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" button. If you tried to skip quickly through a setup wizard by clicking on the "next" button, you'd cancel everything on screen 4.
This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.
Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.
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!
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.
Also the Alt key + letter keys produces a series of key codes prefixed by escape, so one can use any single letter normal-mode command with the Alt key, resulting in "Escape"+<key>. This is convenient to quickly switch to e.g. moving the cursor with e.g. `Alt+j` to both escape from insert mode back to normal mode _and_ move down a line.
I knew about the Ctrl+[ but this might be a game changer... I have tried vim several times but have never gotten used to the idea of staying in one mode or another (emacs chords is more intuitive to me). This seems promising.
Yes I did, and it probably wasn't really an option, but the moderators were kind enough to reclaim a very old, unused username (which I think was mine but forgot all the credentials to).
It's Stavros everywhere, it was only StavrosK here because the former was unavailable. I wasn't too fussed either way, but I asked the mods whether I could reclaim the username and they renamed the account to it, so here we are!
My point was that if there's a CTRL key on each side of the keyboard, then anything involving a ctrl+something is one-handed-able.
Whether it's good typing practice to use one hand for both the ctrl and the C, say, in a ctrl-c construct - I can't say.
I know that I rarely if ever use the right-hand control or alt keys (on a standard US-mode PC keyboard that has alt and control keys on both sides). I suspect this is poor form.
I'm curious, with a macbook do the right thing if you plug in a USB keyboard?
I'm not suggesting you just use a USB keyboard instead (although, now that I say it, that does seem like a solution).
What I'm actually wondering is how much work it would be just to create a single button that's an escape key on a USB stick that implements the USB keyboard protocol (but only ever reports that the escape key was hit).
It would depend if "Escape" requires a specific non-standardized scan code or not. (Even if it did you could also try sending the Ctrl-[ variety instead.)
Random piece of keyboard trivia: On Mac OS X (and I assume current variants) each keyboard is a separate "entity" with e.g. separate state which includes caps lock state. This means that the USB "Capslocker" gag USB dongles that randomly toggled Caps Lock state didn't actually affect Macs.)
If anyone is really looking for a single-key macropad... the Seeeduino Xiao is a small microcontroller development board which would suit the purpose. e.g. https://www.40percent.club/2020/08/wonky.html
Yes, it does. I do know that single-purpose keyboard extensions like this might be harder to integrate than you'd think. When I had my first Powerbook back in 2004, I bought a USB numeric keypad for entering grades into a spreadsheet quickly. One of the OS X upgrades in the following years rendered the keypad unrecognizable.
Yeah, I strongly considered that last time it happened. Eventually I was able to fix it by restarting a few processes related to the touchbar, and decided to leave well enough alone for fear of breaking something else. I think if it starts happening more frequently, I'll remap it.
Thankfully they gave us back the physical escape key in the next version! I had the version you're using for 3 years as a work issued machine. Between the touchbar and the butterfly keyboard repeatedly failing on me it was pretty bad.
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. :-/
I'm aware of the leaks/rumors, but I'm saying the M1 MBP isn't any indication. It's not an entirely newly designed body, just the old base model with a new processor (and I think the new non-butterfly keyboard?)
I don’t follow. The leaks indicate Apple is planning a fully designed MBP. The schematics show a completely redesigned chassis and the removal of the touch bar. i’m not sure why the current M1 MBP is relevant here.
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.
And on the other hand 4GB or more of ram would require Vista 64bit, which today remains the most crash-prone and unstable leaky bucket of an operating system I’ve ever been subjected to, at least in the first year of release.
If you want to see horrible, horrible UX, check out Microsoft 365. Everything is a giant mess, violating every rule in the book. Azure, Exchange, nothing even looks like it’s from the same company.
The Office UI, in general, hasn't improved since 2007 introduced the ribbon. Recent changes to Outlook make it seem like nobody at MS is even thinking about these issues.
The centered taskbar in Windows 11 is a perfect example of this kind of stuff, instead of muscle memory to click something you have to hunt for it because everything moves around.
