I just can't get behind either the Surface or Macbook Pro. I had a Macbook that my wife has taken over and I'm currently rockin' an Asus ultrabook that has a 15" screen. I love the bigger screens and 13" is just way to small for me. For the price of a Surface Book I could get a Dell/HP/Lenovo with a 15" screen, 32GB of memory and a large SSD.
It's a function of how you use your computer. I travel a lot and find 13" is a pretty good compromise between portability and usability. No way would I travel with a 15". I do sometimes just go with a small Asus Flip Chromebook but with the knowledge that I can't use it for everything.
I think it also depends on how you travel. I have a 4 hour commute each day but it is on the train. I'm lucky enough to be at the first stop each way so I typically get a seat and the train is typically empty enough so I get a seat to myself. Because of that I'm able to plop my 15" laptop on my and go to town. When I fly it is more of an issue because of the limited space, so I definitely understand why a 13" becomes a better option.
13.5" is great for portability - my surface book is small enough to slip into a satchel in a way that a larger laptop wouldn't, and light enough to do that with. Before I got it I used to have two laptops (an 11" ultrabook for travel and an 18" gaming laptop), but the surface book replaces both - powerful enough to game on but small enough to transport. I used to be a big fan of the big screens, but you adjust quickly, and the resolution is high which is the main thing; I could keep a screen plugged into my surface dock if I wanted to use a bigger screen at home, though so far I haven't felt the need.
I have a close to 4 hour train commute per day and I just bring my 15" laptop on the train with me. I have a laptop section in my backpack so carrying it isn't an issue. Being on the train is typically the only time I bring my laptop out of the house as it is a long ride to work on side projects. If I had to do more travel, especially on a plane, then I could definitely see how a 13.5" screen would be worth it.
> But the equivalent MacBook is thinner than a lecture pad
Sure, but how much value do you get from that? Weight matters, diagonal matters, but thickness alone makes very little difference unless we're talking about something too thick to fit into a satchel.
> and more powerful at most price points.
I don't think that's true? The top and bottom end specs are pretty similar IIRC (same RAM, similar processor, similar resolution...), except for the Surface having a touchscreen, and the price points are mostly higher for the MacBook.
I agree with you. I use a surface pro 3 as my daily driver but I have two 23" monitors I plug it into. I can only use the 13" screen for movie watching and reading.
I bought the SP a while ago, before the two monitors. If I had my druthers I'd go with something more powerful. Either a dedicated desktop rig or a beefier laptop
15" is way too small for me. Basically it boils down to differences in usage patterns.
For my part I have a 17" laptop that is almost exclusively for home office use, a 11" chromebook for meetings or light work away from home, and an 8" tablet for entertainment and the odd emergency ssh session (I can fix servers over ssh from my phone too, but it's not exactly a fun experience).
The way I see it, there's no single form-factor that'll keep me happy, so I'd rather go for multiple.
I don't think people will ever agree on a single screen size or what other specs actually matters (e.g. I do have an SSD in my laptop, but quickly realises it doesn't really matter what type of storage I have, because I boot, I start Chrome and a bunch of terminals + ssh sessions, and then I rarely touch disk again; meanwhile other people load and store massive files regularly)
> For my part I have a 17" laptop that is almost exclusively for home office use, a 11" chromebook for meetings or light work away from home, and an 8" tablet for entertainment and the odd emergency ssh session (I can fix servers over ssh from my phone too, but it's not exactly a fun experience).
15" is perfect for all-around use. Plug in an external monitor or two and you won't notice the difference between 17", and it's still plenty portable in any bag that holds more than a tablet.
I used a 15" for years, and I'll never use a 15" again. Plugging in an external monitor was a workaround that helped when I was at a desk, but much of the time I much prefer to have my laptop actually on my lap in a comfortable chair or on the couch, where external monitors is not an option.
And it's still way too big for my travel needs. Yes, it fits in my bag, but I regularly have other things I want to take with me too.
So back to my point: It depends on your usage pattern.
A desktop would be very uncomfortable to use from the couch, or my bed, or my living room table, or kitchen table, or any of the many other places in the house I enjoy being able to sit down when I fel like it... It's about being "luggable". I might very well look for an 18" or bigger next time.
Regarding the 11" I sort of agree - it's for note taking in meetings and the occasional use on trains etc., not for anything that requires very frequent use. I only went that small exactly because I don't need to use it very often. If I did more meetings, I might have used a somewhat bigger one.
That's very similar to what I used to have pre-Surface Book. But I found that the Surface Book was small and light enough to replace the 11", but powerful enough to replace the 17" (I have a Surface Dock for the "home office" part - leave stuff connected to the dock (which could include a big screen, though I haven't found the need yet - the 13.5" screen is high-resolution and very clear, so it ends up being more readable than the larger screen it replaced), but take the laptop itself travelling when need be). The tablet form is a bit clunky, but close enough that the convenience of a single device outweighs having a lighter dedicated tablet (in fairness I was on a 10" tablet, and I have a 6"+ phone that probably displaces some 8" use cases).
I don't think we'll ever see a single form factor dominate as such, but a single device that can shift between form factors simplifies things a lot, I think that's the future.
For my part, I just can't work on a smaller screen. I certainly get what you mean regarding getting away with smaller screens with a higher quality and/or higher resolution screen - I'll never go back to less than full HD for my phones, for example, - but the distance of my laptop screen is largely dictated by the attachment to the keyboard (if someone offers a hinged display that can be lifted up closer to the face, perhaps) and I've found not being forced to lean in towards the screen while working is essential to my physical comfort, but I want to be able to largely fill my field of view.
My current laptop "only" has a full hd screen, but it was well over half the cost of my not-at-all-cheap custom build laptop when I bought it, and I expect to spend a similar proportion of the cost of my next laptop on an above average screen (edit: which will mean at a "4K" 17" screen, most likely)
I'm all for a single computing device, but not a single screen size. I don't think we'll ever settle on a single screen-type until/unless we have good enough head mountable screen replacements.
Almost certainly untrue. Most iphone users are still Windows PC users. Yes the developer community is important to the iOS app lead, but most of that is due to the self selecting group of people who purchase iphones - people willing to pay for things.
It's more indirect than that: the apps exist because of Mac using developers. Without the developers having access to Xcode/Swift/etc the quality and number of apps would decline in favor of android.
Again, Microsoft refuses to provide numbers but vaguely claims “our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever.”
If you go from 5 trade ins to 7, you can site your best year ever. It doesn't mean you've made a dent. I can see that people are disappointed in the new MacBook, but there are very few I know that would just say "screw it, I'm switching platforms." Admittedly, my friends are mostly designers and developers, so it's a biased sample, but I'm a little skeptical about the numbers.
True, but seeing that trend upwards allows Microsoft to put more dollars towards developing Surface.
I don't know if Microsoft has reached parity with Apple with professional development machines, but it does look like they've set themselves up to be a contender for next generations.
With increased internal funding, they may actually achieve that goal.
> I don't know if Microsoft has reached parity with Apple with professional development machines
I assume they are still way off, and may not catch up in the near future. But I also think for Microsoft that's not a problem: when professional developers buy a nice Dell or a Lenovo model instead of a Mac, and run it on Windows, that's still a win for Microsoft. Surface is also meant to show that PC's do not have to suck.
