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

Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 329 posts

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#301

Post by willtim »

akulbe wrote: post #143

I tried to like it. I have my Surface Book sitting here next to me. Windows 10 is much better than previous versions, and I like the direction MS seems to be moving. That said, I feel like in spite of how nice a machine the Surface Book is, QA is still sorely lacking on Windows 10. "Sleep of Death" (google it) and working in *nix 99.99% of the time is what killed it for me. Trying to make the workflow work, it's just…

QA is lacking in MacOS too. Lots of tweets about bugs with the latest Macs with touch bars.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#302

Post by mikestew »

DanBC wrote: post #246
mikestew wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Apple-branded adapters, it has been demonstrated time and again that they actually put some thought into their adapters so that your device or house do not catch on fire. Not so much with the $0.70 ones. Maybe, likely not, but hey, you saved $9.70 that you can apply to your home owners insurance premium!

Are there any Apple brand adaptors available for $10.40?

I was going to edit my original comment, but then your subtle catch wouldn't be nearly as humorous. I'll leave it there as a monument to my lack of skill in ad hoc math.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#303

Post by shmerl »

krob wrote: post #297
shmerl wrote: post #238

In my experience, quite a lot of MacOS refugees who are upset with its stagnation are switching to Linux.

Not sure I've read anything about this, it always seems to be going on year round, especially when toolsets become increasing difficult to work with exclusively on mac. vmware fusion on mac is pretty piss poor, amount of ram on a mac laptop is usually the biggest concern I'd have for doing virtualization or setting up a bunch of vm's for simulating deployments, 16gb vs say 32 & 64gb ram configurations on newer laptop…

Well, MacOS was experiencing bit rot for quite a while already, especially in areas where Apple simply completely abandoned it. Having a paranoid control from Apple in combination with its indifference bit MacOS users hard.

Example: https://www.winehq.org/wwn/404#Direct3D%2011%20development

> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#304

Post by lewisl9029 »

fredley wrote: post #120
johnernaut wrote: post #115

I'm one of the people that switched from a MacBook Pro to the new Surface Book. The ENTIRE experience was dreadful for me. The day I went into the Microsoft store to purchase it (Black Friday), their credit card system was down, so I had to wait around for nearly 2 hours until they finally figured things out. That wouldn't typically upset me, but my brother-in-law went through something similar just 2 weeks prior. As…

Trackpads are one of the main things that other companies just can't get right, even on premium devices. Given how long ago Apple 'solved' trackpads, I'm amazed that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up.

My main problem with trackpads on Windows laptops is actually a software problem: there's no separate sensitivity/acceleration settings for trackpads vs mice for Windows (MacOS has this).

Acceleration is pretty much a necessity for trackpads to be usable with high-res/multi monitor setups for me, but I cannot stand to use mice with acceleration enabled (probably a relic from my hardcore PC FPS gaming days... I get horribly distracted when my mouse movements don't map 1:1 to movements of my cursor). Not being able to keep separate settings for these different classes of input devices means I simply can't get any decent amount of work done on my laptop without connecting a mouse or going into my settings and enabling acceleration (and of course, disabling it afterwards when I need to use a mouse again, which is a huge PITA).

Having touch alleviates the problem somewhat, but there are still plenty of instances where having the precision of a touchpad is necessary.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#306

Post by youngtaff »

mikestew wrote: post #230
rcavezza wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although price can sometimes be an indicator of quality, it doesn't necessarily mean quality. I think this is especially true when the alternative higher priced product has a lot of "Brand Value" that can be attributed to the higher price.

In the case of Apple-branded adapters, it has been demonstrated time and again that they actually put some thought into their adapters so that your device or house do not catch on fire. Not so much with the $0.70 ones. Maybe, likely not, but hey, you saved $9.70 that you can apply to your home owners insurance premium!

This is where Apple really confuse me…

They obviously put lots of thought into their adapters but everyone fails where the cable enters the charger - I'm about to buy my third in just over three years and the cable on my daughter's actually melted through where it shorted inside.

Why could they never be bothered to address this well know issue give them thought they put in?

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#307

Post by lmm »

astrodust wrote: post #253
lmm wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No OS license key Not something you see as a user, at least on the Surface. > No "Patch Tuesday" Because Apple leaves you running vulnerable software for months at a time. (Remember the zlib double free?) > No finger pointing between hardware vendor and OS vendor. No third party drivers necessary to clean boot. Not an issue with Surface. > Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software avail…

The double-free thing dates from 2002. I'm sure there's better examples than that. The Surface is a big step forward in terms of eliminating a lot of nuisances from the Windows experience but it also proves that the biggest nuisance of all is OEMs. Eliminating them also cuts out a lot of reasons for using Windows in the first place, like low-cost equipment. I agree it's a great product, but it's also great because of…

> Also "Linux on Windows" is a huge step forwards, but sheesh, it's still atrocious compared to proper native support. It's like a slick version of Cygwin. Remarkable but not a drop-in replacement for Linux.

What's the practical distinction you're making? I develop a program that has Linux as its primary platform there. It gives you a closer-to-Linux experience than OSX does.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#308

Post by mafuyu »

uncletaco wrote: post #279

I bought a Surface Book recently and it has been a mixed bag. On one hand there's Windows' horrid display scaling issues. Hooking the Surface Book into an external HD monitor means dealing with blurry fonts and inconsistant scaling on some apps. Not entirely Microsoft's fault but its still a concern. On the other, I really like marking up documents and drawing sketches on the screen. The machine is fairly solid and a…

Yeah, Windows 10 is a huge improvement but there are still some hairy parts.

I've run into the search issue as well, and resolved it by tweaking some options in "Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows". I believe it was the "Animations in the taskbar" option, but I'm not 100%.

Flux also destroys your framerate when it transitions. I tend to just launch it when I need it and set it to always be tinted.

The touch and pen support is fantastic, though, and has become second nature to me for web browsing and note taking.

I've also more or less been able to recreate a Linux-like development workflow with Windawesome[0], cmder[1], chocolatey[2], and qutebrowser[3]. Msys in cmder gives me the unix-like terminal I need while still being able to run Windows-native utilities, and things I install from chocolatey like git, ag, and vim are added to the cmder PATH and just work. Bash for Windows has been quite nice as well.

[0] https://windawesome.codeplex.com/ [1] http://cmder.net/ [2] https://chocolatey.org/ [3] https://qutebrowser.org

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#309

Post by ocdtrekkie »

One of the things I've noticed that's pretty huge is that a lot of Mac-exclusive apps like Affinity and Tower have recently made full native Windows versions in the last few months. Developers who felt their customer base resided entirely or primarily on Mac seem to feel there's a market on Windows for artists and developers that there hadn't been before.

Re: Microsoft: more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before

#310

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

derefr wrote: post #270
josefresco wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you were looking for excuse to go back to Apple.

Think about it this way: people who leave an ecosystem for mostly-aesthetic or status-signalling reasons (e.g. a small touchscreen replacing some keys they don't use, making their favoured device appear less 'professional' according to people who've never used it) are likely willing to discard other options for reasons that are just as petty.

I haven't heard any criticism of the touchbar predicated on it making the device "appear less 'professional'" at all; I don't even understand why anyone would think that.
Post reply on HN