I remember around this time talking with a coworker about the Vista UI and questioning why they made the start button smaller, round, and protruding out above the taskbar. He looked at me with credulity and said “they made it look like a gem”. From his perspective this completely explained and justified the change. But from my perspective I was even more confused.
I'm in the minority on this, but I like the touch bar, especially in the newer Macbooks which have restored the physical escape key. I can never remember what F-key is supposed to do what and having contextually significant buttons that I can press is, for me at least, an improvement. When I'm using my Macbook docked with my big monitor and with an external keyboard and trackpad, I'll sometimes still reach over to the Mac keyboard to use the touchbar for things like stepping through the debugger.
Not to mention by default assuming an executable download outside of the appstore must be malicious so you have to jump through red tape just to enable it. It's like they assume all their users are just morons and can't be trusted.
Steve Jobs would have never let the TouchBar come to market, if not outright fire the inventor of it. I’m on my second MacBook Air because of how bad is touchbar.
>Steve Jobs would have never let the TouchBar come to market, if not outright fire the inventor of it.
Same with the stupid camera lens bump that is now ubiquitous across the iPhone. I just picture some engineer walking into his office to show him the iPhone 7 prototype, and he flips it over, runs his fingers over that bump, and fires the guy on the spot.
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.
The project that Windows team kind of sabotaged the .NET efforts, and instead of having everyone team together and create a Midori like effort, they just redid the .NET original components in COM, and later doubled down on the idea with WinRT.
Now we have the company trying to undo 10 years of pushing everyone to go down the path that only WinDev can love, because apparently a large portion of the world rather write .NET (with its shortcomings) + DLLs than having to deal with COM boilerplate.
Nostalgia. I remember in the skinning communities there was A LOT of buzz about Longhorn and the promise it had. I got my hands on a copy of it and the changes to the UX over XP were awesome (I wish I could find screenshots, very sorry that I cannot post some links to support this). Then when Vista was released, it looked nothing like those early builds we saw. Coupled with the performance and stability issues, it really let the air out of the balloon.
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.
Which, to be fair, was a fairly high-end machine at the time.
As I recall, the problem was not just Vista's juicy hardware requirements, but the fact it would initially behave quite unpredictably performance-wise.
OTOH, Microsoft is said to have fixed most of the problems with SP1, and Windows 7 was, as far as Windows versions go, a very solid system.
One of the scandals of that era was Microsoft purposefully lowering the hardware requirements for Vista so that lower end PCs could get the all important Vista sticker.
I was in tech support at the time, and a ton of cheap HPs came in that were sold with vista and 2gb of ram.
2GB would have been fine. I still remember a bunch of Fujitsu laptops that we got at work, all with the "Vista Ready" sticker and 512GB of ram - they were almost unusably slow, but XP ran absolutely fine with the same amount of ram. 2GB would have been a massive improvement.
I had it preinstalled on a very nice 17" Dell Inspiron 2.4Ghz Core Duo. Vista ran perfectly. I don't think I had a bluescreen on that laptop until I upgraded to 7 (no joke). I guess it all comes down to conservative hardware design from Dell and the right drivers from Microsoft/luck.
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.
10.4 (Tiger) was fantastic because it was the first version where the UI and the underlying file system drivers and bash were in-sync - in 10.3 you could delete a file in Terminal but the change wouldn't show up in Finder.
MacOS just kept getting better and better until sometime around Yosemite or El Capitan, with a small hiccup with Lion.
I think they put a lot of extra work into 10.4 because it was also the first version that ran on Intel hardware. Lots of QC related to the platform transition from PowerPC. If all those $2500 MacBook pros had launched with a flaky OS it would have been a disaster.
Apple did not have it's internal emails made public and discussed in court. I think the email we're discussing was part of the anti-trust investigation against Microsoft.
> Apple executive Eddy Cue sent an email in January 2011 to CEO Tim Cook... “I believe there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one,” Cue wrote in the email, which forwarded an article written by a reporter that switched from the iPad to a 7-inch Samsung tablet. “I tend to agree with many of the comments below,” Cue wrote.