I have both a Asus ultrabook running Win10 and a Macbook Air. Win10 has a harder job to do because it has to work on third party hardware they don't have control over.
OSX has complete control over their hardware, so the overall impression I get is that more attention can be dedicated to the small details. I also prefer UNIX over CMD(?).
What I have noticed is a sense of diminishing returns from the Apple camp. There just haven't been any really compelling innovations for years now. Microsoft seems to have fixed its development processes to actually start building compelling technology, and since they have lagged behind the gains are bigger.
Personally, I think Apple needs a kick in the pants; the thought that Microsoft is positioning itself to be real competition hopefully pushes both companies to build better products. Capitalism, right?
*PS: Apple should be careful though, Microsoft knows how to exploit an opportunity.
the surface studio looks great. i'd love them to come up with an IDE that takes advantage of touch.
my proposal is: the basic structure of code is represented visually via an AST, i.e the folders,files,classes,method and public variables and public variables and constants. and they could tie in tests and have test show up within that space.
Do people really want to switch from a rock-solid, sandboxed Unix to an inferior OS like Windows? Did people already forget the crazy days of regedit, zero app sandboxing, inconsistent installers, anti-viruses etc?
I wish more people jumped ship to Linux instead of the Apple/Windows duopoly, but if wishes were horses...
Windows of today is not the Windows of 10 years ago, and the Apple of today is not the Apple of 10 years ago.
Windows has improved considerably over the past decade, while Apple has shifted away from the professional market. It is realistic to believe that at least some people would switch platforms.
>> It is realistic to believe that at least some people would switch platforms.
I know "Post-PC" is the more popular buzzword, but "Post-OS" is probably a good one to use.
So much stuff is in the cloud these days that a lot of non-developers and non-creatives can probably use any OS these days without too much pain.
I switched to Windows from Mac a couple of years ago, and honestly, I don't miss it much. I did have to write off a pile of Mac software purchases, but I found reasonably priced alternatives that work as well.
If I get sick of Windows, I can easily transition to something else. Outside of some platform specific games, I can do just about everything I do now on another OS.
I detest Windows and much prefer Linux, but I have used OS X at work for years before, and caused it to crash regularly. Your experience will greatly depend on what applications you use and your usage pattern. I'd prefer more people switched to Linux too, but it's by no means certain that their experience would be better.
I believe it. I just abandoned Apple after years of loyalty. I looked hard at Surfaces and after considering them for a while I decided they weren't ready to be my main dev machine, so I went with a Thinkpad. But Microsoft is doing great stuff with its hardware lately.
Same, I bailed for a Dell Precision this year, though I'm running Fedora, not Windows. Apple has steadily lost direction over the past 5 or so years and it shows. There's no way I'd buy a new laptop with nothing but USB-C, a headphone jack, and a million dongles.
Sure, that is great, but even with prior generations of MacBooks dongles were a hinderance. I'd end up at the end of a conference with at least a couple mini-Displayport to VGA adapters from people who were presenting but forgot them for one reason or another, and I'd usually only be able to get 2/3rds of said dongles back to their rightful owners.
With USB C at least for now, this will be a constant source of fustration for users who don't own a Google Pixel and have to deal with legacy hardware (everything else out on the market). That being said, USB C itself is great, Apple should adopt it on the iPhone.
I looked at a surface book last month, decided to stick one more cycle with the new MBP, but I was moderately tempted. Hardware looks and felt pretty good. Biggest drawback was window 10 itself - too many colleagues and clients still have daily issues with it (mostly unscheduled updates and downtime) - I don't want to deal with that right now. But if it shakes out and stabilizes in the next couple years, a Surface might be my day to day machine then.
I hope my MBPr doesn't die on me for another year and in the meantime Cook will see some sense. I have to say I'm not in love with the Surface either, but their trajectory seems opposite to the Apple one: MS now "gets" what developers want, even non-MS ones. The change of CEO did wonders for them, whereas it seems to have sent Cupertino on the path of being Yet Another Consumer Electronics Company.
Microsoft is doing excellent stuff with hardware. It's a pity that it comes at the price of being bundled with their user-hostile nightmare of an operating system.
I've been using Macs since 2008. My next machine will probably be a Thinkpad or a Dell. Apple has dropped the ball too many times now, both hardware and software vice. And somehow everything Apple does now feels stale and off mark.
No OS license key. No "Patch Tuesday". No finger pointing between hardware vendor and OS vendor. No third party drivers necessary to clean boot.
Built-in backup system, both to "cloud" if desired or external hard disk if preferred. Application signing that serves to protect users rather than nag them into unquestioningly running anything and everything as administrator.
Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software available for UNIX/BSD.
Apple hasn't dropped the ball. You'll realize this once you end up in the Windows world frustrated and trying to do the same things you take for granted now.
Not something you see as a user, at least on the Surface.
> No "Patch Tuesday"
Because Apple leaves you running vulnerable software for months at a time. (Remember the zlib double free?)
> No finger pointing between hardware vendor and OS vendor. No third party drivers necessary to clean boot.
Not an issue with Surface.
> Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software available for UNIX/BSD.
"Linux on Windows" may theoretically be non-native but it's a better experience than mac - real apt-get, install anything that works on Ubuntu without having to compile anything yourself. And has OSX figured out how to display any OSS GUIs yet?
The double-free thing dates from 2002. I'm sure there's better examples than that.
The Surface is a big step forward in terms of eliminating a lot of nuisances from the Windows experience but it also proves that the biggest nuisance of all is OEMs. Eliminating them also cuts out a lot of reasons for using Windows in the first place, like low-cost equipment. I agree it's a great product, but it's also great because of the tight integration you get with a unified hardware/OS vendor. Dell, HP and others don't have this luxury, so their experience is always second-rate.
Also "Linux on Windows" is a huge step forwards, but sheesh, it's still atrocious compared to proper native support. It's like a slick version of Cygwin. Remarkable but not a drop-in replacement for Linux.
You can compile GUI apps on macOS, but I've never needed to. The one app that depended on that was Wireshark, but I found a way to use tcpdump instead. It's mostly a non-issue.
> Also "Linux on Windows" is a huge step forwards, but sheesh, it's still atrocious compared to proper native support. It's like a slick version of Cygwin. Remarkable but not a drop-in replacement for Linux.
What's the practical distinction you're making? I develop a program that has Linux as its primary platform there. It gives you a closer-to-Linux experience than OSX does.
I can't believe anyone using macOS for their professional workflow would consider switching to Windows 10 despite all the criticism leveled at Apple's hardware (most of which I think is totally justified).
I use Windows professionally (for .NET development) and I think Windows 10 is still light-years behind, with an unstable, jarring OS experience full of bugs and niggles and unloved and underdeveloped touch interface. I would love the opportunity to move to macOS and iOS professionally. Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison.
If by "professional workflow" you mean programming, I agree. But I'd have no problem using Linux for that instead of MacOS.
However, for many "professional workflow" means using the MS Office suite and a browser. For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
It's only free to the original buyer of a new Mac since something like 4 - 5 years ago. If you've never bought a new Mac and registered it with your Apple ID, it's not free.
