If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I’ll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally.
But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small. I’m a developer, and it seems to me Apple doesn’t pay any attention to its software or care about the hundreds of thousands of developers that have embraced the Mac as their go-to platform.
Something’s obviously afoot in Mac land.
The main reason I’m still onboard is that macOS is still more than viable — but it won’t be for long, as they don’t seem interested in stopping their efforts to make it less useful. The OS works great, and does something that Windows does not do well — handle text well and display fonts readably. I have a Windows 10 box, and no matter how much tweaking I do, it leaves my eyes sore after reading any appreciable amount of text. It’s atrocious.
That said, if things keep going this way I’m likely moving to Linux or one of the BSDs — Windows is too rickety for my tastes (though I will keep a box for gaming), and I want a decent command-line system without having it be some weird subsystem within Windows — i.e., unnecessary baggage.
Apple is in danger of killing something beautiful; iOS is a joke when it comes to productivity, and I have no interest in touching my screen all day. I don’t have to look at my keyboard. Down with Ive! Bring back Forstall!
After having used a Linux desktop for going on 10 years for work now, then trying to use either macOS or Windows 10 just seems so inefficient. Sure there is brew on macOS, but I trust that a bit less than a Linux repository. I remember back in 2005, wanting to get a Mac laptop (maybe 1 or two months before I read they were switching away from PowerPC), but that was mostly due to the eye candy, I’d never used one much myself, and I probably would have just put Linux on it anyhow. Of course now, I’m kind of wanting one for MorphOS….
But why would anyone leave macOS for Windows?
Meanwhile, after the very stable and performant release of Windows 8.1, 10 feels like a mess in comparison. I’ve had to reboot every week after 1709 came out because of unrecoverable bugs in Explorer, (that were in there since 1511, but got *WORSE*) almost as bad as 98! It feels like the OS took a major slap of CADT to the face.
After the perennial “it’s nicer than it used to be, but not good enough” of polished desktop GNU/Linux run-in I had last week and my loss of interest in “ricing” Unices, it’s either buy a Mac or beat Haiku into submission for what I do…
Edited 2018-04-24 00:25 UTC
Its weird how varied the experiences with an OS can be. I have a machine at home I use for gaming (ALOT of gaming), web browsing, basic productivity stuff, occasional programming, and a file server for my media files. It has been running Windows 10 since the original release, and has been updated every time a major update came out. Never crashes, never hiccups, never nothing. I haven’t seen a blue screen once in 2 years. It runs weeks even months at a time without a reboot. Its not like it doesn’t get used either – I probably spend 2 hours or so a day gaming on it, and between me and my kids it gets used at least 5 hours a day.
I mostly use Macs for programming, and I like them, but I really can’t complain about Windows 10 as far as stability goes. This machine has been as reliable as any Mac I ever used.
Edited 2018-04-24 04:55 UTC
Well since XP SP3, I haven’t seen much BSoD. Windows 7 is stable as frozen hell. Just some quirks like logon screen without password prompt force you to force reboot, but basically the machine is very stable.
I’ve had the same experience with Windows. Maybe I’ve always had systems with hardware that played nicely together, and well-supported drivers. Or, maybe Windows is simply a great OS. It has certainly served me well.
What’s both funny & ironic is all the things the Mac fanatics crying about Windows over, are problems I’ve had with Mac. But I also understand that computers are very much YMMV. I use Windows & Linux on a daily basis (for different tasks) and both have been very good to me. Mac has been far worse, easily coming in last. And someone will probably reply to this with the exact opposite experience. That’s just how it goes.