> The email was introduced Friday during Samsung’s cross-examination of iOS chief Scott Forstall, who was among the recipients of Cue’s email. Forstall testified that Cue also used a 7-inch Galaxy Tab at some point... Steve Jobs was an outspoken critic of such tablets, saying that one would only be practical if it came with sandpaper to make people’s fingers smaller.
I agree, but seemingly that hasn't mattered or helped much? Apple is a more valuable company in terms of market cap, and almost certainly a more 'loved' company in terms of mindshare.
Many people thought they'd be doomed without Jobs but they've seemingly been doing just fine still (ignoring many valid criticisms here, of course, but talking about the general population).
Which I really find fascinating. Aside from their arguably better stance on privacy, I don't really find there's much at all to love about Apple products beyond they look quite nice, generally. In fact I actively dislike a lot of the way they dumb down interfaces, but I acknowledge that's something the vast majority of users won't ever care about.
Is that really all there is to it? The consistency of aesthetic is enough to win? I've always found it to be an interesting question, why they continue to be so successful.
There are two things that have always set Apple apart in my opinion:
1) Landscape-shifting new product categories
2) Holistic, "scenario"-driven product design (as the author was advocating for)
#1 mostly died with Jobs, imo. But #2 seems to still have deep cultural roots at the company. They don't think in terms of component parts (at the hardware, software, UI, or any other level). They think in terms of making a device that a person can use for things they care about. They start from the top and work downward, everything else serving that ultimate end. Microsoft still doesn't do this, Google still doesn't do this.
That was enough on its own, but now 14 years of investing iPhone profits have added "sheer technical excellence" to the equation, giving them an additional edge.
I think of Apple as tech company that has fashion brand retail quality marketing and distribution, and highly developed internal hardware with very strong and well managed supply chain.
Those are more advantageous features in smartphones than they are in desktop.
The products are 'good' but not that much better from a feature/function perspective. They look a little cleaner, nicer, but it's not really features that make them better.
Every employee rants, and thinks that 'the thing they are working on' is really important, and it's common that people think that the company has 'lost it's way' with this or that.
The fact is, the 'speed' of the file system on mac and windows isn't very relevant. It works, it's fast enough.
More paradoxically, the Windows UI's are a total confusing mess, always have been, and yet they've dominated on desktop forever.
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 of time to install an app that copies files over a network" is, well there's no way to cross that gap. And then you describe what Apple does as "dumbing down", for dumb people. People who don't want to care that SyncThing is written in Go instead of Java which means they can't access the Android API to write to an SD Card and the docs lead to a Github issue with 128 comments explaining why they aren't going to fix it. People who give their iCloud account login and Apple has their photos? Dumb people.
[I know people choose SyncThing to keep control locally and that often comes at a cost of more trouble, more effort. It's illustrative of very different worlds, that's all].
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).
> In fact, you actually struggle and waste more time on ios
This hasn't been my experience
> Stock Android is just as mature and capable as ios
It's fine, but everything is just (imo) a little bit less cohesive and polished, and then there's the Google spyware, a shorter lifetime of updates, etc. And then if you aren't going off the beaten path and customizing stuff anyway, what are you actually gaining in exchange for those downsides?
I've given a clear example - try transfering a file from an iPhone or iPad to any non-Apple device, and you will waste a lot of time. Where as an Android or a Tizen or a Sailfish or Windows user only has to switch on Bluetooth and pair to transfer files with each other easily.
And what if your friend doesn't have it on their non-Apple device? You waste time because you have to use third-party solutions for something that is built-in the device but restricted due to the software (ios limiting Bluetooth or Wifi Transfer to not work non-Apple devices).
It's just not a problem I find myself running into. Probably part of that is because I don't need to share actual files with others very often these days, especially from my phone, aside from pictures which you can of course send over any messaging or media platform (including SMS). And for small non-image files there's always email.
I would add that when I had an Android phone I used the exact same strategies for transferring files.