I always thought it was free too, but learned otherwise recently from a colleague battling with it.
I think this was flagged down because it was flippant but the statement is true and insightful. And I think it's is a big driver of why the App Store went to FTP.
I've eaten €1500 meals at 3 star restaurants like L'Ambroisie and $10 Grand Slam meals at denny's. They fill different roles and both can be enjoyable.
For years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was really quite good and which my wife loved to visit. I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good, I always felt the bill was 50% higher than it should have been.
In the case of apps, most of them, for most users, don't justify the time put into them. Since that's true, people aren't idiots and won't take an up front risk on buying an app that doesn't work for them. That's why free download/in app purchase to really use has really taken off.
Oh, and it's well worth it to me to pay for a Mac. The fact that it's true for me doesn't justify your decision to buy a Mac or contradict your decision not to.
> I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good...
...supply and demand. That you were willing to eat there despite the higher prices suggests you found value in the food. You can bitch about higher prices all you want, but you paid them.
Likewise, for a lot of professionals the difference between a $3000 MacBook and a $1500 Windows notebook over the lifespan of 3-4 years is inconsequential. You could easily make up the difference by brewing your own coffee versus getting something at a store.
> ...supply and demand. That you were willing to eat there despite the higher prices suggests you found value in the food. You can bitch about higher prices all you want, but you paid them.
Yes, well the decision criterion was that it made my wife happy. So I suppose they optimized for that factor :-).
I've had fine experiences with Java, Javascript, and Python development on windows. I've developed also on Mac and Linux and after maybe a getting used to the the workflow on each system I haven't found the OS to be a major impediment for me outside of some tools and libraries only existing on certain platforms.
Many would use Surfaces with Linux. They are excellent hardware, albeit tricky to run Linux on as they include some exotic components for touch recognition and dreadful Marvell network adapters.
"Great" on Windows is "typical" on macOS. The approach to rendering fonts is completely different, where Windows tends to nudge things towards pixel boundaries and in so doing ends up distorting the type considerably.
Font rendering on Windows is barely better than Linux.
It really depends on DPI of your monitor. I have both MBPr and Windows PC with 4k 24'' monitor. On FullHD I can't look at Windows, on 4k it looks great (UI looks more sharp than in macOS, fonts looks almost as good as in macOS). And Linux fonts rendering is not even near - last time I saw it, it was completely awful, although it was on FullHD monitor, not 4k.
Seems just fine on my 1080p 22" monitor, or on this 26" 2560x1600 monitor beside it. Then again I'm a dirty Gnome user on Debian, so perhaps my vanilaness is saving me. But even a few years ago on my last A8 & 1080P 15.6" laptop it was fine, definitely much better than 1366 by potato.
On 4K a Windows machine looks tolerable, but I'd hold back from calling it "great". It's more like the deficiencies are less obvious.
Windows has long been indifferent to faithfully representing fonts, to accurately representing colors. They've always promoted readability at the cost of mangling fonts, and of performance.
The macOS rendering system has always been set up with high-DPI displays in mind, they were able to work out a lot of rendering problems on things like the iPhone and iPad before committing to the computer version of same.
Windows on a 4K display looks close to but not quite as good as a Mac on a 1440p display, it's just that stark.
This is all personal preference obviously, but having done a lot of design work I'm more easily irritated by little quirks.
Windows itself isn't bad, but the driver ecosystem is completely rotten. Any muppet with a code signing certificate is apparently capable of writing driver code that gets injected into the kernel.
I've had various issues on two separate clean installs of Windows 10 in the last two weeks, one of which was the start menu being broken, and the user profile being damaged to the point where I had to do a full reinstall. Official App Store apps don't install for various reasons (Onedrive) or become damaged etc.
I guess this may be a case of 'grass being greener' as suggested by someone else in this thread. I just don't seem to remember having any of these issues on my 2010 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Then again, this is purely anecdotal.
Win 10 is pretty stable, but I for one had all kinds of issues when it just installed the Anniversary Update on it's own. I couldn't use my start menu without the computer locking up for about a minute. Spent a few hours researching it, tried multiple fixes which didn't work.
This is definitely an example of YMMV, if someone claims that macOS is better than Windows because of a prettier UI and smoother font rendering, I simply laugh.
For me it is more important to have a file manager that doesn't lock itself creating .DS_Store files in the middle of an I/O operation (ex. copying a folder from an external drive).
To be fair, Windows has the same issue with Thumbs.db files, but I can't remember the last time it happened to me, in contrast, with macOS it is annoyingly easy to trigger error -36, just connect a clean drive and copy a big folder...
Yes, it still uses them on (certain types of) external drives (in certain types of folders) and in folders that already have them from a previous version of Windows (sometimes), but nowhere to the extent that it used to use them (because there now is a central cache for most of them), and nowhere near the extent that macOS uses .DS_Store.
ETA: All of which is why my first post said "most drives"...
Two days ago, immediately after several programs crashed and shortly before the entire OS locked up, I managed to capture this: http://i.imgur.com/ecCPlcs.png
That is Crash Reporter crashing. The following is the last screenshot I was able to take before the system stopped being able to write files: http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png
Sierra has been an absolute nightmare in every respect that I have been forced to reboot on a weekly basis.
Apple's precipitous and continuing software quality decline is not an exaggeration or an illusion. It is flat reality. Professionals with any awareness should be evaluating their alternatives very seriously.
The Mac has passed the hardware diagnostics at the Apple Store multiple times. The components are unchanged from Yosemite, which did not have these issues. The OS has been freshly reinstalled, with the same problems.
This is also just one of a myriad of issues that have plagued the OS. Sierra has introduced me to new and wonderful ways to fail: http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png
If git is failing due to a system-wide file limit, that would explain why other programs are also failing. Perhaps some process has gone mad with creating files and if you find and delete those it will help things recover. (I agree with your general point -- just trying to be helpful in getting your computer back working.)
I reached the same conclusion, and the prime suspect in my investigations is Safari 10. However, once the system has hit the file limit, it never fully recovers without a reboot.
Google "too many open files" and you'll find posts about OS X but also Linux. Could it be git itself that's hitting a limit? Maybe you're hitting the shell's ulimit, not the system's per process or per-system open files max.
Yeah, pretty much this. If you get macOS to pop out an error that it can't find Finder (especially on 10.11>, which has SIP), you dun pretty goofed. macOS (especially with SIP) is by far the most stable of the big three OSes. Windows its shortcomings are known, but as far as Linux goes (numbering is only for clarity):
1. No default power management. Why isn't TLP installed and activated by default on systems that are known to work with it? Macbooks get 12-13h on macOS vs 5h on Linux. The XPS13 gets 22h on Windows vs 11h(!) on Linux. Ubuntu 16.04 on my MBP 13" 2015 gets 7h with TLP and Powertop configured, so even with those tools there's still a very large discrepancy.
2. Package hell. Yes, shared libraries have advantages. No, they don't outweigh the benefits of containerizing. By now (with 'Snappy Packages' and 'Flatpak' getting bigger) its finally getting fixed, but still.
