The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.
It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.
What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:
1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.
It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.
And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.
Apple is at least in part operating like they are a fashion brand. Functionality and usability are secondary to looks. Both in their devices and their software. It's hard to argue they aren't successful with that.
It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons
I think the HN crowd and the public at large have different ideas of usability. The "I want to save the file on my computer that I own" resonates with us. But there are a lot of advantages to a mobile like experience. There's no viruses, you never lose files, apps don't lock up your device, and so on.
The problem isn't really the experience being something like devices as a service. It's that the providers are a rent seeking duopoly.
It doesn't help that the big tech advertising platforms are making money off pushing ads peddling investment scams and malware. So long as there is a financial incentive to make money in ways that harm "users" things will only get worse. Governments have failed consumers.
Malware has a specific meaning - that one app can surreptitiously embed itself in your device, cause damage, or exfiltrate your info.
I’m not saying there haven’t been vulnerabilities in iOS. But those were bugs that Apple tried to close. For desktop operating systems, giving third party applications that ability is a feature not a bug.
Yes I’m including MacOS in that bucket - see Zoom installing a web server on Macs without letting users know.
I thought it was an Ive problem but once he left nothing really changed. Sure the Mac got some functionality back but that’s about it. They really need to just not do a redesign and flesh out their software.
Are you complaining that Apple is releasing computers that are fast, quiet and with a ridiculous long battery life that are well built as “not functional”?
The keyboards are terrible now, even the ones that went back to the original type after the hell that was butterfly. There's still almost no key travel because Apple is so obsessed with thinness.
Absolutely no one to a first approximation is complaining about the keyboards since they left the butterfly keyboards even before the ARM transition. These were the same people who (rightfully) criticized the butterfly keyboards left and right.
Again which devices? You’re not an alt for Rob Malda are you wondering why anyone would want an iPod because it had less space than a Nomad and no wireless are you?
This is true, with the caveat that their function is also best in class. And I mean yeah, they make gorgeous devices, but even if they were ugly id still choose them because they also work better than any alternatives.
I use an (at this point older) MacBook pro myself (M1) and honestly believe it is a great product. I am a lot happier with it then if I bought an equivalent windows device.
However, its definitely true that Apple prioritizes looks is function.
We're just currently in a generation where it ceased to matter for the most part, because Apple Silicon has made the previous tradeoffs basically meaningless. But that's not because Apple started to prioritize function, technology has just gotten good enough for their design philosophy to no longer hamper it significantly
A luxury fashion brand. High quality goods, yet the aesthetics change over time so that the style conscious keep buying the latest to stay on trend. This doesn't apply to all users of course, there are other methods to nudge buying the latest for other personas.
I'm not sure that's true. Apple has arguably the best laptops there is in terms of hardware. Making the highest end SoC year after year. That's not operating like a fashion brand.
> What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market.
It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.
The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.
Apple keeps cycling between great hardware and not so great software and great software and not so great hardware.
In the PowerPC era the software was fantastic, especially when you factor in the much lower odds of viruses and malware. However, the hardware was well behind the curve except right at the release of a new generations, which were few and far in between.
Then when Apple switched to Intel, you had a few years of incredible hardware and incredible software. This is when the Mac absolutely blew up.
But then while Apple has constantly been improving the hardware (although they’ve made repairabiltu and extensibility worse), their software has seen a steady decline.
Where Apple has been really lucky is that while their software has seen a steady decline, their primary competitor MS’s software has seen several steep declines.
I feel like when I fire up my mac(s) the OS really is there for me to use, new features, better or worse do in fact feel like they're there FOR me with some thought of me as a user.
Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.
I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
You mean alienate their desktop users by making chips specifically targeting them that are fast, run cool, quiet and have ridiculously long battery lives?
You’ve seen much more frequent updates in the Mac line post ARM than you did in the Intel era.
Letting go of x86 was just one of the first steps on the road to a world completely dominated by mobile devices. Macs just caught up with all the progress that mobile devices had made when apple made the switch.
I didn't really get it until I Airdropped a shipping label PDF to the guy at the UPS store to print from his phone, which was already set up for the label printer.
My mum can use airdrop. She sends us things. She doesn't need to install anything or configure things. She just uses the first-party UI.
It's the same with Airpods. Bluetooth headphones? Yeah, you can buy some for $20, who needs Apple ones? Apparently everyone. Turns out providing great noise cancellation and bluetooth that just works means the product is appealing to general consumers.
File transfer worked well on Nokia devices and was pretty stable. What was not, is bluetooth connections with audio devices. This is a solved problem now and my Xiaomi earpods connection is pretty stable. I remember having more issues with the Airpods.
File transfer over SSH also just works. You can even mount it, so you can work directly on the remote version without any program support. It was deliberately killed by computing-device-as-a-service vendors.
As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.
But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.
macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.
Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).
Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.
I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
Something that most sub 1000€ laptops could do over a decade ago, requires a macbook costing well above 2000€ in 2025.
I'm running multiple types of machines in my home for work and personal use but macs have been by far the worst offender for multiscreen support for a long time.
Vintage 2015? Yes. Any Dell Latitude (mid tier business line) would have supported 3 monitors and would have been in the ~$1000 range, especially picked up off of Dell Outlet. I have Dell Latitude Windows machines from 2011 that supported 3 monitors.
That wasn’t a capability of the laptop. The docking station had its own dedicated graphics hardware that drove the extra monitors. Of course the lowest end Macs can do that. When we talk about how many monitors a certain laptop can drive, we mean plugging them in directly to the laptop in some combination of HDMI ports and USB C/Thunderbolt ports.
This is embarrassing, just stop. You can go look up the specs of any chip and how many discrete displays the iGPU supported instead of bickering about what is or isn't a laptop feature. Citing sources isn't illegal or passe.
After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.
The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.
But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)
The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?
The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.
Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
I'm not so sure about that, modern Linux is pretty good — I was able to configure it to fit my needs much better than I could a mac. It's also free of dark patterns (looking at Windows).
If you're willing and able to configure Linux, I would say that, for some people, it's much better than a mac.
One of the main things I run on my Mac is Ableton Live, so Linux is a no-go.
Also, I'm no longer the kind of person who really wants to tinker with an OS set up and doing a lot of manual configuration. I just want a decent user experience out of the box and good connectivity with all my various peripherals.
I wish I could disagree, but Microsoft won't let me thanks to their determination and speed in destroying what was good about Windows.
Right now I find myself forced to use macos for iOS dev, and Windows for gaming-adjacent stuff. For the first time in 33 years, I truly wish I could just have Linux everywhere.
Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).
What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.
I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)
Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.
I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.
The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.
My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.
Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...
In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
I use all three and I have to say Windows shitifize itself by adding too much ads, but if you can remove those than it’s a better experience than MacOS.
Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.
10 is OK if you remove the ads and stop random update. I’ll never use 11 and beyond. I always switched to Linux for my dev box and now that I play less and less game (haven’t played for weeks) I’ll switch to Linux for my personal box too, once the current one broke down.
Yeah, the version history as perceived by the vendor and as perceived by the commoner are somewhat out of touch. To me Windows 10 is basically new and already considered to be out-of-date.
Windows 10 Pro is actually a pretty decent OS. It brought quite a few major improvements over Windows 7 and I can't really think of any notable downsides.
Actually in the latest MacOS release it constantly trains local models for all kinds of junk without asking you at all.
I had to disable all that AI garbage in the settings after researching a bunch of local inference and training processes that were grinding my MacBook to a halt every time it woke up from sleep.
Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.
> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas
At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).
Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).
And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.
Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
This more recently happened to IBM (as a computer manufacturer). If your platform is not accessible to hobbyists, the next generation will not be familiar with it, and when they go get a job, it probably won't be with the technology they don't know. Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes.
> Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
To their credit, IBM is still making zArchitecture chips that aren’t completely humiliated by x86 and ARM. Note also since 2000 IBM helped improve the Linux kernel and got it working in zArchitecture so if a business that has old COBOL or CICS applications wants to run some Linux apps in virtualization on the same machine they can.
It sounds like your CTO took the opposite message of the book. Well the modern interpretation anyway. But can't really argue with not rewriting working code, even the Oracle licensing is probably is probably nothing in terms of cost. Might wanna update to a supported version though.
Well, almost the entire book is about how companies like DEC and Xerox just could not move to the new technology, whatever their decision makers decided.
I really don't understand the executives that read it and decide that "yeah, we are doing that impossible thing, disregard the sensible alternatives the book shows or thinking of something new!"
Windows 8: some people in the early 2010s (me!) thought laptops were cooked…. My hackathon kit from then was a dirt cheap Android tablet, plastic clip, Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse. It looked so sleek compared to the MacBooks and gaming laptops everybody else had. I don’t think Microsoft was crazy chasing the tablet dream but I was the only one.
Meta Quest: Facebook has users, advertisers and all sorts of people who depend on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and such. Facebook knows that platforms like that fail eventually and doesn’t want to be the next MySpace so it has been struggling to get them into a virtual reality platform that, on a certain level, is well executed, but that people don’t have enthusiasm for. VR games for the Quest platform are pretty good but there are so many good flat games that I barely have time for them. I’d make the case that the 8GB MQ3 has enough RAM to run carefully optimized games but not enough for ordinary people to author content (some of why Horizon Worlds is dead: no way McDonalds is going to build an experience if they can’t import an SVG or PNG of the Coca-Cola logo to out in the cups and instead have to painstakingly make it out of solid geometry using the controller by hand… and the same is true for small businesses and enthusiasts) —- we are seeing 16GB headsets from Apple, Samsung and Valve now and maybe it will be better but quite probably it won’t. I know though that if Zuck gives up and somebody else succeeds he’ll have the most terrible regret.