It honestly sounds like you're getting upset about this relative to how you think it should work, and not relative to an actual practical barrier, so I'm going to withdraw from the conversation here
> It honestly sounds like you're getting upset about this relative to how you think it should work, and not relative to an actual practical barrier
Typical irritating Apple fan response - "It's not the device, it's your fault for not using the device as Apple intended.
Everyone knows that Apple locks down its devices to only work well within its eco system. But many don't like the fact that it doesn't work as well as with other devices, and this is where Android (and other mobile OS) shine over ios. With less than 50% marketshare, Apple device users do often run into this problem with others who have a non-Apple device.
- Cheaper. You can get great cheap android based photos from a lot of vendors
- Free app / games. You can sideload anything. You can find free really indie unique apps/games .
- Just using a cellphone means you are tracked. Murder someone with your phone and they will be able to track you. Apple collects data on you. I don't like it but accept that I am being spied on on any phone.
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.
To be fair on Syncthing, it's not nearly as difficult as that particular article made it out to be.
If you want to run the normal CLI-with-a-web-server Syncthing on Android, sure you could do that... but you could also much better serve your time by just having the Syncthing app with a native Android GUI with it. The day-project turns into a 5-minute project.
The FOSS movement has failed to appeal to end users, and a big part of that is the chronic inability of FOSS leaders to understand UX.
Us programmers want to believe that technology is enough. That just because because our implantation is technically superior in x, y and z metrics, consumers should be flocking to our solutions. But that’s not good enough. We have to get the technology right, and we have to make the product a joy to use.
As you said, there is a real disconnect between technical people and users. User-centered design tends to be treated with a kind of hostility. It’s often viewed as “dumbing down” rather than making the product better. I’m not sure why this disconnect exists, but until we close it, customers will continue to flock to closed ecosystem solutions.
My dad used an old laptop with Xubuntu on it for a while. Worked great for web browsing. I think a notebook computer with some flavor of Ubuntu preinstalled could stand in all right for a Chromebook; the challenge is how to penetrate a market that is pretty well-served already.
Well, it depends what you meant when you said "why they continue to be so successful.". If you compare iOS to Android, Android outsells it by vast numbers. If you compare macOS to Windows, Windows outsells it by vast numbers. How do they hold a niche by making nice products? Well they make nice high-end luxurious feeling products and that's surely enough.
If you take it more like "why do so many devs use macOS when they could have open source fully customisable Linux/BSD" which is in some ways their real "surprising" success given that they are more expensive and less customisable, the answer falls out in every HN thread about Apple - they build things which let people get on with their work. People get fed up of fighting suspend mode or wifi config or high-DPI displays or sound drivers or web video or breaking upgrades or regularly needing to edit config files to keep things basically working, and Apple makes all that go away. And that increasingly applies to Microsoft/Windows, people on HN often say things like "Win 10 ads in the start menu and telemetry is the last straw, I bought a Mac" or "I'm fed up of Windows update reboots interrupting me, I bought an M1 laptop", but they don't say nearly as much "I use macOS for the consistency of UI aesthetic". [Although people do say things like that about choosing iOS instead of Android]
Syncthing would compare to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, but it's the ecosystem and developer attitude towards users that I'm pointing to, not the file sync part. Apple walk the fine line between taking options away vs forcing you to deal with plumbing, easily well enough to keep their niche market share. "I actively dislike a lot of the way they dumb down interfaces, but I acknowledge that's something the vast majority of users won't ever care about." - including plenty of tech users who don't care.
> Is that really all there is to it? The consistency of aesthetic is enough to win? I've always found it to be an interesting question, why they continue to be so successful.
Apple understands that technology is not enough. If you want consumers to want to use your products, you have to get the technology right, and you have to make the product a joy to use.
Most of us in this industry get the technology right, but treat the consumer joy (aka, amazing UX) as completely optional.
That's funny, because AT&T with the rotary phone and original Windows UI, both of which have stood the test of time, were results of extensive and rigorous UX research. Hard numbers got the industry mainstream. Then we decided it was time to make things pretty, even at the cost of UX, and here we are.
Or put in other words, metric-based was awesome, but then we decided to focus on wrong metrics.