3. There is no unified repo, and no unified package manager. There's Pacman, RPM, apt, etc. etc. and if you switch distro's you have to re-learn. Now I understand that this is due to each distro being like a micro-country, but imagine this: 3x3 unified repos (free, non-free and community) each with 3 levels (bleeding edge, testing, stable). All distros could(would) tap into these repos, so you combine the efforts of every distro its maintainers. Same for the package manager development. For distro-specific stuff the distros could just use a separate repo
4. UI. There's 2 different UI toolkits (QT and GTK) that both are configured differently, behave slightly differently and thus something (usually the QT apps since GTK is used more often) feels 'off'. This split also gives issues with scaling sometimes. macOS does this perfectly with pretty much everything using Cocoa and having all options on the menubar. Saving is always under 'file', and 'file' is always in the same location. Same for 'Edit', 'View', etc. So far only Ubuntu replicates this, and they do it for a good reason.
And those are only a few of my pet peeves. Here's a full list by someone that has much better knowledge of Linux than me. Quite staggering really.[0]
Wow, we have a bunch on order at our office. If we have even half these problems they are all going back and we're getting Dell's or Lenovo's. Which is a really sad and disappointing outcome for me to consider.
I was a solid proponent of OSX for all development. I've only had to go through 2 macbooks in the better part of a decade, upgrading the OSX versions along the way ... and so, when it was time recently to buy macbook #3, I was actually a little sad that Apple's slipped so much recently and I had to go with an Asus zenbook (of course gutting windows 10 and running Ubuntu :-) Its running great, with none of the issues I was having with Mavericks.
yes, I would've liked to stick with Apple & OSX.
no, I don't feel I could and still be as productive as I need to be.
I considered all these issues and just ordered the new XPS 13 Dev Edition. I'm a bit nervous about making the change (and the rest of my ecosystem is macOS/iOS), but kinda excited.
I just installed Windows 10. My start menu by default was full of stuff I will never ever use. After deleting/uninstalling apps (where it would allow me) the OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable.
Wait until you get the random start menu no longer works bug. Not only does the start menu not appear, clicking on the File Explorer icon will take 30 + seconds to open, every time. There are links where thousands of people have posted various fixes but from my understanding MSFT hasn't actually fixed the underlying cause. To their credit they have released a utility that fixes the issue however.
"OS decides to install Candy Crush and other games I never asked for. Unacceptable. " - I would like more details on this. I don't think I've heard of that before?
Not sure if you're being sarcastic (there's the non-Nexus Android experience after all), but I did a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro on my gaming machine a while ago. Full retail license and an official .iso downloaded from Microsoft. There's barely anything installed on that machine, however I was also surprised to find Candy Crush in my start menu after a while. It's probably just a shortcut to the store, but it does look quite a bit like it's already installed.
by default windows 10 will show you 'suggested' apps in your start menu programs list. This can be disabled in the settings (just open settings and search for suggestions)
The OS puts Candy Crush in your menu and it's installed on demand. So to users it will seem like it's always been installed.
All the pre-installed software is my big pet peeve for Windows 10. I don't want weather, or contacts, or xbox, or 3d builder, or email, or alarms, or skype, or office, or calendar, or groove, or money, or news, etc... I've deleted them and they just come back because of some provisioning setting.
Things like Candy Crush, Skype, and Office aren't the full installs but instead are stubs that install the applications on first run. Even if you buy a retail copy of Windows 10, that junk is still in there.
A signature edition makes sure that the only crapware is stuff that Microsoft installed.
Microsoft deserves every bit of ridicule lobbed its way for adding advertising to it's start menu in Win10. That being said they aren't the only offender, my iPhone has a folder of apps called Apple Trash filled with Apple's collection of worthless default apps that can't be removed from iOS.
If you're on iOS 10 you can 'remove' (more akin to the 'disable' function on Android) them. However, this also kills functionality associated with that app. You can't say 'hey Siri what song am I hearing' if you have removed the Music app.
While I agree that it's more a minor annoyance than a dealbreaker (for me at least), the fact remains that there's a big difference between including a simple game or two and installing (or "suggestive-selling") a "freemium" money-sink from a third party.
Basically the way I look at it in order of annoyance/offensiveness:
- Free, standalone application made by same company (this is a free gift as far as I'm concerned)
- Free, standalone application made by another company (ok, this is starting to approach crapware but as long as it can be uninstalled and doesn't try to sell me anything, I'll deal)
- Link, installer, or preinstalled application that requires later purchase from same company (OK, this is an ad and pretty offensive)
- Link, installer, or preinstalled application requiring later purchase from third party (this is most certainly unwanted crapware that they were paid to include)
> Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison.
I've heard a number of people say this, and I'm always puzzled because it is exactly the opposite for me. Running on the same hardware (late 2013 MBPR 15"), Windows 10 font rendering is much more pleasing to my eyes. When I boot into OSX, the text looks terrible to me. (I'm still running El Capitan - has text rendering changed in Sierra?)
One thing I did in Windows that I recommend to everyone: I went through the ClearType tuner and adjusted the settings to my taste. I picked darker and heavier text compared to the defaults. That really punched up the rendering; everything is so crisp and clear, much nicer to my eyes than the blurry text in OSX.
I understand that OSX text rendering may be more typographically accurate, and I have some sympathy for that view. I appreciate good typography, especially after working at Adobe many years ago. (I built the first scalable font system for Windows, Adobe Type Manager.) But OSX text just doesn't look good to me.
And of course I don't disagree with anyone who prefers OSX/macOS text rendering, since this is very much a matter of personal taste.
I am no professional in typography nor have I used any other Mac than the Macbook 12" (2015), but putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen), I still like macOS' text rendering a lot more.
Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text.
Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes.
However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?
>> putting it side by side with my Acer Predator Z35 (35" curved screen)
The reason why you notice the difference is because of the low DPI for the screen size on your Z35. Windows fonts render badly on those screens at small point sizes. If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.
> If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.
Oh, I'm sure of it. Thing is though, I picked the Z35 and not the Z34 because I also want to game on the machine and going to [almost] 4K was a no-go, even with a GTX 980.
I suppose one day I might just switch to huge dual-monitor setup: one for gaming and one for everything else. Seems like quite a hassle though, having in mind that my Z35 occupies a huge chunk of my otherwise pretty big desk.
I have 2 x 27" 4K screens side by side (at 1:1 text scaling - yes, I'm crazy, but it's for work so the tradeoffs were worth it for me).
You can still play your games at 1080p on a 4K screen - the pixels divide up evenly by 4, so I don't think it would look any worse than playing on a native 1080p panel of the same size.
If you really, really want mac style text rendering on your monitor, check out an app called MacType. The text will look much closer to how Mac renders fonts.
Higher pixel density makes a huge difference in text quality, of course. Your MacBook has 226 pixels per inch, and the Acer Predator Z35 has a very low 79 pixels per inch - that's almost a 3:1 difference linearly, and more than 8:1 by area.
On other words, given the same physical text size on each monitor, your MacBook is using more than eight times the number of pixels to render each character.
Given a choice between macOS on a 226 PPI monitor and any other OS on a 79 PPI monitor, I would definitely prefer macOS too. :-)
You're right that the best way to compare font rendering is on the same monitor for each OS. I wouldn't use 27" FHD monitors though. Those would have 81 PPI, about the same as the Predator.