That said, no, Microsoft wouldn't be crazy to make a tablet facade for Windows. What made them stupid (still not crazy) was to remove the desktop facade from their OS that sold exclusively to desktop users at the time.
You see this happening right now with LLMs. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc are incredibly worried about being disrupted. But all they can really do is try to shoehorn AI into their existing products (OSes, search, social media), which is a difficult sell to their existing customers.
Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
"Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams"
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality.
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings?
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
Could you name a specific person whose estimate of when we might get AGI has doubled twice since 2022? Or do you mean you found one person with a really short estimate in 2022, another person with a longer one in 2024, and another with a longer one now?
Also, if you compare with 50 years ago, AGI has also (better than) halved the interval experts are commonly predicting since then.
(Of course the experts could turn out to be hilariously wrong, for fusion or AI or both. I just don't think your comparison is anything like apples-to-apples.)
> Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
It needs to get through dense downtowns where there isn't much space between buildings, and wires and skyways to dodge as well. A skilled pilot could do it - but they wouldn't try because while space physically exists there isn't enough margin for error.
People will just have the thing open in another window, and move the result over, rather than pay for a bunch of Teams licenses.
In general, we should expect more AI use to decrease the value of human oriented products. A word document is just some XML collection to a computer program. An AI won't need Word to create or edit the files.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
It might be just a remote UI over "Windows Cloud Eternal" at that point but if by then we've moved to "Apple Forever OS" or "The Eternal Year of the Linux Desktop" I'll make a balanced diet out of hats
Honestly, a Phone/Dex style thin client that you connect to a bigger screen and that remotes into Windows Cloud Eternal seems like a solid sale for them
They sell you compute, plus a phone that gets renewed every 2-5 Years
Besides techies I'm seeing more and more people not even having a personal computer at all, doing most of their "computing" on their phone and using their work computer for the rare task that does require a real computer.
The younger generations have actually regressed in computer proficiency, file management, etc.
That depends on your social circle. Among gamers, consoles are losing popularity and PC gaming is increasing, even in countries like Japan (where I live).
And those were mostly marketed toward businesses not consumers. Even your citation says the idea quickly died when computers were less than $1000.
Around 2000, was the time that eMachines were selling $400 desktops and you had promotions from places like MSN making them free if you signed a contract for dialup.
What are they going to be replaced with now? You still can't do anything actually useful on a mobile device. You need an actual computer to get anything done besides dicking around playing games or scrolling through apps.
People do “useful” things with mobile devices all of the time with only their phones. Most people don’t define “useful” as running VIM in a terminal and running Docker.
8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.
We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.
We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
If the last 15 years are any indication, in less than 15 years, Microsoft will make Azure Linux their main OS and they'll skin the desktop edition to resurrect Lindows. It'll take a 2-5 years campaign to move most of the remaining Windows user base to it. Oh and also, it'll probably be free.
In 15 years, Windows will still be running hospitals and governments and Linux will have dropped back well below 5% desktop usage because using Linux on the desktop in the modern day is an ideological decision and literally never a technical one
Microsoft themselves have actually made it a technical one. By dropping support for perfectly fine computer without TPM/SecureBoot, they have made it an actual technical decision to install an alternative to their OS.
This seems like a more reasonable take. What I'm wondering is "Where will consumers go?"
They won't be shifting to Apple in any large numbers, many aren't willing to pay the price Apple is asking for a laptop. More and more I'd say that the average consumer if going to either use their work laptop, or their phone, for all their personal computing needs. Other that gamers, and the few of us who actually think that computers are fun (or at least they used to be), why would the average person buy a computer? My personal experience is that especially women just handle everything on their big ass phone anyway.
> The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
> Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years
Yeah, but they are far outweighed by the quality of life regressions that pushed me to desktop Linux a number of years ago. I only use Windows, begrudgingly, on my work laptop these days, and it just seems to get more bothersome as the years pass.
Linux used to require more install and post-install-setup effort to get me to my happy workflow place, but Windows overtook it a while back and has only been increasing its lead ever since as a result of a growing stack of defaults and unnecessary inclusions being, quite specifically, quality of life regressions (transgressions).
Another useful W11 feature (that later got backported to W10) is seamless integration with graphical Linux apps. You can just double click an icon on your desktop and it opens up in a window like any other app. Passkey support was added which made securely signing into site easier. Dev drive was added that makes it so building on windows is faster. Support for low latency Bluetooth was added.
If Windows was "a very good OS", us Windows sysadmins would've been out of a job a long time ago! A good portion of our job involves trying to fix or workaround things that Microsoft breaks every Patch Tuesday, logging tickets with Microsoft, dealing with the asinine Microsoft Support (who don't even know how to extract .cab files from the logs generated by the Microsoft Support Tool!), and implementing fixes and workarounds for unwanted "features" they manage to sneak into the latest update.
Actually, I concede that it is "a very good OS" - it is very good for keeping me employed!
Linux supports hybrid sleep. It might not be enabled by default because if you have a lot of RAM it has a tendency to burn out consumer SSDs. Consider what happens if you have 64GB of RAM, a 512GB consumer SSD that supports 100 full drive writes in total and you enter into hybrid sleep twice a day for three years.
> Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Copy entire filesystem to backup. This isn't even a step because you were already doing it, right? Enable FDE and copy it back.
These ones are just Windows defect workarounds:
> "reset this PC" functionality
> a built-in anti-malware
> Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Windows messes itself up on a regular basis, requiring you to reset it; this is rare on stable Linux distributions and even then "reset this PC" is really just copying the user's documents and reinstalling the OS, which nobody cares about having a one-press button to do when they're not having to do it all the time.
Linux has functional package managers that people actually use, which makes the default way to install software be the one that isn't likely to introduce you to malware.
And the package managers recompile the software for whatever architecture you're using so you don't need to emulate a different one.
> Touch/Face login
I think people have tried to add this and the users went out of their way to remove it again. "Have the machine record your biometric data" is creepy and the security is bad because people leave their fingerprints on everything and post pictures of their face on the internet.
> an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
That is simply wrong. Some of them might be a package install away rather than there by default, but they are hardly features that Windows pioneered…
> automatic private info redaction
With regard to that, I wasn't aware of a direct end user feature for that in Windows. There are tools for it in Office, and from a programmers PoV in .Net, but these are things that will continue even if Windows gets canned because it is a tech debt problem: Office is still a cash cow and .Net is via VS/VSCode and funnelling people into Azure.
> - "reset this PC" functionality
Maybe not as a one-click, but just re-follow the installation instructions…
> - a built-in anti-malware
Good point, though it is less needed due to most users installing via OS package repos which offers some friction to malware installation. Individual services that particularly need it have support for it though (mail servers and such). This might become a bigger issue if the use of “curl -> bash” as an installation or quick-run method keeps gaining traction.
> - Touch/Face login
I'm a refusenik there so I don't care about that one - biometric are bad for authentication/authorisation as they can't be easily revoked! And I'm sure I've seen it done so it is at least available.
> - Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Valid, ish, but where FDE is required commercially it is going to be done on first install anyway, the same for most home users that care enough. And conversion is possible after-the-fact, just not in as automated a manner as with Windows.
> - Hybrid-sleep
Though while we are talking about that, proper hibernate has been broken on Windows on many laptops for some time.
> - Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
I can't comment on that, it isn't something I would need. Though it is worth pointing out that a great many applications on Windows don't handle HiDPI well anyway, especially when you have different scaling factors on different screens. This is the same on any OS I think.
> - Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Again completely out of my wheelhouse so I can't really comment. Again, this feels like a niche issue for consumer use cases ATM - the situation may change quickly as demand increases.
> (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats)
And bloody “AI”. They've put it in notepad…
Thankyou the Sirius Cybernetics Marketing Division!
Notepad had been perfect for two (three?) decades.
I think it was noticing that Notepad (and Calculator) in Windows 10 took a countable number of seconds to open, that's what pushed me over the edge into permanent Linux desktop land.
I like WSL, but their search bars have gotten worse which really kills any good will I have towards them.
On my work computer, the search bar can't even find Intellij which is installed in a totally normal way. It's even in the same folder as clion in the program files and it can find that one. I also had a problem where the file explorer couldn't find a file by name and it made me look like an idiot.
You know what feature my menu bar has though? I tells me when the s&p 500 goes down in value to try to make me panic sell. That's a feature I really want in my work computer's os menu /s.
Also when I clicked on the time, it used to show me a calendar, but now it shows me a pomodoro app?
I don't want more features in notepad, what I want is the os to do basic stuff, like finding my programs and files or show me the time, right.
I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.
IDK I started running Bazzite on my workstation after Win11 died on me a couple weeks ago, and if it is the premier experience for Linux desktop gaming then we aren’t there yet. It is great as far as distros go, don’t get me wrong. But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died. I had to hack on it for a bit, then do it again with immutable OS patterns in mind. MS is certainly leaving an opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?
