no shit, sherlock. keep shipping a user hostile OS ? and you think people are gonna stay.
in as much the javascript ecosystem is a pita. it freed a lot of software - and made it be accessible on all platforms either via the browser or electron.
now what someone needed a windows machine for can be done on an ipad, linux box, chrome book etc.
the next evolution of course will be the transition of professional software to
run on web-assembly, then people can finally be free of microsoft's tyranny.
There are really nice Windows machines but Holy shit, there is zero legit reason to pay Apple grade prices for a laptop, especially a Windows laptop. (Unless you are a company & then price is a rounding error on expenses anyways.) Especially since no one is sure how good the Win laptop really is.
The market segmentation is ridiculous. So many deliberately shitty builds and subpar screens that cost $25 less than a good screen, on mid range laptops. Awful web cams everywhere. The PC market is killing itself, by trying too hard to extract an upsell, rather than making smart compromises that try to deliver good value. Frigging unbelievably sad.
Actually I take back my starting place! Apple now has great very capable well built $1k laptops. That's borderline perfectly fine for a very solid low-compromise machine imo. Disruption from above coming down (so damned rare in today's world!). I was more thinking MBP prices but you just don't need it now.
the next evolution of course will be the transition of professional software to run on web-assembly, then people can finally be free of microsoft's tyranny.
If you're running some closed source code from a SaaS application in wasm, you're not free of anybody's tyranny.
The advantage of Microsoft is actually a widely compatible ecosystem. There might be vendor lock-in, but it was always collective vendor lock in, so at least it was easy to exchange stuff. If everyone is using some different incompatible SaaS, we're going to experience all the downside and non of the upside.
I'll shortly be switching jobs and one of the things I look forward to most is getting a Mac so I can finally use a real terminal and something that isn't so buggy. I'll still run some Windows programs in a VM I guess, but it won't have to be my main experience. I'm also excited about a usable and easy to learn systems language that can compile to a binary (swift).
I made the switch to macOS with my last job change for the first time because of the M1 and I'll give two notes from my experience: the terminal is still very awkward compared to a proper Linux environment + will still need a bunch of tweaking and Crossover tends to run the random Windows app better/more conveniently than Parallels (which has been the best VM experience on Apple silicon so far).
Overall it's great but don't go into thinking it's terminal focused or bug free just because it's not Windows and has a *nix background. It's more like trading one set of weird decisions for another, albeit with less attempts to gather your data or sell you things (but not 0 attempts). The hardware lives up fully to the hype though.
It is built off BSD, that's where said *nix background comes from. Where it falls short is Apple won't ship anything GPLv3 licensed so you get a lot of either ancient or non-standard programs you're back to having to fix up via 3rd party sources (e.g. homebrew, and be careful with what you put as default in the path). There's also no 1st CLI package manager and the Store is primarily about GUI apps since it's a consumer OS at the end of the day. Even when you do patch in modern coreutils, bash, editors, and such you find it's still not quite the environment tools expect i.e. Linux so things like Docker just spin up a Linux VM anyways.
As far as the original "real terminal" it used to be the the macOS Terminal app was miles ahead of Windows but now that's not even that different with both system's "Terminal" apps having tabs, panes, 24 bit color, decent ANSI VT sequences support, transparency, ligatures, customizable shortcuts, and so on. Windows will actually ships OpenSSH and a newer version of Python but macOS ships a lot more of the standard tools like screen, awk, and nano but as mentioned they can be woefully out of date anyways so it's not a huge upsell and you'll still be adding a 3rd party package manager like homebrew.
On the bright side homebrew is much easier to work with than e.g. cygwin IMO. That said WSL2 is much easier to work with than any of the "Linux VM on macOS" systems so it's a bit of a give and take there. Asahi (native Linux on Apple Silicon laptops) is fantastic but unless you're a diehard Linux user that's fine with working around fairly core features being unsupported it's not quite there yet so Linux dual booting is a bit of a loss right now too.
> The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces.
E.g. /bin/sh is from an ancient version of bash while the default /bin/zsh is not POSIX standard (without some manual mucking around at least which can break your setup if you do globally). The POSIX certificate doesn't make those less ancient or more standard it just makes the environment POSIX certified.