In my case I'm comparing OSX and Windows on the same hardware: the MBPR 15" (220 PPI) plus a ViewSonic VX2475SMHL-4K 24" 4K monitor (187 PPI) rotated to portrait mode. I'm a big fan of smaller high-DPI monitors like this. 187 PPI is a reasonably close match to the MBPR's 220 PPI. Both Mac and Windows look nice on each of these displays, I just find I like Windows better of the two.
Here's a spreadsheet I've been maintaining that lists the pixels per inch for a variety of machines and monitors:
It's mainly true on low DPI screens at 1:1 scaling with small point sized fonts. At a certain size, all fonts basically look alike in that case. It does happen on high dpi screens at 1:1 scaling too, but you need a magnifying glass to see the issues.
There's an app called MacType which makes the rendering more like Mac on low DPI screens, but I don't think it gets updated very often.
Many confuse hardware differences (low-DPI versus high-DPI screens) with operating system differences.
Windows has had sub-pixel text alignment and LCD-oriented anti-aliasing ("ClearType") for, what, a decade? Text on my 267-DPI Surface Book looks absolutely amazing, and obviously text on a 226-DPI Macbook will look great as well.
For those who are not confused by hardware differences, I suspect the remaining matters are taste and familiarity. Having used Windows for a long time, my preference is for Windows' rendering and I find the rendering on macOS to be odd and uncomfortable. I'm struggling to find the right adjective—perhaps too comical or whimsical? Overall font selections and rendering don't seem as crisp and professional as on Windows.
Windows also supports ligatures and advanced kerning, so text on a web browser with good Windows API support (e.g., Edge or Firefox) looks fantastic. (Chrome was a notable laggard here, refusing to use modern Windows text rendering APIs for a very long time.)
If the market is growing, then every part of it may be growing including trade-ins. They may still be shrinking in market fraction. How would we know? We need numbers.
I've been compiling the kernel since I got it, later figured out how to compile only the drivers I needed (specially the keyboard/touchpad) which was reduced over time as more and more drivers were built in.
There was finally a guy that set up an Ubuntu PPA [1] repository from where you can install the whole package, and it was fine until last October when I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.10.
For that version there is no PPA, and the kernel patches I had been using for the type cover did not work any more (they compile, just do not work). Then I re-installed 16.04 from scratch, but now the tigerite kernel does not boot because of some BTRFS crash (divide by zero) and the standard one only supports the Type Cover 3 keyboard: I have both the v3 and v4, and the later is much better and was working with both my patches and the tigerite kernel.
There are ways to get the Type Cover v3 touchpad working by configuring xorg, but the patches are better because they work with the multitouch driver.
The result is that right now I'm typing on a Lenovo Thinkpad Compact USB keyboard. :-\
In general I like this computer a lot, and nowadays almost everything works out of the box (including volume keys and both cameras) except the most crucial part, the type cover.
The stylus and touchscreen worked fine from the first day.
Suspend never worked, although it kind of did for a few months and now it's broken again. Hybernate should work but I did not do it because I would need to work around the encrypted swap.
I had pledged for the Eve V tablet computer [2], a crowd-funded version which has a few interesting improvements, but I think I'll back down before the deadline because they said they can not support Linux, and I will not have time in the coming months to experiment with it.
This is quite a disorganized answer but I hope it'll be of use to you. I like the Surface Pro, but I'm tired of this back-and-forth getting the basics to work with Linux. At this point the v3 is not a cutting-edge computer any more, and it should be effortless to use it with Linux.
Dude! Thank you for your "disorganized" response! I'm kinda married to the 16 release of Ubuntu right now and it does not seem worth it yet for the Surface 3 Pro. I hope I will never have to run / use Windows again. Not enough hours in my life to make it worth ever going back.
I've resuscitated an older Windows PC, after years of exclusive OSX.. I've changed the CPU cooler (Intel Q9550), added an SSD drive - and my old PC is back up, with the SSD it has enough juice to do the tasks I need it for - run Visual Studio 2015, browsing ... plus I can also play some (older) games on it, which is a lot of fun.
I miss the old days of being able to play with the hardware, buy new video or sound cards, overclock the CPU and so on.
Years ago when I was using Windows 7 it seemed the best OS Microsoft has put out so far (and I think since).
But after years of working on a mac, I have to say that Windows feels like a huge hack in comparison. There are countless UIs you have to access in order to configure the OS, all kinds of voodoo utilities, registry editor hacks and so on.
Should I also mention the daily blue screen of death ? Probably my fault somehow, but still..
Yes yes, I remember.. this used to be the Windows experience - I used to liked that.. It was what made me an 'experienced' user.
But I don't anymore. I'm not sure what the Windows experience is today, but I'm not eager to spend a lot of money to find that out...
Of course I'm curious about the Surface hardware - but not as much as to accept an inferior OS experience.
After all, these little things, the details, the polish, the smoothness ... they trickle down into the creative work that I do, they do influence me subconsciously.. all the time.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Your old 'revived' PC doesn't not represent the Surface signature experience which Microsoft designed to appeal to Mac users.
Curious though: Who was the OEM for your PC and how much did you spend on it? How much was your Mac?
So according to Microsoft, based on their numbers, which they won't release, more people are trading in Macs for Surfaces than before. There's also no way of knowing if this claimed increase is in any way significant.
I'm rather puzzled that even with this complete lack of data, which The Verge seems also skeptical about, they still decided to write an article about it.
Maybe the focus on fake news about politics in the popular press will get people to wake up and realize that the problem has been worse, for longer, in the tech press?
Odd. Isn't the biggest complaint against the new Macbook Pro the lack of memory? There's no Surface with 32GB at this moment, is there? There are rumors of a Surface Book 2 next year with 4K and 32GB but nothing more than that.
I played with the Surface Studio yesterday and it was a BEAUTIFUL machine. The screen was a lot thinner than I imagined, it was super sturdy, and just felt good in the hand. My experience fell apart with using the pen/my finger to navigate windows. I felt like I was double/triple clicking icons because I wasnt sure if my action registered or not. But once into photoshop (it was right on the desktop) the pen worked well. If I were to leave macOS as the os on my development machine, it definitely wouldn't be for Windows. I've heard people still have problems with *nix symlinks in their VM shared folders -- that is very minor, but it could cripple certain projects.
Yeah, the stylus isn't very good. I bought a Surface Pro 4 tablet with a ~$500 discount which made it attractive. The device has some nice points, but compared to my Wacom Cintiq or even my Apple Pencil/iPad Pro combo, the stylus on the Surface is sub-par. The pressure sensitivity is weak, there's no tilt capability, and it frequently fails to capture clicks/strokes.
The Surface type cover is definitely nicer than the keyboard cover for the iPad Pro though. MS did a nice job with that.
'Microsoft still isn’t providing sales numbers, but the company claims “more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before.”'
Maybe this article would be improved with a little journalism to maybe make an educated guess as to what these numbers might be? Something besides just retyping Microsoft's marketing press release?
Yeah, recently bought my first windows laptop in about 15 years. Not a surface but one of the Lenovo yogas. It's a neat little device and I enjoy the touch screen, but everything feels just slightly jankier than my macbook, especially scrolling / touchpad.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadJust kidding. I want a Surface Studio so bad its crazy. Just can't bring myself to spend the scratch, though.