How I see it is, of course you won't have a good time with Linux if you don't have compatible hardware. The stuff you're mentioning (flaky Wifi and Bluetooth) is a hallmark symptom of incompatible hardware, or newer hardware with immature drivers.
I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.
If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.
But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
> But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died.
That sounds like a hardware compatibility bug to me and not Bazzite's fault - I don't have those issues on my ThinkPad Z13, nor on my GPD Win Mini 2024.
I both 100% agree with you and also don't think our opinion matters.
The general consumer isn't going to hear "the manufacturer hasn't upstreamed stable drivers to the kernel" and suddenly stop blaming Linux if the hardware works in Windows.
That's weird. I've been running it for years and it's been rock solid--but I've done so on Ryzen mini-PCs with very standardized hardware, and am not using it as any kind of desktop--purely as a game machine.
Microsoft really should just open source Windows and completely abandon the OS market. They make their money on things like gaming, Office, and Azure. At this point, Windows is just a loss leader for other products. Outsource the dev cost with open source like phone makers do with Android.
> Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company.
The Zune wasn't consumer tech?
Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.
Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.
Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
> Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.
But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.
And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.
This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.
What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.
Before Andy Ruben created Android, he created the T-Mobile Sidekick, which was a Java based consumer smartphone before iOS or Android.
Microsoft acquired Rubin's company for a Billion dollars and then spent so long rewriting everything from Java into .Net (before releasing it as the Microsoft Kin Phone) that it was dead on arrival.
> The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales.
Zune belongs with Bob and Encarta. I said Microsoft has had side areas.
But Win 95 and XP were were absolutely built for corporations.
Sure, XP came in separate "Home" and "Professional" editions. But the important thing is that it was the Home version that was missing features to make it cheaper -- not that the Professional edition was primarily a consumer product with some business functionality bolted on.
Obviously Windows has always been used by both home users and corporate users. But the bulk of Microsoft's revenue has always been from corporations. There is no sense in which Win 95 was designed primarily for individual consumers, and then business sales were somehow secondary.
You weren’t around at the Windows 95 introduction were you? There were a long line of consumers buying it and Gates went on the Tonight Show with Leno to promote it.
They already had Windows CE and ActiveSync, the bane of many an IT support worker. It might be they expected phones to remain consumer-only, and the business world to keep using PDAs.
Indeed. Previously, every Patch Tuesday we used to pray that nothing would break in that patch cycle. Now we expect that things _will_ break, but hope that that whatever Microsoft breaks won't affect us, or is something minor, or gets patched quickly.
Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
In the last 18 months we've seen a lot of maturation in various linux distros trying to make them "out of the box" usable by people who are not all that technical. More GUI utilities, better stability, compatibility layers for gaming driving adoption, and dead simple setup.
Valve has been doing a lot of the work driving adoption from gamers with Proton, PulseAudio is suddenly way more functional and compatible, working Nvidia GPU drivers (565+), and immutable spins on distros have all made it so that linux overall is more approachable than ever.
I think we'll look back at 2025 and see it as the inflection point where suddenly linux became a viable alternative to Apple/Microsoft in a way it wasn't before, driven in part by development targeting a new demographic along with the spotlight on both the technical and consumer issues with OSX/Windows (such as patches bricking hardware, attempting to crowbar AI into everything, and antagonizing their customer base with things like subscriptions and data harvesting).
Gotta say the article hits the right notes. I'm one of the peeps thinking about whether I actually still need Windows. I'm not a power user of office and photoshop. I could in fact live with various online office-alike suites or Linux Libre office. I also no longer need a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. The HW I have is well supported on Linux nowadays. The only real reason for still running it is games and most of those I still play run crossplatform in large-part due to Steam. The new features being announced sound like a MS board-cooked joke. Agentic OS? For who? Secretaries? Small businesses that need local AI crawlers to find - what - 3y old invoice? I don't get it. And lets not forget their plans to turn the octopus into a subscription-based model which to me sounds horrific and likely the final step to purging it off my machines. Still a good choice for non-tech-savvy users and for users forced into it due to OS-exclusive software. Hopefully not for long though. More competition in the space should hopefully spur some innovation.
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows.
Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.
I don't think gaming is really bigger than windows. Gaming revenue is 23B in 2025 and Windows+Devices is 17B, so just in this metrics they're already close; but you have to factor how much of their 120B Office+Productivity line on their annual report only exist because people use Windows. If you take LinkedIn and Dynamics out of the equation you get approximately 100B in Office, Teams, SharePoint and stuff like that and people only use these product at scale because they're on Windows.
Gaming is a massive loss leader, MS will never make back the money they invested to buy other publishers. The subscription model will fail aswell, prices will have to go up more, to try and actually make some profit.
Microsoft has definitely angered consumers in the gaming space. Look what they've done to Minecraft, or the formerly beloved studios they bought out. The Game Pass price hike was not well-received.
Yeah there's lots of complaining but until they move to linux, stop buying their games and cancel their subscriptions nothing will change in the enshittification path.
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.
Consumers are leads and beta testers. Microsoft's business is licensing and reselling -- directly and via Azure. Their primary concerns are keeping businesses and developers happy. Consumers are a distant third.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
I disagree. I think one of the main reasons most companies still give their employees Windows machines and use Windows Servers to support those employees applications (ie Outlook and Office) is because most of the world has grown up using Microsoft Windows and Office at home. If there was another world where most people grew up using MacOS, there’s just no way MS would have as much market share in the corporate world.
The proliferation of cheap agenting tools integrating with every SDLC stage makes building open source software faster and cheaper, which decreases the competition barrier with Microsoft's deep pockets, and decrease older propietary software market value significantly.
Another point not mentioned in this article is that Windows desktops are incredibly slow these days.
I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.
Did you turn off Microsoft Defender for the relevant directories? Otherwise you might be measuring malware scan performance more than compiler performance.
A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).
> VSCode (polished, fast, ...) and Explorer (paleolithically slow,
In what world is VSCode fast when its startup time is multiples of Explorer (which had in recent news decided to preload itself to mask that issue) and they are the result of exactly the same fundamental shift from native to web native
VSCode starts up the same as any other IDE, and is responsive and snappy when using it. Explorer starts up about 100 times slower than any other file explorer, and is exceptionally while using it too.
Visual Studio is the one to compare to "any other heavy IDE", vs code is slow as a text editor due to chrome, not its ide features , and there are plenty of code editors with plugins that start much faster, though I won't make up 10000 times, it's only around 10
Now try to follow your own sources, both links for that sentence call it a code editor with MS doing the correct reverence " happy with using a regular code editor like Sublime Text instead of a full IDE like Visual Studio."!
It's also called so on its official page "The open source AI code editor"
So try to make an actual argument/use a proper source for one instead of treating wikis as the ultimate truth
> What IDE with plugins starts faster?
Sublime Text, which is as much an IDE as VSCode
> And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
You're, you are responding to a point about very slow startup time
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
When I started using Linux about 10 years ago, whenever I bought a new computer, I would keep a partition for Windows just in case for dual boot... Nowadays I just wipe it all clean.
It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.
Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.
People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.
The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.
It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.
What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:
1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.
It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.
And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.
Apple is at least in part operating like they are a fashion brand. Functionality and usability are secondary to looks. Both in their devices and their software. It's hard to argue they aren't successful with that.
It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons
I think the HN crowd and the public at large have different ideas of usability. The "I want to save the file on my computer that I own" resonates with us. But there are a lot of advantages to a mobile like experience. There's no viruses, you never lose files, apps don't lock up your device, and so on.
The problem isn't really the experience being something like devices as a service. It's that the providers are a rent seeking duopoly.
_Maybe_ no viruses is accurate most of the time, but certainly this cannot be extended to no malware. Mobile platforms are 90% malware/spyware.
It doesn't help that the big tech advertising platforms are making money off pushing ads peddling investment scams and malware. So long as there is a financial incentive to make money in ways that harm "users" things will only get worse. Governments have failed consumers.
Malware has a specific meaning - that one app can surreptitiously embed itself in your device, cause damage, or exfiltrate your info.
I’m not saying there haven’t been vulnerabilities in iOS. But those were bugs that Apple tried to close. For desktop operating systems, giving third party applications that ability is a feature not a bug.
Yes I’m including MacOS in that bucket - see Zoom installing a web server on Macs without letting users know.
I thought it was an Ive problem but once he left nothing really changed. Sure the Mac got some functionality back but that’s about it. They really need to just not do a redesign and flesh out their software.
Are you complaining that Apple is releasing computers that are fast, quiet and with a ridiculous long battery life that are well built as “not functional”?
The keyboards are terrible now, even the ones that went back to the original type after the hell that was butterfly. There's still almost no key travel because Apple is so obsessed with thinness.
Absolutely no one to a first approximation is complaining about the keyboards since they left the butterfly keyboards even before the ARM transition. These were the same people who (rightfully) criticized the butterfly keyboards left and right.
Maybe people get used to it but I can't. I can't even use the "magic" keyboard.
I work with them a lot at work but when I use my MacBook I always use it docked. I just need more key travel. The feel is ok but the travel is not.
They were fine until 2015 and I still use the old aluminium keyboard at my desk.
Apple has famously been form over function almost since their inception.
Again which devices? You’re not an alt for Rob Malda are you wondering why anyone would want an iPod because it had less space than a Nomad and no wireless are you?
