[HN Gopher] "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Mic...
___________________________________________________________________
"I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft" (2004)
Author : renaudg
Score : 70 points
Date : 2021-07-23 08:25 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| throwaway4good wrote:
| So what has changed?
|
| You can buy a Mac today even if you are working at Microsoft.
| rsynnott wrote:
| This was during the reign of noted loon Ballmer, so probably
| not a great idea. Remember this?
| https://www.cultofmac.com/501138/apple-history-steve-ballmer...
| exegete wrote:
| 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"
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Similar to Eric Schmidt using Blackberry and iPhones over an
| Android phone:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/mar/21/eric-
| schm...
| wink wrote:
| 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.
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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.
| sbuk wrote:
| 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...
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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.
| sbuk wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| XP SP3 was about to hit the market as M$ went into security
| overdrive mode.
| sidcool wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| > " _deep entrenchment into the enterprise_ "
|
| If that was all it took, Sun Microsystems would still be alive
| too.
| ksec wrote:
| Roughly half of the PC in use are in Enterprise and Corporate.
|
| Part of the reason why moving Windows forward with Backward
| compatibility is so god damn hard.
| spodek wrote:
| 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.
| culopatin wrote:
| Good for you. How does this have any relevance in this thread
| though?
| ubermonkey wrote:
| It's amazing they effectively ignored him.
| anthk wrote:
| 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...
| auiya wrote:
| And for music producers! Logic Pro is probably the best bang
| for the buck you buy right now as far as DAWs go.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| A friend of mine preferred Apple for hardware and Microsoft for
| software. About a decade ago he bought a MacBook and installed
| Windows 7.
| ska wrote:
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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.
| tasogare wrote:
| I did that too around 2009 for a few years. It always bugged
| people that my MBP was running Windows.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| 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
| plainnoodles wrote:
| 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).
| dexterhaslem wrote:
| windows is already not great for dev? I'll bite, what were
| you doing, ios apps? lol
| filoleg wrote:
| 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).
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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.
| darzu wrote:
| 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.)
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| whymauri wrote:
| 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.
| gh123man wrote:
| 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.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| And that was in the PowerPc Era!
|
| I think this is the video mentioned:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2lWbRU3xM
| muizelaar wrote:
| Indeed. You can find the original on the-eye.
| tobr wrote:
| Here's the linked page on Wayback Machine:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040108215755/apple.com/ilife/v...
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Is that embedded video playable on anything? it isn't
| compatible with the latest version of Quick Time I have
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Some insight around this time.
|
| http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
| hughrr wrote:
| I love the backpedalling later about how great Vista is. Which
| was bollocks.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Vista changed the driver model (for the best), and some
| manufacturer quite simply never bothered to upgrade.
| bigtex wrote:
| I was able to crash Vista pre SP1 just by copying a few kb
| file to the network. It's file copy performance was very
| different from XP.
| auiya wrote:
| Vista also introduced several crucial security features that
| were sorely needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_an
| d_safety_features_n...
| hughrr wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| That's pretty much what you'd expect though, the original email
| was never meant to become public. Companies are never upfront
| about their weaknesses.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Vista after the first SP resolved a lot of the issues if I
| recall correctly. But it was really overshadowed by 7.
| LucidLynx wrote:
| Post-email:
| https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1418259351140188166?s=...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Where he HILARIOUSLY insists Vista was better than anything
| else on the market.
|
| It's like that Iraqi general saying US troops were nowhere near
| the capital.
| basisword wrote:
| 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
| wk_end wrote:
| 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.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Project management is probably harder, classic OS design was
| well understood by that time.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| perceptronas wrote:
| I am not sure if it fits this topic/forum, but there is a joke
| made by Jobs on youtube [1] about Longhorn/Vista.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jCh7D_OpKM
| C19is20 wrote:
| ', and ship Vista.' You spelled 'shit' wrong?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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.
| vondur wrote:
| Vista actually ran fine after service pack 2 was installed.
| At that point Windows 7 was being released and it became a
| moot point.
| krylon wrote:
| 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.
| anthk wrote:
| Most people had 512MB or 1GB back in the day, the lesser
| ones 256MB.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| CountSessine wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| drcongo wrote:
| 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.
| alas_coo wrote:
| The introduction of invisible gesture control on iOS was the
| end of UX for Apple.
| nindalf wrote:
| 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.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| That was mostly based off the base-model 13" MacBook Pro from
| before which didn't have a touchbar.
| auiya wrote:
| Isn't Apple walking-back that whole Touch Bar fiasco now?