I don't know about writing a letter like this, but actually USING non-Apple products was never a big deal in my recollection. I've never heard of an Apple equivalent of the stories of ostentatious hostility displayed by Microsoft executives toward employees (or their own offspring) daring to privately own/desire Apple products.
"… and still working at Apple" I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like that either, but mostly because OS X, at the time of this writing, was amazing and getting better at a rapid clip, while Windows was its nadir.
Are you implying that there would have been reprisal? Because this whole thing happened just a couple years before a notorious incident where Jobs walked into a meeting and asked the Macbook team why the laptops were so inferior to iPads. He was notoriously critical of their own products.
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
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.
Sadly, I still have to support IE11. There are some people so entrenched that IE is the internet, that we've seen tickets come in through IT where people reported others for using Chrome because it isn't IE and they were concerned.
Sometimes I wish we could just tell these ignorant people get bent and figure it out. I'm not telling you to build goddamn Arch, it's just running a different piece of software. 100% of them didn't even ask to install it either.
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).
Getting a functional semi-ok, posix sorta vaguely compliant terminal is not a fun or easy task in windows.
The web runs linux, and unfortunately, windows doesn't really want to do linux (WSL is a tiny concession)
WSL doesn't cut it, it's at best frustrating with all sort of weird problems. Just yesterday, as I was forced to use Windows at work, I couldn't get emacs to save a file because of some weird locking issue when trying to compile some react application that would work fine on linux
Yep. Currently working there as a dev on a team completely unrelated to Apple (i.e., i am not working on iOS apps or anything else that even remotely requires a macbook), using a company-issued macbook pro. And of course, you are always welcome to bring your own machine of any kind, as long as it allows you to do things you are doing for work (e.g., if you are working on something super-windows-specific that just straight up cannot be done on macOS, well, you better get a different machine or install windows on your macbook through Bootcamp).
>Microsoft allows you to do corporate work and development on personal devices?
No, they do not. If you bring your own device, you have to put it under control of the company using MDM software, pretty much the same way it works with company devices. Without MDM, none of the corporate resources are accessible, just like they shouldn't be.
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.
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.
I've heard accounts from some Google devs that Windows machines became quite scarce once Bing was caught scraping Google search. Not totally sure if that was true or not.
When I onboarded I got option to choose a Mac or thinkpad. IIRC a Mac is a recommended option for swe, but there’s nothing in the onboarding that says do not use windows machine
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.)
I recently saved an old (2012) Mac Pro from the trash at work. As a lockdown project, I decided to do the rejuvenate the thing, thing. Cleaned it up, wiped and put a fresh copy of High Sierra on it. I am a long time Linux guy and I was pleasantly surprised. It’s almost fun to use!
That said, I believe High Sierra is the last release before things start getting...weird? My wife has a newer Mac (cannot remember the release) but I had some pretty crazy hurdles to install an unsigned bit of software. If that’s the trajectory Apple is taking, I don’t think I will be ditching Linux for MacOS.
I haven't really had a problem getting anything done in Big Sur on my 2017 Macbook. Before my Macbook I had a Lenovo X1 Carbon with Arch and KDE; I really loved that setup but there are several conveniences with Macs. I prefer Excel to LibreOffice for example, and I like messaging integration with iPhone and all of the applications I use are really nice; I always felt like there were a few apps on Linux that were not well designed and I had to use them anyway. But, Arch has such a great package management system. You can easiy revert to any previous version of a package, you can quickly do a binary search to find which package broke you after an update etc. Homebrew is a total garbage fire. A couple weeks ago I typed "brew upgrade git" and it upgraded the version of every homebrew package on my system. My Postgres database wouldn't start because my databases had to be upgraded. I had a deadline... Also for some reason I'm more likely to run into build problems with certain native packages. I'm really on the fence about what my next computer will be.
It's still annoying. Apple needs to realize, it's my machine, and I'll take whatever risks I want. Stop trying to police me as though I'm incompetent. I know full well at this point if some random executable is going to be sketchy and it's wholly on me if I run it. It's just a push to go to the app store, while convenient, it most certainly is not for developers who don't want to deal with their BS to maintain a presence there.