This is true, with the caveat that their function is also best in class. And I mean yeah, they make gorgeous devices, but even if they were ugly id still choose them because they also work better than any alternatives.
I use an (at this point older) MacBook pro myself (M1) and honestly believe it is a great product. I am a lot happier with it then if I bought an equivalent windows device.
However, its definitely true that Apple prioritizes looks is function.
We're just currently in a generation where it ceased to matter for the most part, because Apple Silicon has made the previous tradeoffs basically meaningless. But that's not because Apple started to prioritize function, technology has just gotten good enough for their design philosophy to no longer hamper it significantly
Well said. (An upvote was not enough.)
A luxury fashion brand. High quality goods, yet the aesthetics change over time so that the style conscious keep buying the latest to stay on trend. This doesn't apply to all users of course, there are other methods to nudge buying the latest for other personas.
I'm not sure that's true. Apple has arguably the best laptops there is in terms of hardware. Making the highest end SoC year after year. That's not operating like a fashion brand.
They are operating as fashion brand, that's why they want to sell you a knitted iPhone Pocket for $230
Some fashion brands (eg Lulu) make excellent quality products as well. Apple nails both form and function imo.
> What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market.
It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.
The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.
Apple keeps cycling between great hardware and not so great software and great software and not so great hardware.
In the PowerPC era the software was fantastic, especially when you factor in the much lower odds of viruses and malware. However, the hardware was well behind the curve except right at the release of a new generations, which were few and far in between.
Then when Apple switched to Intel, you had a few years of incredible hardware and incredible software. This is when the Mac absolutely blew up.
But then while Apple has constantly been improving the hardware (although they’ve made repairabiltu and extensibility worse), their software has seen a steady decline.
Where Apple has been really lucky is that while their software has seen a steady decline, their primary competitor MS’s software has seen several steep declines.
I feel like when I fire up my mac(s) the OS really is there for me to use, new features, better or worse do in fact feel like they're there FOR me with some thought of me as a user.
Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.
I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
You mean alienate their desktop users by making chips specifically targeting them that are fast, run cool, quiet and have ridiculously long battery lives?
You’ve seen much more frequent updates in the Mac line post ARM than you did in the Intel era.
Letting go of x86 was just one of the first steps on the road to a world completely dominated by mobile devices. Macs just caught up with all the progress that mobile devices had made when apple made the switch.
Yeah, the hardware's been fantastic, but the OS has mostly treaded water with the occasional step backwards.
Maybe people are happy with the OS treading water? I basically just want it to run programs, let me find files and connect to the wifi.
> 1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.
I see it the opposite. At least for iPhone owners Universal Clipboard and file sharing with Airdrop are killer apps.
On android, KDE Connect felt great for basic copy/pasting/file transfer between devices.
https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
On iOS, KDE Connect feels like its running a potato sack race with both arms tied behind its back.
I didn't really get it until I Airdropped a shipping label PDF to the guy at the UPS store to print from his phone, which was already set up for the label printer.
File transfer! What will they think of next?
File transfer that just works.
My mum can use airdrop. She sends us things. She doesn't need to install anything or configure things. She just uses the first-party UI.
It's the same with Airpods. Bluetooth headphones? Yeah, you can buy some for $20, who needs Apple ones? Apparently everyone. Turns out providing great noise cancellation and bluetooth that just works means the product is appealing to general consumers.
File transfer worked well on Nokia devices and was pretty stable. What was not, is bluetooth connections with audio devices. This is a solved problem now and my Xiaomi earpods connection is pretty stable. I remember having more issues with the Airpods.
File transfer over SSH also just works. You can even mount it, so you can work directly on the remote version without any program support. It was deliberately killed by computing-device-as-a-service vendors.
As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.
But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.
macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.
Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).
Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.
I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.
Exactly my thought, the last paragraph.
> Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock
Or you could buy a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max and plug in four monitors without displaylink.
Something that most sub 1000€ laptops could do over a decade ago, requires a macbook costing well above 2000€ in 2025.
I'm running multiple types of machines in my home for work and personal use but macs have been by far the worst offender for multiscreen support for a long time.
Most $1000 laptops supported three monitors a decade ago?
Vintage 2015? Yes. Any Dell Latitude (mid tier business line) would have supported 3 monitors and would have been in the ~$1000 range, especially picked up off of Dell Outlet. I have Dell Latitude Windows machines from 2011 that supported 3 monitors.
Using what ports? I had Dells back then and at most they had one VGA or HDMI port.
If you’re referring to using a dongle with its own GPU like some of the modern Displaylink adapters, any Mac can do that.
Not dongle; docking station (old school ones with port on the bottom).
That wasn’t a capability of the laptop. The docking station had its own dedicated graphics hardware that drove the extra monitors. Of course the lowest end Macs can do that. When we talk about how many monitors a certain laptop can drive, we mean plugging them in directly to the laptop in some combination of HDMI ports and USB C/Thunderbolt ports.
This is embarrassing, just stop. You can go look up the specs of any chip and how many discrete displays the iGPU supported instead of bickering about what is or isn't a laptop feature. Citing sources isn't illegal or passe.
Here is the chip in my dogshit 2015 Ultrabook I still lug around, it very clearly states that the chip supports 3 displays regardless of how IO bandwidth is distributed on the mobo: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/88192/i...
I haven't kept up, but do they support display port daisy chaining and multi display docks now?
After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.
The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.
But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)
The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?
The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.
Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.
> it's still the best OS by a mile
I'm not so sure about that, modern Linux is pretty good — I was able to configure it to fit my needs much better than I could a mac. It's also free of dark patterns (looking at Windows).
If you're willing and able to configure Linux, I would say that, for some people, it's much better than a mac.
One of the main things I run on my Mac is Ableton Live, so Linux is a no-go.
Also, I'm no longer the kind of person who really wants to tinker with an OS set up and doing a lot of manual configuration. I just want a decent user experience out of the box and good connectivity with all my various peripherals.
> it's still the best OS by a mile.
I wish I could disagree, but Microsoft won't let me thanks to their determination and speed in destroying what was good about Windows.
Right now I find myself forced to use macos for iOS dev, and Windows for gaming-adjacent stuff. For the first time in 33 years, I truly wish I could just have Linux everywhere.
> Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about.
They all kind of blend together, so I asked Claude to give me a list of major features since 2020. Here are those that I've enjoyed:
* Universal control * iPhone mirroring * Stage Manager * Container CLI
Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff).
What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.
I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)
Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.
It's telling that to defend Apple against the charge of stagnation you immediately attacked Windows.
They only attacked Windows at the very end of their statement.
And I mean... They're not wrong.
I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines.
The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime.
My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption.
Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops...
In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
And the second sentence.
I use all three and I have to say Windows shitifize itself by adding too much ads, but if you can remove those than it’s a better experience than MacOS.
Someone else on HN has a line that I agree with:”Apple makes the OS apps mundane so that people can write replacements and sell those in App Store where Apple has a fat share”.
Windows 7 is the last good one. And that is only... Oh, almost 20 years ago. Never mind.
10 is OK if you remove the ads and stop random update. I’ll never use 11 and beyond. I always switched to Linux for my dev box and now that I play less and less game (haven’t played for weeks) I’ll switch to Linux for my personal box too, once the current one broke down.
Windows 7 was supported until 10 years ago.
Yeah, the version history as perceived by the vendor and as perceived by the commoner are somewhat out of touch. To me Windows 10 is basically new and already considered to be out-of-date.
Windows 10 Pro is actually a pretty decent OS. It brought quite a few major improvements over Windows 7 and I can't really think of any notable downsides.
I love the Mac, but the OS has gone nowhere in ages. I can't think of a new feature since APFS.
Have you _seen_ system preferences?
Insanely hostile permissions and "untrusted software" behavior.
Nobody seems to like Tahoe, but I can't really speak to it because I don't even want to install it.
If light years means not inundate the OS with ads, shove AI down our throats and redesign every app with regressed UX, then sure.
Actually in the latest MacOS release it constantly trains local models for all kinds of junk without asking you at all.
I had to disable all that AI garbage in the settings after researching a bunch of local inference and training processes that were grinding my MacBook to a halt every time it woke up from sleep.
Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.
The full screen thing was great on an 11” MacBook Air. It’s pretty useless on anything bigger.
> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas
At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).
Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).
Yeah, this book was hugely influential
https://www.google.com/search?q=innovator%27s+dilemma&ie=UTF...
And came to the conclusion that many firms like DEC and Xerox did not sufficiently move to new technology because their customers were not interested and didn’t feel served by it, at least not until it had decades to improve.
Today we have the FOMO dilemma where executives all read that book and no way they are going to end up like DEC or Xerox so you get things like Windows 8, really a lot of what Microsoft has done since then has been in the same vein. We’re yet to see a “big tech” company die from the FOMO dilemma but maybe 20 years back we’ll see Google or Facebook or Microsoft in that frame.
This more recently happened to IBM (as a computer manufacturer). If your platform is not accessible to hobbyists, the next generation will not be familiar with it, and when they go get a job, it probably won't be with the technology they don't know. Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes.
Yes, many companies even start with hobbyist tools. IBM proves that going all B2B is not a good idea.
The other end of the problem is Apple which is a consumer company, but they prohibit companies to use their hardware for building new things.
Both approaches suck for consumers and/or startups, but Apple's approach at least works for them from a business perspective.