Sure, but how much value do you get from that? Weight matters, diagonal matters, but thickness alone makes very little difference unless we're talking about something too thick to fit into a satchel.
> and more powerful at most price points.
I don't think that's true? The top and bottom end specs are pretty similar IIRC (same RAM, similar processor, similar resolution...), except for the Surface having a touchscreen, and the price points are mostly higher for the MacBook.
For my part I have a 17" laptop that is almost exclusively for home office use, a 11" chromebook for meetings or light work away from home, and an 8" tablet for entertainment and the odd emergency ssh session (I can fix servers over ssh from my phone too, but it's not exactly a fun experience).
The way I see it, there's no single form-factor that'll keep me happy, so I'd rather go for multiple.
I don't think people will ever agree on a single screen size or what other specs actually matters (e.g. I do have an SSD in my laptop, but quickly realises it doesn't really matter what type of storage I have, because I boot, I start Chrome and a bunch of terminals + ssh sessions, and then I rarely touch disk again; meanwhile other people load and store massive files regularly)
15" is perfect for all-around use. Plug in an external monitor or two and you won't notice the difference between 17", and it's still plenty portable in any bag that holds more than a tablet.
I used a 15" for years, and I'll never use a 15" again. Plugging in an external monitor was a workaround that helped when I was at a desk, but much of the time I much prefer to have my laptop actually on my lap in a comfortable chair or on the couch, where external monitors is not an option.
And it's still way too big for my travel needs. Yes, it fits in my bag, but I regularly have other things I want to take with me too.
So back to my point: It depends on your usage pattern.
I wouldn't be able to use the 11" chromebook, especially coming from a 17" screen.
Regarding the 11" I sort of agree - it's for note taking in meetings and the occasional use on trains etc., not for anything that requires very frequent use. I only went that small exactly because I don't need to use it very often. If I did more meetings, I might have used a somewhat bigger one.
I don't think we'll ever see a single form factor dominate as such, but a single device that can shift between form factors simplifies things a lot, I think that's the future.
My current laptop "only" has a full hd screen, but it was well over half the cost of my not-at-all-cheap custom build laptop when I bought it, and I expect to spend a similar proportion of the cost of my next laptop on an above average screen (edit: which will mean at a "4K" 17" screen, most likely)
I'm all for a single computing device, but not a single screen size. I don't think we'll ever settle on a single screen-type until/unless we have good enough head mountable screen replacements.
Almost certainly untrue. Most iphone users are still Windows PC users. Yes the developer community is important to the iOS app lead, but most of that is due to the self selecting group of people who purchase iphones - people willing to pay for things.
If the implication is that developers will stop writing apps for iPhones, that's highly unlikely because money is still in vogue.
But wasn't it the first time they ever offered a trade-in for Macbooks? I just googled it and was not able to find old offers.
Again, Microsoft refuses to provide numbers but vaguely claims “our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever.”
If you go from 5 trade ins to 7, you can site your best year ever. It doesn't mean you've made a dent. I can see that people are disappointed in the new MacBook, but there are very few I know that would just say "screw it, I'm switching platforms." Admittedly, my friends are mostly designers and developers, so it's a biased sample, but I'm a little skeptical about the numbers.
One would certainly hope so!
I don't know if Microsoft has reached parity with Apple with professional development machines, but it does look like they've set themselves up to be a contender for next generations.
With increased internal funding, they may actually achieve that goal.
I assume they are still way off, and may not catch up in the near future. But I also think for Microsoft that's not a problem: when professional developers buy a nice Dell or a Lenovo model instead of a Mac, and run it on Windows, that's still a win for Microsoft. Surface is also meant to show that PC's do not have to suck.
OSX has complete control over their hardware, so the overall impression I get is that more attention can be dedicated to the small details. I also prefer UNIX over CMD(?).
What I have noticed is a sense of diminishing returns from the Apple camp. There just haven't been any really compelling innovations for years now. Microsoft seems to have fixed its development processes to actually start building compelling technology, and since they have lagged behind the gains are bigger.
Personally, I think Apple needs a kick in the pants; the thought that Microsoft is positioning itself to be real competition hopefully pushes both companies to build better products. Capitalism, right?
*PS: Apple should be careful though, Microsoft knows how to exploit an opportunity.
It's not much different from Tim Cook saying Apple Watch sales are breaking records this quarter without actually providing actual numbers.
my proposal is: the basic structure of code is represented visually via an AST, i.e the folders,files,classes,method and public variables and public variables and constants. and they could tie in tests and have test show up within that space.
Do people really want to switch from a rock-solid, sandboxed Unix to an inferior OS like Windows? Did people already forget the crazy days of regedit, zero app sandboxing, inconsistent installers, anti-viruses etc?
I wish more people jumped ship to Linux instead of the Apple/Windows duopoly, but if wishes were horses...
Windows has improved considerably over the past decade, while Apple has shifted away from the professional market. It is realistic to believe that at least some people would switch platforms.
I know "Post-PC" is the more popular buzzword, but "Post-OS" is probably a good one to use.
So much stuff is in the cloud these days that a lot of non-developers and non-creatives can probably use any OS these days without too much pain.
I switched to Windows from Mac a couple of years ago, and honestly, I don't miss it much. I did have to write off a pile of Mac software purchases, but I found reasonably priced alternatives that work as well.
If I get sick of Windows, I can easily transition to something else. Outside of some platform specific games, I can do just about everything I do now on another OS.
With USB C at least for now, this will be a constant source of fustration for users who don't own a Google Pixel and have to deal with legacy hardware (everything else out on the market). That being said, USB C itself is great, Apple should adopt it on the iPhone.
Built-in backup system, both to "cloud" if desired or external hard disk if preferred. Application signing that serves to protect users rather than nag them into unquestioningly running anything and everything as administrator.
Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software available for UNIX/BSD.
Apple hasn't dropped the ball. You'll realize this once you end up in the Windows world frustrated and trying to do the same things you take for granted now.
Not something you see as a user, at least on the Surface.
> No "Patch Tuesday"
Because Apple leaves you running vulnerable software for months at a time. (Remember the zlib double free?)
> No finger pointing between hardware vendor and OS vendor. No third party drivers necessary to clean boot.
Not an issue with Surface.
> Fantastic, fully native support for the wealth of open-source software available for UNIX/BSD.
"Linux on Windows" may theoretically be non-native but it's a better experience than mac - real apt-get, install anything that works on Ubuntu without having to compile anything yourself. And has OSX figured out how to display any OSS GUIs yet?
The Surface is a big step forward in terms of eliminating a lot of nuisances from the Windows experience but it also proves that the biggest nuisance of all is OEMs. Eliminating them also cuts out a lot of reasons for using Windows in the first place, like low-cost equipment. I agree it's a great product, but it's also great because of the tight integration you get with a unified hardware/OS vendor. Dell, HP and others don't have this luxury, so their experience is always second-rate.
Also "Linux on Windows" is a huge step forwards, but sheesh, it's still atrocious compared to proper native support. It's like a slick version of Cygwin. Remarkable but not a drop-in replacement for Linux.
