

Sometimes I miss Windows. MacOS has a huge amount of weirdness where an errant swipe or button combination does something completely unexpected as a new user.

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

#75

Post by vondur »

Nextgrid wrote: post #30
C19is20 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

', and ship Vista.' You spelled 'shit' wrong?

Maybe I’m the minority but I’ve only had good things to say about Vista. Maybe the problem isn’t Vista but trying to run it on underpowered hardware? It ran perfectly fine on a quad-core and 4GB of RAM.

Vista actually ran fine after service pack 2 was installed. At that point Windows 7 was being released and it became a moot point.

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

#76

Post by auiya »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #28
hughrr wrote: post #20

I love the backpedalling later about how great Vista is. Which was bollocks.

I disagree. Vista did have some problems, but this was because it introduced SuperCache (which worked in a way that did not match everyone's expectations), a new strategy for file copies (that didn't work better in a lot of cases), a new display server, and new driver models for networking, sound, and video in user space. Vista is when we stopped having to reboot for changing the video driver, where a sound driver cr…

Vista also introduced several crucial security features that were sorely needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_and_safety_features_n...

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

#77

Post by gh123man »

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…

Yep - worked there for a few years on an iOS/Mac team. Was pretty fun to watch the progression over the years. When I joined they gave me a mac and a PC desktop because so many internal tools only worked on windows or IE.

But that changed rather quickly from 2016-2020. By the time I left I hadn't turned on that old desktop in months (unless I had to do some windows specific dev work) and could do nearly everything from the mac.

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

#78

Post by walrus01 »

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…

OEMs also shipped Vista on laptops with as little as 256MB of RAM, where the silly thing was immediately deep into swap space (on a slow 4200 or 5400 rpm 2.5" spinning hard drive) immediately after booting. It was the most excruciating experience.

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

#79

Post by auiya »

anthk wrote: post #46

Mac OS X for its era was astounding. Think about it. The ease of the Macintosh (journalist, media people) that's it, a good looking OS and the security and Unix tools preinstalled which would be helping ex-Solaris/Sparc departments. As it was shipped with XQuartz, a Terminal by default and tons of Unix utilities, even Motif worked, so porting expensive Unix stuff between Solaris, Linux and OSX was a breeze. Windows..…

And for music producers! Logic Pro is probably the best bang for the buck you buy right now as far as DAWs go.

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

#80

Post by Imnimo »

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…

Sometimes my work-issued Macbook decides that it no longer wants to display an escape key on the touch bar (and there is no physical escape key). People joke about not knowing how to exit vi, but it turns out the game is even harder when your machine takes away your escape key!
Post reply on HN