> Then, assuming there is a credible alternative, the inaccessible technology will die out in a generation, as we've seen with IBM mainframes
Unfortunately IBM mainframes are still around. No new customers, but existing ones are too afraid of touching it because it's usually the result of decades of spaghetti hence they're locked in for the forseeble future. So they'll keep renewing contracts and refreshing hardware periodically. IBM prints money with this stuff, and use some of it for all their acquisitions of various software companies (biggest one was Red Hat) to leverage their massive B2B sales org to sell oher stuff to those existing customer relationships.
To their credit, IBM is still making zArchitecture chips that aren’t completely humiliated by x86 and ARM. Note also since 2000 IBM helped improve the Linux kernel and got it working in zArchitecture so if a business that has old COBOL or CICS applications wants to run some Linux apps in virtualization on the same machine they can.
The “CTO” at my small employer used this book to explain why we needed to stick with Perl and Oracle 9i in 2020.
Would that have failed? It still works
It sounds like your CTO took the opposite message of the book. Well the modern interpretation anyway. But can't really argue with not rewriting working code, even the Oracle licensing is probably is probably nothing in terms of cost. Might wanna update to a supported version though.
Well, almost the entire book is about how companies like DEC and Xerox just could not move to the new technology, whatever their decision makers decided.
I really don't understand the executives that read it and decide that "yeah, we are doing that impossible thing, disregard the sensible alternatives the book shows or thinking of something new!"
Windows 8: some people in the early 2010s (me!) thought laptops were cooked…. My hackathon kit from then was a dirt cheap Android tablet, plastic clip, Bluetooth keyboard and Bluetooth mouse. It looked so sleek compared to the MacBooks and gaming laptops everybody else had. I don’t think Microsoft was crazy chasing the tablet dream but I was the only one.
Meta Quest: Facebook has users, advertisers and all sorts of people who depend on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and such. Facebook knows that platforms like that fail eventually and doesn’t want to be the next MySpace so it has been struggling to get them into a virtual reality platform that, on a certain level, is well executed, but that people don’t have enthusiasm for. VR games for the Quest platform are pretty good but there are so many good flat games that I barely have time for them. I’d make the case that the 8GB MQ3 has enough RAM to run carefully optimized games but not enough for ordinary people to author content (some of why Horizon Worlds is dead: no way McDonalds is going to build an experience if they can’t import an SVG or PNG of the Coca-Cola logo to out in the cups and instead have to painstakingly make it out of solid geometry using the controller by hand… and the same is true for small businesses and enthusiasts) —- we are seeing 16GB headsets from Apple, Samsung and Valve now and maybe it will be better but quite probably it won’t. I know though that if Zuck gives up and somebody else succeeds he’ll have the most terrible regret.
Tablets weren't actually disruptive at the time.
That said, no, Microsoft wouldn't be crazy to make a tablet facade for Windows. What made them stupid (still not crazy) was to remove the desktop facade from their OS that sold exclusively to desktop users at the time.
You see this happening right now with LLMs. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc are incredibly worried about being disrupted. But all they can really do is try to shoehorn AI into their existing products (OSes, search, social media), which is a difficult sell to their existing customers.
Ultimately, LLMs will probably find their place in a new product category instead.
Link to Worldcat book information: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1423132421
Alibris link: https://www.alibris.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-When-New-Tech...
thanks, gp's google link was unusable for me (apparently my activity is unusual)
I thought the Google search link was some facetious joke at first. I’ve only seen people share a search result as a sarcastic “lmgtfy” response.
It was an accident on my part tapping away on my tablet when I was out of town.
Nobody seems to want to use Copilot, but Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing. They can just provision however many virtual coworkers to a Microsoft Teams instance and you'll be handing off documents and chatting with the AGI workers pretty much as you would any other remote worker.
Microsoft doesn't have to be first or best here. Just owning the plumbing of so many present-day workplaces with Teams and Office will make it hard to beat them.
> Microsoft is in a great position when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet. It'll have to happen soon enough that other companies aren't able to pivot in time, and despite what Altman says, I just don't see it happening at that timescale.
> While I don't disagree with you here, that's a helluva big bet.
And yet, one that Microsoft has the best chances. Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams. Google has its Workspaces thing plus its web wannabe-equivalents to Office, but that's it. And AWS is an infrastructure provider.
Microsoft in contrast? They're everywhere and most importantly, whatever is in Office 365 automatically has the "compliant" checkboxes ticked for auditors. And MS can easily ride the time until AGI or something coming reasonably close to it is marketable on that moat.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams.
Not from my experience. I see product managers/owners and software engineers using Macs more than Windows where I work, and it’s in healthcare, not SV. This move to Mac was gradual, starting ~10 years ago, and I believe a part of this was moving away from native apps to web apps.
To the sibling comments: Apple holds <10% of the worldwide PC market: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-01-1...
"Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams"
Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world. At every company i've worked for (3 tech companies, 1 digital agency), the Macbook is the default issued workstation unless you formally request a Windows laptop.
Some roles, like finance, tax, 3D design, favor Windows but that is generally because certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world.
Microsoft totally dominates non-tech companies though.
Apple's footprint in BigCorp is a drop in the ocean compared to MS. You said it yourself, "certain software they depend on only exists in the Windows world". That is intentional and the reason is because of MS dominance in BigCorp. Most makers don't find it worthwhile to spend so much time and resources building software for Apple when it has so few users at that level.
> Bad take. Apple has a strong presence within the tech and digital agency world.
Oh I'm aware, working at a digital agency myself. But that's not the "bigco" world aka S&P 500, DAX and the likes.
I worked at the second largest employer in the US. It was mostly Macs. You could choose whether you wanted a Mac or Windows computer.
> Apple has all but zero presence in BigCorp outside of social media and creative teams
Depends on the BigCorp. One of the most quentessential BigCorps out there, IBM, is deep into Apple stuff. As far as publicly shilling for Macs with extremely questionablly extrapolated data - they did a pilot with power users for a year, and came out saying Macs cost less in hardware and support than equivalent Windows Lenovos over the full lifecycle of the machine; which is literally impossible to know a year in a pilot with power users compared to the 4 year lifecycle for all sorts of people.
I'm very happy that "AGI office workers" will use Microsoft products - so I don't have to do it anymore... But: they will not pay a dime for the licenses...
For the average office task they don’t seem far off being competent, at least to the average workers quality.
Ai builder with gpt5 + workflow triggers is very capable already. 1-2 more model generation hops needed plus a bit more “agent” plumbing before its game over for the excel and word jobs.
Which average office tasks would those be? Writing project proposals? Putting budget numbers into a shared spreadsheet? Composing a progress report? Preparing presentation slides for an executive status update meeting? Writing performance reviews? Taking mandatory compliance training? Going to planning meetings?
One or two of these, I could see. Automated progress reports would be nice. But a lot of them aren’t about document generation, but about human accountability, about being a person who commits to something in writing. Automating away paper pushers means all the accountability lands on their bosses, leaving them nowhere to hide. It will be quite something if we manage to rewrite the corporate social context like this.
Relevant: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsofts-head-of-ai-do...
> when AGI "drop-in office workers" become a thing
How many more weeks? Also, is this before or after flying cars?
Looking like 2028-2030 but it's a moving target.
Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup, I guess it's going to be after flying cars.
I prefer fusion power as the go-to vapourware technology. It’s been “10-20 years out” for 70 years and counting.
I don’t see any reason to believe that “AGI office workers” will be ready to go by 2030. All signs right now are pointing to a looming plateau in their capabilities.
Fusion has halved the "interval until we get it" on those 50 years. AGI has doubled the "interval until we get it" twice already since 2022.
Those things are not the same kind of vaporware.
Could you name a specific person whose estimate of when we might get AGI has doubled twice since 2022? Or do you mean you found one person with a really short estimate in 2022, another person with a longer one in 2024, and another with a longer one now?
Also, if you compare with 50 years ago, AGI has also (better than) halved the interval experts are commonly predicting since then.
(Of course the experts could turn out to be hilariously wrong, for fusion or AI or both. I just don't think your comparison is anything like apples-to-apples.)
Fusion is always years away because funding has been at or below the minimal "fusion never" levels since the '70s: https://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf
> pointing to a looming plateau
Latest LLM's have already been declining in performance. It's not a plateau and it's not looming.
We don't know what the hell we are doing. Adding more training data and parameters only degrades LLMs after a certain threshold.
> Since we're basically getting flying cars next year at the World Cup
That's so funny. Regular people can't hahndle regular cars. Self-driving cars barely handle 2 dimensional space within very specific confines and rules, in good weather. Existing airspace is congested to the point of being problematic in most metro areas around the world.
"Flying cars" might be replacing some private heliopters, maybe. But they aren't going mainstream any time soon.
I also don't really understand what's supposed to be the line between flying car and helicopter.
Does the flying car need to also be street legal on the ground? Does it just not have to look too much like a helicopter?
I think it’s anything in the category of “way more common than a helicopter to the point where normal people use them”.
It needs to get through dense downtowns where there isn't much space between buildings, and wires and skyways to dodge as well. A skilled pilot could do it - but they wouldn't try because while space physically exists there isn't enough margin for error.
Ok Elon.
Idk they seem pretty serious
https://gizmodo.com/official-air-taxi-provider-of-the-2028-o...