The vast Windows hardware support (drivers) probably. Linux is just way better on my 2010 18 inch (yes, it existed) HP laptop, upgraded with SSD (and has room for one more HDD) and much more RAM, now just used for testing developed stuff on Windows like in Edge, but it’s super fast i7, top spec from 2010 and got Windows 10 for free, but runs Linux much better, and I can’t stand Windows Update, abd the reboots with waiting before rebooting to configure updates and then configuring or setting up updates after reboot… On Linux it’s just… certain updates that for security reasons one should reboot (or if pro hot swap kernel), and Windows Update uses like 10-30 minutes for a small update while an APT distro uses 1 minute. No details shown, not download speed or details about what’s happening. Sometimes seems like nothing is happening. Have to check Task Manager to see that some MSI process IS actually running. WU really needs an update. I don’t boot the laptop often, and with 10 it STILL needs to reboot before installing more updates. Forget that on Linux or even macOS. If not updated for months I can almost be sure that some update will cause an error KBXXXXXX without any easy solution. Usually a hard reboot although Windows doesn’t want me to, fixes it. WU works again.
Edited 2018-04-24 17:44 UTC
It’s better to reboot / not run the OS while updating… it avoids changing files that are in use by some process / avoids odd crashes.
I basically never do except monitoring tools (CLI Linux tools mostly), since I mostly update servers I know that.
But on Linux, at least all Debian based distros like Ubuntu, this works well generally for all apps. If an app is running a library that’s being updated the library will just be in RAM until next launch. If critical security update, CLI tells a reboot is recommended and GUI updater says the same with a simple restart button, but I’ve never seen a program crash when updating, but some heavy GUI programs can start behaving weird (see below).
I do close GUI programs if on my desktop. Some programs can have problems, like Firefox, but even if updating in CLI it’s smart enough to say you should restart any running instances of Firefox if open, and if updating using GUI it says so in a GUI dialogue, I think with a “Restart Firefox Session” or something button, but I always use apt CLI, with my aliases it’s much quicker and more detailed (and more secure in a screen against GUI bugs and crash, always more bugs in a GUI, screen has never died on me, even the whole freezes and I’ll go TTY, restart X and login again and reattach the screen and the update is going on just fine).
macOS doesn’t either require closing Safari when updating Safari as I’ve seen. But recommends restart of program or system.
For example an update to openssl tells user to please reboot. Because it’s a security library used by so many components.
Edited 2018-04-26 23:46 UTC
Those weirdnesses are reason enough to restart, regardless how it can seem that all is running fine. Of course to that end, desktop environments should also ideally support saving and restoring sessions.
I would guess that you have some kind of defective hardware or a bad driver.
I had a USB-3 add-in card that shipped with Windows 7 drivers. After upgrading to Windows 10 my machine would bluescreen within an hour.
It was that card’s drivers. They were ridiculously bad. I don’t know what driver programming standards they violated, but I think all of them.
Yeah, it’s called the reality distortion field dying.
Once it fades completely, people will notice that no only is something afoot in Mac land. Everything is a foot in Mac land. It is feet all the way down.
It is interesting to read this article one week after I replaced my MacBook Pro 13″ for a ThinkPad.
Windows world feels so full of life and the OS is in constant improvement that macOS now feels forgotten.
Le roi est mort, vive le roi.
I prefer Apple’s approach of thoughtful refinement of macOS rather than Microsoft’s constant lurching from one clumsy GUI to another, shuffling, renaming, and coming up with new icons for administrative tools. Just to administer a new Windows system requires that one does the tech equivalent of an Easter egg hunt.
I also like the consistency of having one version of macOS for all Macs. There isn’t a macOS Enterprise edition, macOS Education edition, macOS Pro Education edition, macOS Enterprise LTSB edition, macOS S edition, and a macOS Pro for Workstations editions.
Ask an enterprise IT guy if he found the move from Windows 7 to Windows 8 to be an improvement.
Sure, the various versions were not really easy to get at first, especially for Vista. But it improved with 7 and now 10. Still, I wonder why such differences, just release the damn thing, unleash the power, Microsoft.
Now with his new PC he can now play pretend to be a VR “developer,” which is the new fad.
The whole owning a Mac to go to a coffee shop to play pretend to be a “writer,” is soooo last 2015.
LOL
no pretending here. I’ve written three books since 2012 and had them published using a MacBook Pro. Now that I’m retired, I am well into my fifth novel. The 4th will be published next month. All done with self-publishing.