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| That's the rumor, but nothing official has been shown off yet
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| hangonhn wrote:
| 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. :-/
| crooked-v wrote:
| It adds a menu bar icon to stop recording.
| npunt wrote:
| It's been that way for years and has nothing to do with the
| touchbar, it's in the menu. Agree it's hardly discoverable.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| 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!
| Saris wrote:
| 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.
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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!
| dharmab wrote:
| 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.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| 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!
| LennyWhiteJr wrote:
| Remap caps lock to escape.
| pkulak wrote:
| I'm a big fan of using "jj".
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Capslock as esc/ctrl is great. Or Delete/Cmd. Whatever
| actually, as long as it's not capslock.
| darkr wrote:
| ctrl + ] sends an escape sequence. Remap caps-lock to ctrl
| and you never have to leave home row again!
| alexcnwy wrote:
| Map caps lock to ESC using Karabiner
|
| https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
| sjackso wrote:
| 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.
| trashcan wrote:
| ctrl+c also works if you are using vim (and not vi). one
| handed!
| messe wrote:
| Seconding this, especially if you have to SSH into remote
| or newly spun-up machines regularly.
| stavros wrote:
| Map Caps Lock to both! Tap is Esc, hold is Ctrl.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Did you change your username? I didn't realize that was
| an option.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| dashoffset wrote:
| 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.
| webmobdev wrote:
| 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.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| zokier wrote:
| No, that's the opposite, read the followup:
| https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1418259351140188166?s=...
| Razengan wrote:
| The follow up is basically "oops I shouldn't have been caught
| thinking that out loud"
|
| I mean he's calling Vista a "phenomenal product", for
| Fourier's sake
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20070107170621/http://windowsv
| ist...
| some-guy wrote:
| 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.
| pvitz wrote:
| 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.
| wesnerm2 wrote:
| 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.
|
| See https://longhorn.ms/the-reset/
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/wil
|
| So you get some samples on MSDN now that after being
| rewritten from C++/CX into C++/WinRT, are also tainted
| with WIL library types
| johanj wrote:
| Yes, the codename for Windows Vista was Longhorn.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| 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!
| thejohnconway wrote:
| > Wasn't their new filesystem a giant mess?
|
| 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.
| dsego wrote:
| 4096 files is the limit when reading from SD cards on a Mac
| (not windows).
|
| https://youtu.be/0bqOB_XGBVE
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Interesting. But the video is way too manic (too many cuts,
| guy too animated and shouty) that watching him gives me
| anxiety.
| Slippery_John wrote:
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| 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.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Given that Windows Update has deleted user data for the last
| three years running, there really isn't room for people in
| glass houses to throw rocks.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| spullara wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| I think it's pretty telling that there are lots of letters like
| this from Microsoft, but almost none from Apple.
|
| I can't imagine someone from Apple writing a letter like this to
| Jobs and still working at Apple.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| "... 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.
| sushisource wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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].
| brundolf wrote:
| 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.
| rewgs wrote:
| 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.
| webmobdev wrote:
| 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).
| brundolf wrote:
| > 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?
| webmobdev wrote:
| 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.
| brundolf wrote:
| I use either Slack or Dropbox, both of which work fine
| sushisource wrote:
| I take your point for sure, but, that's not really what
| we're comparing against, is it?
|
| The comparison is more like google drive, or whatever MS's
| version of that is now. At that point the distinction seems
| relatively minor to me.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| 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.
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