People will just have the thing open in another window, and move the result over, rather than pay for a bunch of Teams licenses.
In general, we should expect more AI use to decrease the value of human oriented products. A word document is just some XML collection to a computer program. An AI won't need Word to create or edit the files.
Why don't we see companies adopting this setup with offshore workers if it's that "seamless" and easy to get started?
A new Turing test: when all the AGI worker bots would rather gargle razor blades than use Microsoft Teams, we might be close.
>use Microsoft Teams
Shit like this make rogue AI scenarios totally plausible. I won't wish that on my worst enemy
No, consumers are not tech debt to Microsoft.
Yes, Microsoft is shifting away from consumer technology.
The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset.
In 25 years Microsoft will be similar to Oracle. Maybe they’ll have investments in some consumer brands, but largely they will be selling to enterprises and governments.
> The difference is Microsoft is squeezing every last drop of profit from consumers on their way out. That’s not debt, that’s an asset
The term is 'cash cow'. Something you milk for cash rather than grow or improve
I am going to have to suspend my objection to the HN usage of MBA as a term of abuse because of where I learn the concept......
I'm young, I'll take that bet. In 25 years windows will still have greater than 50% consumer computer marketshare out of sheer momentum.
I'd be very surprised if "consumer computer" will be anything but a niche thing in 25 years.
It might be just a remote UI over "Windows Cloud Eternal" at that point but if by then we've moved to "Apple Forever OS" or "The Eternal Year of the Linux Desktop" I'll make a balanced diet out of hats
Honestly, a Phone/Dex style thin client that you connect to a bigger screen and that remotes into Windows Cloud Eternal seems like a solid sale for them
They sell you compute, plus a phone that gets renewed every 2-5 Years
I have been hearing the same for the last 20 years, if not longer, and yet the consumer computer remains strong.
> consumer computer remains strong
Besides techies I'm seeing more and more people not even having a personal computer at all, doing most of their "computing" on their phone and using their work computer for the rare task that does require a real computer.
The younger generations have actually regressed in computer proficiency, file management, etc.
That depends on your social circle. Among gamers, consoles are losing popularity and PC gaming is increasing, even in countries like Japan (where I live).
Absolutely no one said consumer computing was going away in 2005. What were they supposed to be replaced with?
Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer
(but looks like I got my timing wrong, as those were proposed 25~30 years ago!)
And those were mostly marketed toward businesses not consumers. Even your citation says the idea quickly died when computers were less than $1000.
Around 2000, was the time that eMachines were selling $400 desktops and you had promotions from places like MSN making them free if you signed a contract for dialup.
What are they going to be replaced with now? You still can't do anything actually useful on a mobile device. You need an actual computer to get anything done besides dicking around playing games or scrolling through apps.
People do “useful” things with mobile devices all of the time with only their phones. Most people don’t define “useful” as running VIM in a terminal and running Docker.
You might be shocked at how many people make big-ticket purchases and other "major" stuff on their phone.
8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.
We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.
We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
Before the AI stuff it seemed people assumed everything would get smaller and more portable continuously.
Not consumer computing, but desktop computers would disappear.
If the last 15 years are any indication, in less than 15 years, Microsoft will make Azure Linux their main OS and they'll skin the desktop edition to resurrect Lindows. It'll take a 2-5 years campaign to move most of the remaining Windows user base to it. Oh and also, it'll probably be free.
In 15 years, Windows will still be running hospitals and governments and Linux will have dropped back well below 5% desktop usage because using Linux on the desktop in the modern day is an ideological decision and literally never a technical one
Microsoft themselves have actually made it a technical one. By dropping support for perfectly fine computer without TPM/SecureBoot, they have made it an actual technical decision to install an alternative to their OS.
This seems like a more reasonable take. What I'm wondering is "Where will consumers go?"
They won't be shifting to Apple in any large numbers, many aren't willing to pay the price Apple is asking for a laptop. More and more I'd say that the average consumer if going to either use their work laptop, or their phone, for all their personal computing needs. Other that gamers, and the few of us who actually think that computers are fun (or at least they used to be), why would the average person buy a computer? My personal experience is that especially women just handle everything on their big ass phone anyway.
> The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot
That's a quite unfair take, especially when it fails to compare it with what things of note Linux distros have added over the last five years. Valve made Windows emulation better, yes. That's it. What else?
Actually, I wouldn't even call Copilot a thing of note. It's just ChatGPT-in-a-popup at the moment. A real thing of note is WSL2. It's a total game changer.
Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years such as an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
Most distros lack the features below, out of the box, which Windows has supported for years:
- "reset this PC" functionality
- a built-in anti-malware
- Touch/Face login
- Ability to enable FDE post-installation
- Hybrid-sleep
- Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
- Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
I agree that Microsoft needs to stop letting product groups get their way with screwing up user comfort on Windows for the sake of their arbitrary goals (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats) and keep it as a solid, bloat-free system that everyone can safely rely on. But, dismissing the existing pros of Windows is just unfair. Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
Disclaimer: I had to switch to Fedora on my old machines because Windows 11 weren't supported on them. That's an exceptionally rare incident where Microsoft dropped the ball on backwards compatibility. But that doesn't mean Windows itself is bad.
Clipboard history? Screen recording? Polished web browser? And none of these are available on most distros?
I think you ought to try "most distros" before making such claims.
> Windows has got many quality of life improvements over the recent years
Yeah, but they are far outweighed by the quality of life regressions that pushed me to desktop Linux a number of years ago. I only use Windows, begrudgingly, on my work laptop these days, and it just seems to get more bothersome as the years pass.
Linux used to require more install and post-install-setup effort to get me to my happy workflow place, but Windows overtook it a while back and has only been increasing its lead ever since as a result of a growing stack of defaults and unnecessary inclusions being, quite specifically, quality of life regressions (transgressions).
Something similar to reset PC would be snapshots and immutable systems.
Touch is notorious for there are very few touch sensors that actually have drivers for linux and vendors keep using unsupported ones.
Hybrid sleep... is actually a big problem as it replaced the regular sleep and now we are all in some deep deep muck.
And fractional scaling works fine on wayland, it is a recent feature of the last 1-2 years but seems to have stabilized.
Fractional scaling also works fine for decades in Xorg.
Another useful W11 feature (that later got backported to W10) is seamless integration with graphical Linux apps. You can just double click an icon on your desktop and it opens up in a window like any other app. Passkey support was added which made securely signing into site easier. Dev drive was added that makes it so building on windows is faster. Support for low latency Bluetooth was added.
> seamless integration with graphical Linux apps. You can just double click an icon on your desktop and it opens up in a window like any other app
You just described what Wine was able to do in Ubuntu since at least 2010
> Despite all the cons, it's still a very good OS.
I disagree, "a very good OS" wouldn't leave major issues unfixed for 5+ months and counting: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-admits-almost-...
If Windows was "a very good OS", us Windows sysadmins would've been out of a job a long time ago! A good portion of our job involves trying to fix or workaround things that Microsoft breaks every Patch Tuesday, logging tickets with Microsoft, dealing with the asinine Microsoft Support (who don't even know how to extract .cab files from the logs generated by the Microsoft Support Tool!), and implementing fixes and workarounds for unwanted "features" they manage to sneak into the latest update.
Actually, I concede that it is "a very good OS" - it is very good for keeping me employed!
> Hybrid-sleep
Linux supports hybrid sleep. It might not be enabled by default because if you have a lot of RAM it has a tendency to burn out consumer SSDs. Consider what happens if you have 64GB of RAM, a 512GB consumer SSD that supports 100 full drive writes in total and you enter into hybrid sleep twice a day for three years.
> Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Copy entire filesystem to backup. This isn't even a step because you were already doing it, right? Enable FDE and copy it back.
These ones are just Windows defect workarounds:
> "reset this PC" functionality
> a built-in anti-malware
> Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Windows messes itself up on a regular basis, requiring you to reset it; this is rare on stable Linux distributions and even then "reset this PC" is really just copying the user's documents and reinstalling the OS, which nobody cares about having a one-press button to do when they're not having to do it all the time.
Linux has functional package managers that people actually use, which makes the default way to install software be the one that isn't likely to introduce you to malware.
And the package managers recompile the software for whatever architecture you're using so you don't need to emulate a different one.
> Touch/Face login
I think people have tried to add this and the users went out of their way to remove it again. "Have the machine record your biometric data" is creepy and the security is bad because people leave their fingerprints on everything and post pictures of their face on the internet.
> Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
X has legacy issues with this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009035
Wayland supports it.
> X has legacy issues with this:
I don't get these complaints. Can you explain to me what the problem with `xrandr --output HDMI1 --scale 0.8x0.8` is?
> an extremely polished web browser, clipboard history, Windows Sandbox, screen recording, OCR, automatic private info redaction, Markdown support in Notepad and many more. None of those exists on most distros.
That is simply wrong. Some of them might be a package install away rather than there by default, but they are hardly features that Windows pioneered…
> automatic private info redaction
With regard to that, I wasn't aware of a direct end user feature for that in Windows. There are tools for it in Office, and from a programmers PoV in .Net, but these are things that will continue even if Windows gets canned because it is a tech debt problem: Office is still a cash cow and .Net is via VS/VSCode and funnelling people into Azure.