MacOS was starting to get good in 2004, but unfortunately I feel that it went to their head. My opinion of MacOS didn't really start to decline until Catalina, at which point it started to become blatantly obvious that Apple was focused more on "business" than "computers" these days. I was surprisingly content with the openness of Mojave, and even hopeful for the future of the OS. If any slivers of hope were hanging on during Catalina, they were certainly demolished when they showed off the Big Sur redesign.
Share the same opinion - in fact, I downgraded back to macOS Mojave. In some ways, I guess the picture is clearer now on why macOS seems to have gone downhill. With their own ARM processors, Apple had to re-shift its focus away from Intel and make its OS work well on its own processor.
And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down like ios as that's more profitable for them in the longer run.
> And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down
Anything to back this up? There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS, and I haven’t seen any evidence of a money grab with M1 based macOS either…
> There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS
On Intel Macs, you can install Linux and Windows if you are unhappy with macOS. So they couldn't really lock it down. With their own custom ARM processors, they can prevent the installation of other OSes. Thus, like with iPhone or iPad, you will be stuck with the OS they provide. With the M1, so far you can only run other OSes on VM.
The whole M1 mac and its architecture is so closed, without Apple providing any useful system literature for it, or even closed source drivers, that developers are experimenting and trying to reverse engineer it to successfully install and run Linux on it. And they are still struggling because Apple is the least interested in helping their effort.
Snow Leopard was the best version for me. I used it for months only restarting to install updates and there was no impact on the performance or stability.
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... well... w2k was for companies or the enterprise, people followed Windows 98SE as if it was a cult and ME was a polished turd. W98SE was crap on security, FAT32's performance for an installed OS was a nightmare, having to defrag a lot and performance degraded a lot over time.
You had to format and reinstall once a month.
Oh, you need to reinstall the chipset, soundcard, and video drivers? Some BSOD on the process will be guaranteed.
Linux and KDE by 2004 was nice, but broadband wasn't everywhere and setting it up was not as easy if all you got from a retailer was a Slackware/Debian DVD with an installing book. For everything else you had to be ready to learn a lot. And X.org wasn't as ready as today.
OFC my KDE3 setup from 2004 with bells and whistles like the Nvidia Geforce 2 drivers was nearly on par on OSX' features, (even with Cinelerra and JackD) but OSX set it up everything for you by default since 2001-2002.
Even Microsoft Office under OSX looked beatiful.
And today, ironically, I'm almost the opposite, by using CWM, void, OpenBSD, groff+ms, sc-im, Gnuplot and so on.
But to each its own. OSX by being a Unix helped Linux/BSD's a lot too, even if it took a huge chunk of market. CUPS polishing, (CUPS ofc worked pefectly in 2003 without Apple's support, but I think Apple gave them more support on weird printers), Bonjour, HTML->Webkit...
Well, I already say that Macs were pretty known for media/writting people such as journalists, artists, painters, designers, writers, and so on. That was pre-OSX.
Mac OS 9 with Quark Xpress and Photoshop were THE tools used in any newspaper/magazine HQ, no matter the country in the world.
Professional printed papers/music and video production = Mac. Period. No one would say otherwise in the 90' s.
But with OSX you had both the media/press people and the science people in your pocket. (Unix sysadmins with KSH, Unix utilities and SSH ready from the beginning, maybe not as a server but you could test all crap locally, and well, Aqua looked shiny, fun and shit would work; and for die hard C/C++/Perl/X11/Motif programmers porting legacy scientific tools to Xquartz and Motif with barely any changes).
And OFC, LaTex, with some GUI's showing the PDF preview.
I feel that the only reason Microsoft survived the 2000s was their deep entrenchment into the enterprise. If the same continued in the 2010s, they would likely be on life support by now.
Anecdote: A senior person at Microsoft that I knew after he left relayed his experience trying to use a Mac at HQ. Balmer threw it across the room during a meeting.
My first thought is that this sounds like a terrible work environment. My second thought is, "Wait senior person at microsoft? That means he could probably afford multiple macs."