In that regard the stuff I mentioned in the comment is what I was referring to as standard. No 20 year old document to reference or certificate on file but I'd bet more people here are interested in things like how docker or package managers compare between systems than knowing df on macOS is certified to report in 512 byte blocks by default. I forget who said it but "the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from". If you're expecting the GNU awk which has been on every machine you've ever used it doesn't matter you have POSIX awk, it's not the relevant standard to check.
The same percentage is listed in the link above. If you flip to show all OS not just desktop the only ones that have almost certainly grown in absolute users are Android/iOS (absent most of the population leaving the internet in the last 10 years which we know to not be true), the rest depends on actual usage not percentage of visitors.
It's good to keep that last bit in mind when looking at these graphs. It's technically possible for users to have increased usage on a platform AND for more users to have started to use the platform but the platforms usage share goes down. This is because more users are present over time and users can browse on more than one device more than once per day.
I'm not affiliated with Statcounter but I think I can answer both of those since I play with these charts a lot.
Regarding OS X calling it macOS wouldn't be any better since it includes counts of users from both. It'd probably make more sense to just call the group "Mac" or "macOS/OS X" but it's too late to change the name of the category since paid users had been exporting the data into tools expecting "OS X" and it's a silly thing to break that for. Similarly splitting the two into separate categories or changing the display name vs data name is more problematic than using the old name. The OS version breakdown for macs started in 2017, after the name change, and uses the macOS name for the overall category as well as for the newer operating systems in that category so they are definitely aware and keeping up with the name changes where it makes sense to.
If you change the graph settings to include tablets it'll give an in-graph note that they weren't tracking tablets and consoles as different from desktops until the start of August 2012. It'd probably be good to include that note in the desktop view as well though. For iOS that means iPads (launched April 2010) were bucketed as desktop browsing sessions rather than tablet until that point. While it's safe to assume all of those should be relabeled tablet their policy on data changes is after 45 days they will not go back and modify/correct data.
Interesting to see how much the Chrome market share seems to be driven by education -- it drops noticeably every year between June and August, when students are on summer vacation.
The worst thing is that we've traded one monopoly (MS via Office and Windows) for a different set of monopolists. How dependent are organizations on Google Drive these days and what would the switching costs look like?
Google's online suite doesn't.do anything special anymore, people just use it for convenience and because its free. There are many alternatives who can fill the vacuum the moment it stops being free and Google know this
In regards to the above about organizations they definitely pay for it. Particularly a large percentage of the Google Workspace and Chromebook users are K-12. As another example my previous place of employment was a healthcare org that switched ~150k users from O365 to (what was then called) G Suite for a large annual subscription and it really wasn't much cheaper.
Android has different user agents than Chrome OS, so that should be relatively clean. The larger iPads don't identify differently than Macbook user agents anymore, but the trackers may have been able to separate them based on additional checks. AFAIK the iPad mini still identifies as an iPad.
I could consider moving to a windows laptop if the quality/performance of their laptops was anywhere close to apple.
I don't even use an iphone or have any other apple products but the hardware is just _that_ good! The M1 totally changed how I could use my laptop and windows has to at least match it's efficiency, not to mention that the unibody chassis of macs is extremely durable and I no concerns traveling with it without using a case or sleeve of any kind.
And the fact that I have to shut down my windows laptop to have any reasonable expectation that it'll have a charge the next day. Or maybe even later that day.
I can't answer your question philosophically. You could decide not to, and accept the bugs as natural limitations of what's available to you.
But from a tech perspective, I see minor annoyances caused by complex systems with parts from many companies where 1 error in coordination can have very large bad consequences (ex: losing the Intel Serial IO on the Fold due to errors in the Intel drivers = no bluetooth, no touchscreen, so you will think it froze while it just needs the drivers reloaded, say by doing that from a USB keyboard or by RDP)
Our current hardware is great, and never has been simpler to use, but it has also even more complexity than before: this is increasing the risk of subtle issues that even most readers of HN would have no idea about if they hadn't read first about it here (like Dells catching fire due to ACPI S0 idle).
But nothing is set in stone! You did that in the 2000s? You can still do that if you want a great experience! You may already know about tweaking IO and IRQ addresses from before? That's not very applicable anymore, so update your knowledge to today's problems: learn about the the DSDT, the default APST settings per device, etc. It may take some time.