> - "reset this PC" functionality
Maybe not as a one-click, but just re-follow the installation instructions…
> - a built-in anti-malware
Good point, though it is less needed due to most users installing via OS package repos which offers some friction to malware installation. Individual services that particularly need it have support for it though (mail servers and such). This might become a bigger issue if the use of “curl -> bash” as an installation or quick-run method keeps gaining traction.
> - Touch/Face login
I'm a refusenik there so I don't care about that one - biometric are bad for authentication/authorisation as they can't be easily revoked! And I'm sure I've seen it done so it is at least available.
> - Ability to enable FDE post-installation
Valid, ish, but where FDE is required commercially it is going to be done on first install anyway, the same for most home users that care enough. And conversion is possible after-the-fact, just not in as automated a manner as with Windows.
> - Hybrid-sleep
Though while we are talking about that, proper hibernate has been broken on Windows on many laptops for some time.
> - Fast fractional HiDPI scaling
I can't comment on that, it isn't something I would need. Though it is worth pointing out that a great many applications on Windows don't handle HiDPI well anyway, especially when you have different scaling factors on different screens. This is the same on any OS I think.
> - Running x86 apps on AArch64 performantly
Again completely out of my wheelhouse so I can't really comment. Again, this feels like a niche issue for consumer use cases ATM - the situation may change quickly as demand increases.
> (like shoving Microsoft accounts, Teams, and anything Electron-based down our throats)
And bloody “AI”. They've put it in notepad…
Thankyou the Sirius Cybernetics Marketing Division!
Notepad had been perfect for two (three?) decades.
I think it was noticing that Notepad (and Calculator) in Windows 10 took a countable number of seconds to open, that's what pushed me over the edge into permanent Linux desktop land.
I like WSL, but their search bars have gotten worse which really kills any good will I have towards them.
On my work computer, the search bar can't even find Intellij which is installed in a totally normal way. It's even in the same folder as clion in the program files and it can find that one. I also had a problem where the file explorer couldn't find a file by name and it made me look like an idiot.
You know what feature my menu bar has though? I tells me when the s&p 500 goes down in value to try to make me panic sell. That's a feature I really want in my work computer's os menu /s.
Also when I clicked on the time, it used to show me a calendar, but now it shows me a pomodoro app?
I don't want more features in notepad, what I want is the os to do basic stuff, like finding my programs and files or show me the time, right.
I agree that a cheap MacBook and the steam machine are presenting a perfect storm situation for windows to lose some serious marketshare with casual/consumer users. Itll be interesting to see how or even if Microsoft reacts to this.
Microsoft dropping the ball on smartphones is their real problem.
Desktops are on the way out for consumers.
IDK I started running Bazzite on my workstation after Win11 died on me a couple weeks ago, and if it is the premier experience for Linux desktop gaming then we aren’t there yet. It is great as far as distros go, don’t get me wrong. But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died. I had to hack on it for a bit, then do it again with immutable OS patterns in mind. MS is certainly leaving an opportunity open for a new desktop OS. Would anyone dare offer a commercially supported consumer Linux OS?
How I see it is, of course you won't have a good time with Linux if you don't have compatible hardware. The stuff you're mentioning (flaky Wifi and Bluetooth) is a hallmark symptom of incompatible hardware, or newer hardware with immature drivers.
I personally use Linux for all my devices, but I'm also very intentional on making sure ALL my hardware is compatible with Linux.
If you have all hardware compatible with the mainline Linux kernel, generally you can achieve a ChromeOS-level of system stability and reliability.
But as soon as you introduce incompatible hardware, all of that goes out the window. It's why I only recommend Linux to users that have compatible hardware.
> But WiFi dies after waking from sleep, and bluetooth worked once then died.
That sounds like a hardware compatibility bug to me and not Bazzite's fault - I don't have those issues on my ThinkPad Z13, nor on my GPD Win Mini 2024.
I both 100% agree with you and also don't think our opinion matters.
The general consumer isn't going to hear "the manufacturer hasn't upstreamed stable drivers to the kernel" and suddenly stop blaming Linux if the hardware works in Windows.
The general consumer does not install an os and hardware with linux reinstalled tends not to have these problems
That's weird. I've been running it for years and it's been rock solid--but I've done so on Ryzen mini-PCs with very standardized hardware, and am not using it as any kind of desktop--purely as a game machine.
the KEYBOARD! on my windows 11 laptop often fails to work after coming out of sleep...
Let me guess... Mediatek?
Microsoft really should just open source Windows and completely abandon the OS market. They make their money on things like gaming, Office, and Azure. At this point, Windows is just a loss leader for other products. Outsource the dev cost with open source like phone makers do with Android.
> Number one is that Microsoft just does not feel like a consumer tech company at all anymore.
At least in terms of Windows/Office, Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company. They've always been focused on corporate sales.
There have always been consumer-focused side areas, from Bob to Encarta to MSN to Xbox.
But Microsoft's bread and butter has always been corporations. I don't understand how the author thinks it was different at any time in the past.
> Microsoft has never been a consumer tech company.
The Zune wasn't consumer tech?
Windows 95 was definitely consumer tech.
Windows XP was about making the Windows NT line accessible for home users going forward.
Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
> Weirdly, Windows Phone was aimed at consumers at a time when they really could have leveraged integrations with products like Exchange and Office to stand out.
This is because a completely under-appreciated apsect of the iPhone revolution was that it basically created the consumer smartphone market. Until then the only smartphone market that existed was the enterprise smartphone market, which was already locked up by BlackBerry and to a significant extent, Windows Mobile (with all the corporate integrations you mention), the predecessor to Windows Phone.
But that market was constrained to the phones that corporations would buy for specific employees, typically execs or senior employees, because the average consumer could not afford those at all. That's a tiny number.
And then the iPhone was originally released at the same price point.
This is why Ballmer was actually right to laugh at the iPhone at the time. The revolutionary UI could not overcome its fundamental unaffordability. I know because I had one through my employer, and I was the object of envy because none of my well-paid, tech-savvy peers in a relatively cosmopolitan major city could afford one.
What happened then was Apple or AT&T figured out that dropping the upfront price to $200 and amortizing the rest of the cost in the data plan suddenly made it accessible to the consumer market. If you look at smartphone sales, that is the point the hockeystick starts curving updwards.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Before Andy Ruben created Android, he created the T-Mobile Sidekick, which was a Java based consumer smartphone before iOS or Android.
Microsoft acquired Rubin's company for a Billion dollars and then spent so long rewriting everything from Java into .Net (before releasing it as the Microsoft Kin Phone) that it was dead on arrival.
> The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
Zune belongs with Bob and Encarta. I said Microsoft has had side areas.
But Win 95 and XP were were absolutely built for corporations.
Sure, XP came in separate "Home" and "Professional" editions. But the important thing is that it was the Home version that was missing features to make it cheaper -- not that the Professional edition was primarily a consumer product with some business functionality bolted on.
Obviously Windows has always been used by both home users and corporate users. But the bulk of Microsoft's revenue has always been from corporations. There is no sense in which Win 95 was designed primarily for individual consumers, and then business sales were somehow secondary.
You weren’t around at the Windows 95 introduction were you? There were a long line of consumers buying it and Gates went on the Tonight Show with Leno to promote it.
Windows NT was for businesses
They already had Windows CE and ActiveSync, the bane of many an IT support worker. It might be they expected phones to remain consumer-only, and the business world to keep using PDAs.
Apple announced ActiveSync support in coordination with Microsoft around 2009, Microsoft knew which way the wind was blowing.
They’re angering corporations too.
Those risk-adverse behemoths are slowly coming to terms with Microsoft breaking their platforms and bread-and-butter applications.
Indeed. Previously, every Patch Tuesday we used to pray that nothing would break in that patch cycle. Now we expect that things _will_ break, but hope that that whatever Microsoft breaks won't affect us, or is something minor, or gets patched quickly.
Also, thelast few months have been a nightmare for or us as we were doing our migrations to Windows 11 and found how much of a steaming pile of poo it was - I mean, we already had an inclination, but it was even worse than the rumours. Never seen a shittier OS in my life, and that's even after considering Windows ME.
2026 will finally be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Unironically it might actually be 2025.
In the last 18 months we've seen a lot of maturation in various linux distros trying to make them "out of the box" usable by people who are not all that technical. More GUI utilities, better stability, compatibility layers for gaming driving adoption, and dead simple setup.
Valve has been doing a lot of the work driving adoption from gamers with Proton, PulseAudio is suddenly way more functional and compatible, working Nvidia GPU drivers (565+), and immutable spins on distros have all made it so that linux overall is more approachable than ever.
I think we'll look back at 2025 and see it as the inflection point where suddenly linux became a viable alternative to Apple/Microsoft in a way it wasn't before, driven in part by development targeting a new demographic along with the spotlight on both the technical and consumer issues with OSX/Windows (such as patches bricking hardware, attempting to crowbar AI into everything, and antagonizing their customer base with things like subscriptions and data harvesting).
I am, unironically, considering this for my dad's computer: https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/
ChromeOS just works, go for it.
Because Windows 11 has ads in the start menu, we decided to switch to an OS made by the biggest online ad company. /s
With Android 17 coming with desktop mode, there is a good chance of that.