What I'm imagining is that after Balmer throws my mac across the room I pull out my second mac. I would also be scouting for someone who can install an airbag into my mac. Like, can you imagine the look on Balmer's face when he throws your mac and an airbag explodes out of it? Then you can just say, "What? Laptop airbags come standard on macs."
To reiterate, it does sound like a terrible situation to have to work in. But unbridled anger on the part of another is the perfect opportunity to create some incredibly comedic scenarios if you're willing to put in the elbow grease.
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.
This was the standard setup for a bunch of people I knew doing windows development around then - according to them the MBP was far and away the best (laptop) windows hardware available at the time.
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 crashing no longer bluescreened the system, and we got per-application volume controls at the OS level. Additionally, since it was new it was bloated and slow on current gen hardware and manufacturers often slapped "Vista Capable" stickers on computers that were really not ideal for it.
As with most Windows versions, it was pretty solid by Service Pack 1. By 7 pretty much everything had been ironed out and consequently we remember 7 as the highest water mark since the peak, Win2k.
It had some problems because they mostly didn’t test it properly. That hasn’t changed now. Hence why the edge and windows alt tab integration actually broke alt tab on windows 10 RTM for nearly 6 months.
Things are actually much much worse today in regards to testing. I don't think Microsoft even has testers for Windows these days, they just push updates to users and and force them to test.
I think LH refers to what appeared later as Windows Vista. It's kind of nice to see a Microsoft executive had the same opinion of this product as their customers.
Longhorn was a failed version of Windows after Windows XP and before Windows Vista.
Longhorn was planned to be a dramatic follow-up version of Windows XP in which the Windows shell was rewritten on top of .NET with three main pillars: communication (WCF), presentation (WPF), and data (WinFS). WinFS was a new filesystem based on a relational database engine (SQL Server).
Longhorn was similar to a previous failed Windows release (Cairo). Longhorn was built on .NET whereas Cairo was built on COM. Longhorn used a new filesystem based on SQL whereas Cairo had a new object-oriented file store.
Longhorn use Avalon for the shell with concepts for people/contacts whereas the Cairo used Outlook. Before it became an Office application, Outlook started life as the new Cairo shell in which emails, calendars, task were integrated into explorer. You could do advanced grouping, tagging, and filtering on files. In fact, the first version of Outlook, Outlook 97, as an Office application allowed you to view the file system just like emails.
Longhorn was several years late before the Windows release was canceled with no clear end date in sight.
A reset was directed to produced an incremental new release of Windows called Windows Vista. It would be purely native and ship in a year and a half.
The .NET dependency "Bet on .NET" was jettisoned, and all Window's dependencies needed to be fully released rather than works in progressed. WCF, WPF were released independently. WinFS was killed because it was too slow.
Apparently Cairo's lesson wasn't good enough, so they ended up rewriting all Longhorn stuff mostly in COM and since it was such a good idea we got WinRT (IInspectable + .NET metadata) as "improvement".
Which kind of was, had the respective teams not botched the whole idea with WinRT, UAP, UWP, replacing C++/CX with toolless C++/WinRT, left .NET Native stagnate,....
So now we get WinUI, Reunion sorry AppSDK, and the whole marketing with deemphasis on the COM love of WinRT high marketing push.
I feel if there was some actual real cooperation across all the business units instead of the feudal wars, either Cairo or Longhorn would have worked out quite well.
What to expect when it was easier for contractors to navigate across units, then asking for stuff directly.
Yeah, what I liked about the 90s you basically got MFC and it was basically it, you could create any desktop app and only waited for incremental upgrades. MFC was supported by Borland and Symantec, so basically whatever you choose you could quickly create a Windows GUI app. What I dislike about the current situation is the lack of certainty as to which toolkit I should invest my time in as I'm sure someone at Microsoft will change their minds again.
C++/WinRT tooling is so bad, that MFC feels modern.
Ok, I got the point that they decided to stop doing language extensions and C++/CX was a dead end.
Surely the PM that signed the idea to replace C++/CX, could have spent one minute considering not to ship a development experience that is worse than MFC.