You can compile GUI apps on macOS, but I've never needed to. The one app that depended on that was Wireshark, but I found a way to use tcpdump instead. It's mostly a non-issue.
What's the practical distinction you're making? I develop a program that has Linux as its primary platform there. It gives you a closer-to-Linux experience than OSX does.
I use Windows professionally (for .NET development) and I think Windows 10 is still light-years behind, with an unstable, jarring OS experience full of bugs and niggles and unloved and underdeveloped touch interface. I would love the opportunity to move to macOS and iOS professionally. Fonts and UI rendering look awful on Windows compared to macOS, there is just no comparison.
However, for many "professional workflow" means using the MS Office suite and a browser. For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
OTOH, I don't see many professionals trusting Apple software in the long run (ex. Final Cut).
I always thought it was free too, but learned otherwise recently from a colleague battling with it.
> For that use, Windows 10 is not only adequate but better than MacOS.
"Denny's is as good as any Michelin Star restaurant."
I've eaten €1500 meals at 3 star restaurants like L'Ambroisie and $10 Grand Slam meals at denny's. They fill different roles and both can be enjoyable.
For years there was a restaurant in Palo Alto that was really quite good and which my wife loved to visit. I was never happy because while the food and ambience were good, I always felt the bill was 50% higher than it should have been.
In the case of apps, most of them, for most users, don't justify the time put into them. Since that's true, people aren't idiots and won't take an up front risk on buying an app that doesn't work for them. That's why free download/in app purchase to really use has really taken off.
Oh, and it's well worth it to me to pay for a Mac. The fact that it's true for me doesn't justify your decision to buy a Mac or contradict your decision not to.
...supply and demand. That you were willing to eat there despite the higher prices suggests you found value in the food. You can bitch about higher prices all you want, but you paid them.
Likewise, for a lot of professionals the difference between a $3000 MacBook and a $1500 Windows notebook over the lifespan of 3-4 years is inconsequential. You could easily make up the difference by brewing your own coffee versus getting something at a store.
Yes, well the decision criterion was that it made my wife happy. So I suppose they optimized for that factor :-).
See https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/
Font rendering on Windows is barely better than Linux.
Windows has long been indifferent to faithfully representing fonts, to accurately representing colors. They've always promoted readability at the cost of mangling fonts, and of performance.
The macOS rendering system has always been set up with high-DPI displays in mind, they were able to work out a lot of rendering problems on things like the iPhone and iPad before committing to the computer version of same.
Windows on a 4K display looks close to but not quite as good as a Mac on a 1440p display, it's just that stark.
This is all personal preference obviously, but having done a lot of design work I'm more easily irritated by little quirks.
On HiDPI monitors, though, it turned out to be unnecessary.
[1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/make-windows-fonts-look-like-ma...
It's truly astonishing how bad it is even with big name vendors like Asus.
I guess this may be a case of 'grass being greener' as suggested by someone else in this thread. I just don't seem to remember having any of these issues on my 2010 Macbook Pro running El Capitan. Then again, this is purely anecdotal.
For me it is more important to have a file manager that doesn't lock itself creating .DS_Store files in the middle of an I/O operation (ex. copying a folder from an external drive).
To be fair, Windows has the same issue with Thumbs.db files, but I can't remember the last time it happened to me, in contrast, with macOS it is annoyingly easy to trigger error -36, just connect a clean drive and copy a big folder...
http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/ximg_54e...
ETA: All of which is why my first post said "most drives"...
That is Crash Reporter crashing. The following is the last screenshot I was able to take before the system stopped being able to write files: http://i.imgur.com/IK7j98P.png
Sierra has been an absolute nightmare in every respect that I have been forced to reboot on a weekly basis.
Apple's precipitous and continuing software quality decline is not an exaggeration or an illusion. It is flat reality. Professionals with any awareness should be evaluating their alternatives very seriously.
This is also just one of a myriad of issues that have plagued the OS. Sierra has introduced me to new and wonderful ways to fail: http://i.imgur.com/HbVLWDq.png
I've had no problems except a couple programs that had broken features for a few weeks.
1. No default power management. Why isn't TLP installed and activated by default on systems that are known to work with it? Macbooks get 12-13h on macOS vs 5h on Linux. The XPS13 gets 22h on Windows vs 11h(!) on Linux. Ubuntu 16.04 on my MBP 13" 2015 gets 7h with TLP and Powertop configured, so even with those tools there's still a very large discrepancy.
2. Package hell. Yes, shared libraries have advantages. No, they don't outweigh the benefits of containerizing. By now (with 'Snappy Packages' and 'Flatpak' getting bigger) its finally getting fixed, but still.
3. There is no unified repo, and no unified package manager. There's Pacman, RPM, apt, etc. etc. and if you switch distro's you have to re-learn. Now I understand that this is due to each distro being like a micro-country, but imagine this: 3x3 unified repos (free, non-free and community) each with 3 levels (bleeding edge, testing, stable). All distros could(would) tap into these repos, so you combine the efforts of every distro its maintainers. Same for the package manager development. For distro-specific stuff the distros could just use a separate repo
4. UI. There's 2 different UI toolkits (QT and GTK) that both are configured differently, behave slightly differently and thus something (usually the QT apps since GTK is used more often) feels 'off'. This split also gives issues with scaling sometimes. macOS does this perfectly with pretty much everything using Cocoa and having all options on the menubar. Saving is always under 'file', and 'file' is always in the same location. Same for 'Edit', 'View', etc. So far only Ubuntu replicates this, and they do it for a good reason.
And those are only a few of my pet peeves. Here's a full list by someone that has much better knowledge of Linux than me. Quite staggering really.[0]
[0]https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
I've had the following problems:
1) They wrote a driver that blew out my speaker and I had to wait 5 weeks for a replacement. http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/30/apple-updates-boot... 2) There is graphical tearing and glitching everywhere. http://www.macrumors.com/2016/12/02/new-macbook-pro-graphics... 3) The OS restarts itself randomly. 4) You cannot plug in an external monitor and use a bluetooth mouse simultaneously.
I love macOS. I make software for macOS. The decline is real and people should start considering alternatives.
yes, I would've liked to stick with Apple & OSX. no, I don't feel I could and still be as productive as I need to be.
Although it does not install Candy Crush, just a stub to install it, anyway, it is certainly unappealing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Windows_10_bu...
All the pre-installed software is my big pet peeve for Windows 10. I don't want weather, or contacts, or xbox, or 3d builder, or email, or alarms, or skype, or office, or calendar, or groove, or money, or news, etc... I've deleted them and they just come back because of some provisioning setting.
A signature edition makes sure that the only crapware is stuff that Microsoft installed.
Basically the way I look at it in order of annoyance/offensiveness:
- Free, standalone application made by same company (this is a free gift as far as I'm concerned)
- Free, standalone application made by another company (ok, this is starting to approach crapware but as long as it can be uninstalled and doesn't try to sell me anything, I'll deal)
- Link, installer, or preinstalled application that requires later purchase from same company (OK, this is an ad and pretty offensive)
- Link, installer, or preinstalled application requiring later purchase from third party (this is most certainly unwanted crapware that they were paid to include)
I've heard a number of people say this, and I'm always puzzled because it is exactly the opposite for me. Running on the same hardware (late 2013 MBPR 15"), Windows 10 font rendering is much more pleasing to my eyes. When I boot into OSX, the text looks terrible to me. (I'm still running El Capitan - has text rendering changed in Sierra?)