Gotta say the article hits the right notes. I'm one of the peeps thinking about whether I actually still need Windows. I'm not a power user of office and photoshop. I could in fact live with various online office-alike suites or Linux Libre office. I also no longer need a particular piece of software that only runs on Windows. The HW I have is well supported on Linux nowadays. The only real reason for still running it is games and most of those I still play run crossplatform in large-part due to Steam. The new features being announced sound like a MS board-cooked joke. Agentic OS? For who? Secretaries? Small businesses that need local AI crawlers to find - what - 3y old invoice? I don't get it. And lets not forget their plans to turn the octopus into a subscription-based model which to me sounds horrific and likely the final step to purging it off my machines. Still a good choice for non-tech-savvy users and for users forced into it due to OS-exclusive software. Hopefully not for long though. More competition in the space should hopefully spur some innovation.
> Considering Apple’s focus on consumers first
What does it mean specifically for the OS? What were the exciting improvements you've noticed that would entice that switch? Is the liquid glass design that is making it harder to read text "costumer first"?
> The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to
But also not entirely to game, so the case for an OS where almost all the basics/apps are even worse, why would they switch?
Most people I know under 30 are either running games or chrome. Word-processing etc (the odd tune they need it) is all in the browser
Author is using Microsoft and Windows interchangeably, this post is only about Windows.
Gaming is a bigger business for Microsoft than Windows and that can only ever be consumer focused. There's no mention of Xbox, nor an awareness that Microsoft published games are playable on the Steam Machine.
I don't think gaming is really bigger than windows. Gaming revenue is 23B in 2025 and Windows+Devices is 17B, so just in this metrics they're already close; but you have to factor how much of their 120B Office+Productivity line on their annual report only exist because people use Windows. If you take LinkedIn and Dynamics out of the equation you get approximately 100B in Office, Teams, SharePoint and stuff like that and people only use these product at scale because they're on Windows.
Microsoft is pushing the web-based O365 really hard tho.
And I use Office 365 from a browser in Debian.
Yes, the article should really be titled "Is Windows just tech debt to Microsoft?" and could have been published five or six years ago.
It would be a short article.
“Yah”
Gaming is a massive loss leader, MS will never make back the money they invested to buy other publishers. The subscription model will fail aswell, prices will have to go up more, to try and actually make some profit.
Microsoft has definitely angered consumers in the gaming space. Look what they've done to Minecraft, or the formerly beloved studios they bought out. The Game Pass price hike was not well-received.
Yeah there's lots of complaining but until they move to linux, stop buying their games and cancel their subscriptions nothing will change in the enshittification path.
> a version of Linux that is optimized for gamers
Bazzite has been great for me so far except for a few exceptions to okay with friends. With the end of support for 10 and the hostile crap Windows has become, I'm trying to see how to transition. Anti-cheat and business agreements seem to be the only real remaining barriers.
And to the original question: no, consumers are moat to the enterprise licensing pot of gold.
The way Microsoft are ruining Windows makes it seem like enterprise users are the tech debt they want to get rid off. Like making their servers non-deterministic by serving random ads or leaking secret content to their AI. It makes sense that they would rather have their customers run Linux on Azure, so they don't have to do R&D for their own OS.
The reason they are abandonning desktop is that it's much easier to serve ads on a mobile platform than a desktop one.
Consumers are leads and beta testers. Microsoft's business is licensing and reselling -- directly and via Azure. Their primary concerns are keeping businesses and developers happy. Consumers are a distant third.
There is value in training consumers on Windows & Office so they are familiar when coming to the office. MS needs to retain endpoint dominance in the workplace. They can't survive on server alone. Windows & Office endpoints are essential to their business. This is the leads channel.
They add pizazz to features and beta test them to consumers . Consumer licensing is moderate revenue but minimal income for Microsoft. Thus consumers are really beta testers.
So Microsoft will continue to provide low quality consumer experiences that don't fit the consumer market that well. The consumer market isn't their goal. It's a means to their actual business.
I think of it a different way. The consumer market (if Microsoft doesn’t value it) is holding them back from paying tech debt. The fear of regressions is a good reason to not touch stuff.
If you do value a market and ignore this, the consequences can be fatal (see Sonos). But if you don’t, then doing the minimum is rational.
I think it’s just like Steve Jobs said: they have no taste. That never changed and it causes them to fail time and again with innovations
I actually think Microsoft is often ahead of it's time with it's consumer-facing products, but executes very poorly. So they have good foresight, but "very bad taste" when it comes to execution.
Microsoft was early to making tablets, smartphones, living room PCs, etc. They just royally screw up the execution of each product category every time.
Maybe it'd be a fun idea for to take some of Microsoft's failed consumer ideas, and revisit them 10-15 years later to see if some other company successfully executes on it.
Making a bicycle with square wheels is not being ahead of it's time, though.
Most of the time MS is actually delivering something successful is when they are very late or bought it and put their sticker on it.
The problem with the last 15 years of Windows is the way that Microsoft did touch it, a lot.
I disagree. I think one of the main reasons most companies still give their employees Windows machines and use Windows Servers to support those employees applications (ie Outlook and Office) is because most of the world has grown up using Microsoft Windows and Office at home. If there was another world where most people grew up using MacOS, there’s just no way MS would have as much market share in the corporate world.
The proliferation of cheap agenting tools integrating with every SDLC stage makes building open source software faster and cheaper, which decreases the competition barrier with Microsoft's deep pockets, and decrease older propietary software market value significantly.
Another point not mentioned in this article is that Windows desktops are incredibly slow these days.
I did some compilation tests on a 2025 Windows desktop with an i9 vs some MacBooks and a new top-of-the-line Windows machine can’t even keep up with a bottom-tier M1 MacBook Pro.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/compiler-performance-on-2025-devi...
Did you turn off Microsoft Defender for the relevant directories? Otherwise you might be measuring malware scan performance more than compiler performance.
These are interesting results! You should post this without burying the lede that a 4 yo M1 outperforms a top of the line new intel laptop.
Some of that may be due to cpu architecture differences. What you have done is more or less an apples to oranges comparison.
Not rick roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSkM-QEeUg
No, Microsoft products are the tech debt everywhere
Someone should come up with an alternative
The way they’re treating windows users sure seems to support that view
A more interesting question to me (and one where MSFT employees here would have some insight) is to what degree is Windows' recent ABYSMAL fucking quality the result of AI, outsourcing, or bad management? You can also feel the difference in healthy employees vs. unhealthy, when you switch between something like VSCode (polished, fast, intelligent UI, not buggy, consistently improves) and Explorer (paleolithically slow, unstable, buggy, crashy, the worst version is always the latest).
> VSCode (polished, fast, ...) and Explorer (paleolithically slow,
In what world is VSCode fast when its startup time is multiples of Explorer (which had in recent news decided to preload itself to mask that issue) and they are the result of exactly the same fundamental shift from native to web native
VSCode starts up the same as any other IDE, and is responsive and snappy when using it. Explorer starts up about 100 times slower than any other file explorer, and is exceptionally while using it too.
Visual Studio is the one to compare to "any other heavy IDE", vs code is slow as a text editor due to chrome, not its ide features , and there are plenty of code editors with plugins that start much faster, though I won't make up 10000 times, it's only around 10
>vs code is slow as a text editor due to chrome
VSCode is an IDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
>Visual Studio is the one to compare to "any other heavy IDE"
Why? VSCode is an example of a well-made product from MSFT, unlike Explorer.
>and there are plenty of code editors with plugins that start much faster,
What IDE with plugins starts faster? And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
> VSCode is an IDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
Now try to follow your own sources, both links for that sentence call it a code editor with MS doing the correct reverence " happy with using a regular code editor like Sublime Text instead of a full IDE like Visual Studio."! It's also called so on its official page "The open source AI code editor" So try to make an actual argument/use a proper source for one instead of treating wikis as the ultimate truth
> What IDE with plugins starts faster?
Sublime Text, which is as much an IDE as VSCode
> And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
You're, you are responding to a point about very slow startup time
The competition is IntelliJ, which can be slow as molasses.
Visual Studio is the competition to IntelliJ
Fifteen years ago every piece of hardware supported windows and windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi so a lot of novel and very custom software was written (guilty as charged). The good thing is that most of these still work, as windows has thankfully not fucked with the underlying Win32 libraries. The bad thing is that this one piece of custom software was probably written by someone of retirement age and it is probably what's running the company.
This is just life, the same will happen to your latest wiz-bang program you wrote today in ten or fifteen years, good companies insist on the source code and/or plan for obsolescence, others become cash cows for the software industry or die.
> I just do not see excitement there.
I feel like the culture at large has shifted from doing what's exciting to doing what's safe, from actor's point of view.
When I started using Linux about 10 years ago, whenever I bought a new computer, I would keep a partition for Windows just in case for dual boot... Nowadays I just wipe it all clean.
It's weird to think I'm still paying for the Windows license because I like to buy from a physical store and they don't have alternatives.
Microsoft has become a bit like Oracle... You don't need what they make anymore but you have to keep paying for it. It's like the company has entered into retirement and society is still supporting it... But the difference is it never dies of old age to make room for new generations of companies.
If the government forced Microsoft to divest itself from Windows, I'm not sure Microsoft wouldn't be thankful for the excuse to jettison it.
People need to have realistic expectations of large corporations.
The old microsoft is dead. It's not coming back. I'm sorry if you used to like what they did - all those people are gone now. Just the name is the same.