In 30 years haven't they had time to add syntax highlighting and code completion to IDL files?
Ah, and the Windows team then ignores C++/WinRT on their own samples, and use their own internal WIL framework instead.
Practical reasons why Electron is winning. A universal base framework and language. Choice of popular development framework, UI and other libraries and million of developers.
When reading his reply[0] it's obvious he was right in the original email when he said he saw no solution to this problem. They even tried to start from scratch and the result was still arguably the worst Windows edition ever.
In my opinion, Windows ME was worse. I decided to use Windows 2000 and then XP. 2000 was very stable compared to what we were used to with the 95/98 series.
I'll be honest, I didn't notice many differences between Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP1. I agree Windows Vista was absolutely terrible when it came out, but so was XP. And so was 98. And 95.
I had an iMac G4 in 2004 and I have a MacBook pro M1 in 2021. I used only PCs running Ubuntu, ArchLinux, and Windows between. When I got the M1, it felt like home. Not much did change over 17 years.
If you think about windows only, between windows XP and a recent windows 10, it's very different and much better. It's possible to use the computer while an application is using all available resources now. You also have descent composting with GPU accelerated 3D effects and good windows management. Good touch screen support too. Also much better security, and a great Linux integration with WSL.
I actually prefer a lot of things in Windows than Mac today. I think Mac OS is a bit behind windows on some features I use, like touchscreen support or the Linux integration. But the good hardware makes it worth it since the M1.
I'm interested in the ' touchscreen support or the Linux integration.' part of your comment. I don't think we'll see touch screen on a Mac in the short-to-middle term because Apple have very defined views on interaction models. Of more interest is the Linux integration part. What Linux 'features' are missing from macOS on the terminal that cannot be installed from either Homebrew, MacPorts or pkgsrc? Genuinely interested...
About Linux it's to have Docker with good performances, and a development environment more similar than the production environment. I'm almost not a fan of compilation to install standard tools, its a bit slow and it feels unnecessary.
About the touchscreen support, it's simply that I like touchscreens. It think it's more convenient for some usages and I think Apple acknowledged that with their ridiculously small touch bar. I hope they will allow real professional usage on the iPad pro or bring touch screen support to the MacBook eventually. I could live without it but I still touch my MacBook screen by mistake once in a while.
Thanks. That makes sence, although Docker on the M1 seems to have improved things. If it's any consolation, my 3 year old tries to touch things on computer and TV screens! It's clearly an natural interaction given the technology around today.
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”
There's a difference between "people at Microsoft Research giving a public presentation on a mac" and "one of the top 10 people at Microsoft runs around with a mac".
But yes, it is a bit of a different time as well, but I think Allchin the person is a pretty important part of the statement.
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!
No? It was a very smooth rollout (even more impressive if you consider it also rolled out to all iOS devices). I can’t think of a similarly large technical change that went so smoothly.
There are things to complain about with the software quality of Macs, but the file system isn’t one of them in my opinion.
Back in the 2004 era Windows was far more notorious for BSODs, but in the intervening time they've put a lot of work into fixing that. Mostly in drivers; things like WHQL, and the amazing subsystem that allows the graphics drivers to crash and recover with only a momentary black screen.
The Longhorn project did include an attempt at doing a fancy new filesystem, more database flavoured; I'm not sure if they ever finalized the feature list, much less got it working, and now everything ships with NTFS which is slow but reliable.
Actually I think the rollout of APFS was one of their more impressive technical achievements. They wholesale updated iOS 10.3 to the new filesystem without any issues. The only downside to it is it is probably a bit heavy for traditional drives, it really needs an SSD.
A recent Windows update caused frequent BSODs with a fun variety of error codes. This would happen fast enough that I couldn't even roll back the update. So I had to wipe my hard drive and re-install the entire OS from a flash drive. I've never had a macOS update cause such a catastrophic failure.
As long as the hardware runs Linux, I'm going to overwrite the operating system, so I'm indifferent. I've bought all my recent computers used from Craigslist and Linux runs great on all of them.
This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.
Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.