One thing I did in Windows that I recommend to everyone: I went through the ClearType tuner and adjusted the settings to my taste. I picked darker and heavier text compared to the defaults. That really punched up the rendering; everything is so crisp and clear, much nicer to my eyes than the blurry text in OSX.
I understand that OSX text rendering may be more typographically accurate, and I have some sympathy for that view. I appreciate good typography, especially after working at Adobe many years ago. (I built the first scalable font system for Windows, Adobe Type Manager.) But OSX text just doesn't look good to me.
And of course I don't disagree with anyone who prefers OSX/macOS text rendering, since this is very much a matter of personal taste.
Maybe it's the fact that it has a huge resolution on a 12" screen. Seems very likely that the higher pixel density makes for a crisp and beautiful text.
Again, I am not a pro in this area. I am a programmer. So just speaking intuitively, macOS still wins in my eyes.
However, probably the best test would be to put Windows 10 and macOS side by side on identical 27" full HD monitors?
The reason why you notice the difference is because of the low DPI for the screen size on your Z35. Windows fonts render badly on those screens at small point sizes. If your same screen was, say, 4K and you were running with text scaling, the fonts would look -way- better.
Oh, I'm sure of it. Thing is though, I picked the Z35 and not the Z34 because I also want to game on the machine and going to [almost] 4K was a no-go, even with a GTX 980.
I suppose one day I might just switch to huge dual-monitor setup: one for gaming and one for everything else. Seems like quite a hassle though, having in mind that my Z35 occupies a huge chunk of my otherwise pretty big desk.
You can still play your games at 1080p on a 4K screen - the pixels divide up evenly by 4, so I don't think it would look any worse than playing on a native 1080p panel of the same size.
If you really, really want mac style text rendering on your monitor, check out an app called MacType. The text will look much closer to how Mac renders fonts.
On other words, given the same physical text size on each monitor, your MacBook is using more than eight times the number of pixels to render each character.
Given a choice between macOS on a 226 PPI monitor and any other OS on a 79 PPI monitor, I would definitely prefer macOS too. :-)
You're right that the best way to compare font rendering is on the same monitor for each OS. I wouldn't use 27" FHD monitors though. Those would have 81 PPI, about the same as the Predator.
In my case I'm comparing OSX and Windows on the same hardware: the MBPR 15" (220 PPI) plus a ViewSonic VX2475SMHL-4K 24" 4K monitor (187 PPI) rotated to portrait mode. I'm a big fan of smaller high-DPI monitors like this. 187 PPI is a reasonably close match to the MBPR's 220 PPI. Both Mac and Windows look nice on each of these displays, I just find I like Windows better of the two.
Here's a spreadsheet I've been maintaining that lists the pixels per inch for a variety of machines and monitors:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K4bCgr-VjMmeCjHf6Udy...
There's an app called MacType which makes the rendering more like Mac on low DPI screens, but I don't think it gets updated very often.
Windows has had sub-pixel text alignment and LCD-oriented anti-aliasing ("ClearType") for, what, a decade? Text on my 267-DPI Surface Book looks absolutely amazing, and obviously text on a 226-DPI Macbook will look great as well.
For those who are not confused by hardware differences, I suspect the remaining matters are taste and familiarity. Having used Windows for a long time, my preference is for Windows' rendering and I find the rendering on macOS to be odd and uncomfortable. I'm struggling to find the right adjective—perhaps too comical or whimsical? Overall font selections and rendering don't seem as crisp and professional as on Windows.
Windows also supports ligatures and advanced kerning, so text on a web browser with good Windows API support (e.g., Edge or Firefox) looks fantastic. (Chrome was a notable laggard here, refusing to use modern Windows text rendering APIs for a very long time.)
I've been compiling the kernel since I got it, later figured out how to compile only the drivers I needed (specially the keyboard/touchpad) which was reduced over time as more and more drivers were built in.
There was finally a guy that set up an Ubuntu PPA [1] repository from where you can install the whole package, and it was fine until last October when I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.10.
[1] https://launchpad.net/~tigerite/+archive/ubuntu/kernel
For that version there is no PPA, and the kernel patches I had been using for the type cover did not work any more (they compile, just do not work). Then I re-installed 16.04 from scratch, but now the tigerite kernel does not boot because of some BTRFS crash (divide by zero) and the standard one only supports the Type Cover 3 keyboard: I have both the v3 and v4, and the later is much better and was working with both my patches and the tigerite kernel.
There are ways to get the Type Cover v3 touchpad working by configuring xorg, but the patches are better because they work with the multitouch driver.
The result is that right now I'm typing on a Lenovo Thinkpad Compact USB keyboard. :-\
In general I like this computer a lot, and nowadays almost everything works out of the box (including volume keys and both cameras) except the most crucial part, the type cover. The stylus and touchscreen worked fine from the first day. Suspend never worked, although it kind of did for a few months and now it's broken again. Hybernate should work but I did not do it because I would need to work around the encrypted swap.
I had pledged for the Eve V tablet computer [2], a crowd-funded version which has a few interesting improvements, but I think I'll back down before the deadline because they said they can not support Linux, and I will not have time in the coming months to experiment with it.
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eve-v-the-first-ever-crow...
This is quite a disorganized answer but I hope it'll be of use to you. I like the Surface Pro, but I'm tired of this back-and-forth getting the basics to work with Linux. At this point the v3 is not a cutting-edge computer any more, and it should be effortless to use it with Linux.
I miss the old days of being able to play with the hardware, buy new video or sound cards, overclock the CPU and so on.
Years ago when I was using Windows 7 it seemed the best OS Microsoft has put out so far (and I think since).
But after years of working on a mac, I have to say that Windows feels like a huge hack in comparison. There are countless UIs you have to access in order to configure the OS, all kinds of voodoo utilities, registry editor hacks and so on.
Should I also mention the daily blue screen of death ? Probably my fault somehow, but still..
Yes yes, I remember.. this used to be the Windows experience - I used to liked that.. It was what made me an 'experienced' user.
But I don't anymore. I'm not sure what the Windows experience is today, but I'm not eager to spend a lot of money to find that out...
Of course I'm curious about the Surface hardware - but not as much as to accept an inferior OS experience.
After all, these little things, the details, the polish, the smoothness ... they trickle down into the creative work that I do, they do influence me subconsciously.. all the time.
Curious though: Who was the OEM for your PC and how much did you spend on it? How much was your Mac?
I'm rather puzzled that even with this complete lack of data, which The Verge seems also skeptical about, they still decided to write an article about it.
Users switching from macOS to Surface this year: 150
"Best year ever!"
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When companies say things like this and refuse to give actual sell through numbers, the above is what I think. I'm sure I'm not alone.
The Surface type cover is definitely nicer than the keyboard cover for the iPad Pro though. MS did a nice job with that.
Maybe this article would be improved with a little journalism to maybe make an educated guess as to what these numbers might be? Something besides just retyping Microsoft's marketing press release?