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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)

#101

Post by whymauri »

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…

Yeah, when I interned there my org used Thinkpad as the first-class laptop but still had an option for you to get a Mac. I also knew a couple people who just ran Arch, lol.

What we _had_ to use was Teams, though... better than Skype for Business, lol. But definitely not Slack.

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

#102

Post by darkr »

Imnimo wrote: post #80
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!

ctrl + ] sends an escape sequence. Remap caps-lock to ctrl and you never have to leave home row again!

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

#103

Post by mixmastamyk »

wk_end wrote: post #82
basisword wrote: post #4

I think the context of this occurring during Longhorn (LH) development is important. For anyone that doesn't know Longhorn[1] was the precursor to Vista. They tried to do a lot of big things but it dragged on for years before they had to recalibrate, abandon a lot of ideas, and ship Vista. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista

Interesting how basically the same thing happened to Apple in the 90s: the original, more radical successor to System 7 was in development for years under the name Copland, before they ended up scrapping most of it and releasing the much more conservative MacOS 8. Although I guess the only real takeaway might be that OS development is hard.

Project management is probably harder, classic OS design was well understood by that time.

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

#104

Post by olyjohn »

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…

You'd think they'd figure out by now how to build a website that doesn't redirect you 50 times and break your back button.

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

#105

Post by sjackso »

Imnimo wrote: post #80
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!

Alternative to escape in vi and vi-alikes: control-[

I recommend committing this to muscle memory. It takes two fingers, but is more comfortable than reaching for escape on most keyboards.

I prefer mapping caps lock to control rather than to escape, but that's another good alternative. But in any case it's nice to have another option for quitting vim in case something terrible has happened to your escape key, as it sometimes can (sigh) on modern laptops.

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

#107

Post by munchbunny »

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…

Generally speaking you can as long as the team's product and tooling are not Windows specific, so it varies by team, but there are significant parts of the company that do not care about Windows for your development environment.

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

#108

Post by AnotherGoodName »

Imnimo wrote: post #80
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!

Oh god yes. There's nothing more embarrassing than being unable to exit fullscreen powerpoint because the touch bar just won't show the ESC option because you once changed a setting about the touchbar. ESC should never permanently disappear!

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

#109

Post by rewgs »

brundolf wrote: post #95
jodrellblank wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to take a recent HN front page example, the link to SyncThing. It says " Since Android phones, at least, are Linux-based, one need only set up a normal shell environment on it and put Syncthing there to achieve this goal; the process shouldn't take more than a day or so. " The disconnect between the two worlds "people who use Apple products" and "people who think a day or so of your life is a reasonable amount o…

This sums up my return to the iPhone. I was an android user from 2012 to 2018. I loved messing with things, customizing, problem-solving when things would break. And then eventually, I just... got over it. There were other things I'd rather spend my finite energy on. I wanted my phone to do phone things and do them well, and without me having to think about it.

Same. I switched from iPhone/Mac to Android/Windows and sometimes refer to that period as my "rumspringa," as I eventually returned to Apple for all things "daily life" tech.

I've put all that customization energy into my Linux VM, i.e. my programming environment. Time spent dicking around there always teaches me something and results in a somewhat more efficient setup. Time spent playing with an Android shell or launcher or icon theme or whatever was just...sunk time.

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

#110

Post by webmobdev »

brundolf wrote: post #95
jodrellblank wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to take a recent HN front page example, the link to SyncThing. It says " Since Android phones, at least, are Linux-based, one need only set up a normal shell environment on it and put Syncthing there to achieve this goal; the process shouldn't take more than a day or so. " The disconnect between the two worlds "people who use Apple products" and "people who think a day or so of your life is a reasonable amount o…

This sums up my return to the iPhone. I was an android user from 2012 to 2018. I loved messing with things, customizing, problem-solving when things would break. And then eventually, I just... got over it. There were other things I'd rather spend my finite energy on. I wanted my phone to do phone things and do them well, and without me having to think about it.

I can understand when someone says they opted for macOS or Windows as they didn't want to struggle with Linux. But making the same argument for Android vs ios, doesn't hold. In fact, you actually struggle and waste more time on ios - e.g. transferring a file from an iDevice to a non-Apple device. Stock Android is just as mature and capable as ios. It's all the bundled adware / spyware crap that the phone manufacturers add to Android that often makes it lousy and gives it a bad name. (Google shares the blame for making it a spyware).
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