As I said, no pretending here.
I hope you aren’t one of those bums who buys the cheapest coffee and then sits there all day long using their internet and taking up seating, only to return the next day and do it all over again.
Other than my desktop at work, there’s no way I’m going to move away from Mac to Windows just yet. I’m tired of having to reconfigure half my privacy settings every six months when a new “creator’s update” or whatever they’re going to call it from now on comes out. No, I don’t want Cortana. No, I don’t want to send my typing results to Microsoft. No, I do not want my start menu to search the web. And, no, I absolutely do not want my default browser changed back to Microsoft Edge! That doesn’t even cover the fact that I have to reinstall my RSAT and Windows ADK tools every time too, because Microsoft just blows them out with every big update instead of upgrading them (RSAT even comes in an MSU package!). Top that off with the new random bloatware popping in every time and I just can’t do it. It’s a shame really, because Windows 10 is becoming seriously more advanced than MacOS in a lot of ways under the hood, but as is always the case with Microsoft, their UX team just designs everything to get in our way rather than out of it.
https://winaero.com/download.php?view.1796
This diatribe from the upset former Apple user was dated March 2017!!! I guess he missed the iMac Pro and all the other improvements. Troll game getting slow huh Thom?
Yeah, to begin with the iMac 2017 is a fantastic machine. The first time I wanted to own a Mac. If it weren’t for Specter, I would already own one. Now I can wait if there is a refresh in 2018.
But seriously, this time they nailed it, especially with the crazy GPU prices on PC front. Any PC with similar specs is in similar or more expensive price range(all-in-one, 64GB support, 5K display, Radeon 580), and they don’t have MacOS.
I agree! I picked up the base model (3.2 GHz Intel Xeon W, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Radeon Pro Vega 56 w. 8GB) for $4k ($1k savings) from MicroCenter. It’s an astounding workstation for that price.
As for Spectre and Meltdown, I can’t worry that much about them. Apple has put patches in to mitigate the danger and Spectre is very difficult to exploit even without the patches.
fmaxwell,
The difficulty lies in finding a spectre vulnerable code pattern in arbitrary code, but once you do it isn’t hard to exploit. It has even been done from javascript! To be clear though, when apple says they patched it, they are referring only to their code/kernel. It’s important that people understand that all software needs to be patched to mitigate the spectre leaks since the hardware’s address space isolation is broken against speculative execution timing attacks.
Vendors like mozilla were quick to patch their software, however many more vendors have said nothing at all. Users have no idea where they stand with spectre vulnerabilities and mitigations.
Consider the ramifications of a business or bank running MSSQL, a lot of sensitive customer information could be leaked from the database even if the kernel has been patched. Microsoft has confirmed they patched MSSQL server, but the point to take home is that the attack surface opened by spectre is huge!
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073225/guidance-protect-sq…
You are not even safe if you run other architectures like SPARC, speculative execution in hardware creates new fundamental risks that are very hard for users and software developers to protect from.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/meltdown-spectre-oracles-critical-patc…
Edited 2018-04-25 00:12 UTC
Wasn’t it just last week that we saw reports of Microsoft disbanding the dedicated Windows team completely? Windows feels way more stagnant than macOS, except in the places it’s still playing catch up (wide gamut support at the OS level, real multi-DPI support, easy networking …. bwaahahaha, that’ll never happen…)
I will admit I love the idea of convertible tablet/laptops, and Apple does need to ship a version of that.
Edited 2018-04-24 22:12 UTC
Yeah, that was strange news. Suddenly Microsoft cares more about cloud and services, leaving behind a very important part of modern computing. I guess updates to Windows will come slower.
I just don’t understand the complaints about macOS…it’s a great OS. I’m a developer too and I only use macOS to do iOS/Android/Windows development (thanks Parallels).
Windows has gotten better and I like some of the things MS is doing. But, there is nothing wrong with macOS. It’s a Unix based OS that is just a pleasure to use.
Yes, I would like to see touch integrated, but I won’t be touching my screen all day…I leave that interaction with my phone or tablet.