However, once it's done, 1) you have a much finer understanding of how your computer works allowing fixing the root cause, 2) so the problem rarely comes back but if it does you are ready 3) you're ready to tackle more challenges!
This year I'm moving to Linux on the Laptop using arch. Everything I learned on Windows is extremely helpful. The rest, I'm learhing it along!
TL;DW: There's a bug in the implementation of windows modern standby that can cause it to activate energetically expensive operations while "asleep", and most PC manufacturers didn't bother to write drivers for the more effective, but less "feature rich" S3 sleep mode.
My laptop only supports S0, which is already extremely annoying.
My laptop is an Asus with a Ryzen 9. If I wanted to have to muddle around with wifi drivers and wakeup timers to have a barely functioning device I'd install Slackware on a 2010 Thinkpad.
So you don't want to "muddle around", and therefore the laptop you have, an "Asus with a Ryzen 9" is "extremely annoying". That's paying an lot of money to be annoyed by a top of the line CPU, but ok I guess?
Meanwhile, my foldable OLED thinkpad and my regular one, both with ridiculous Intel CPUs that are totally crushed by Ryzens are perfectly functional, both on Windows and Linux, and I enjoy them a lot!
Yet you call them "barely functioning" and insinuate they are as primitive as "Slackware on a 2010 Thinkpad"? Wow, if that isn't entitlement, I don't know what it is!
If you had been a little nicer, I would have offered some help to improve your S0idle experience.
I would suggest a little bit of self reflection, as I think your hardware is wasted on you due to your unwillingness of correctly configuring modern options.
Give me OLED, ECC, a touchscreen then we can start talking about the finer details like a physical shutter for the webcam, or a non-soldered NVMe so the drive can be physically destroyed when the machine is EOLed (or just retained when the machine needs to be shipped for warranty stuff)
It blows my mind that Linux is such a minor niche, with its powerful open utilities and ecosystem. Microsoft choked much of the internet revolution with their clickety-spyery.
Not really. It's simply not as user friendly from a UI bugs perspective. That's not to say Linux is bad (I love it and Arch Linux is my daily driver), but open source projects simply don't have the number of QA and Design bodies that MS and Apple can devote to UX.
Get any distribution, and someone in the community is reminding you to feel ashamed because it's bad (get Ubuntu, and you're a traitor to the cause and a newbie. Get Arch, and you're pedantic and unproductive, ...)
Everything is text (configuration files and streams). It is neither user friendly, nor enjoyable to script.
Because of the complexity of the env, you are not hired to work on Linux if you don't have all the certifications (Ansible, CKA, ...), while companies assume that you know how to use Windows.
'Linux' doesn't cater to end users, really.
It feels more dated than Windows or Android.
And it's not advertising anything but speed, which isn't a selling point with modern computers. (Despite the fact it has plenty of other advantages)
Why would you use Linux on a 1000$+ laptop, if it isn't to make a point about OSes ?
I believe that most have non-IT jobs and couldn't care less.
I had a valid for-life license of Office on my Windows 10 PC. When I converted to 11, the software was so slow it was completely unusable. I had to buy a 365 subscription. Then they empowered employers with a nightmarish suite to monitor productivity. They have piloted injection of adware into the operating system. Now, out-of-control AI language models are being implemented and it all amounts to the enshittification of knowledge work. Faced with these hellish anti-human systems, I see Windows and Office increasingly as actively harmful to my working life.
I did, but it is not compatible with the docx format, which is used by many clients I work with. I tried installing Office on a Linux Mint PC with CrossOver, but that was unreliable. My main gripe is that software I paid for was stolen by the company I purchased it from (Microsoft).
Please no. I use it every do on mac and I do not want to use such bloatware ever again. We need open standards and much better (simpler, faster, less bloated, yes , less features) implementations for pretty much everything in the Office suite.
It was Office 2013. I tried CrossOver on Linux, but found it to be unreliable, unfortunately. It is discouraging that a multi-billion-dollar company can steal from paying customers. Office, with no real features for most users but bloat and incompatibility-by-design (docx, xlsx) added since the 1990s, has become an office surveillance tool. Integrating LLMs will further their monopoly by atrophying our ability to write and—-given enough time—perhaps even our ability to think for ourselves.
Anyone from Micro$oft care to comment? Given the exposure here, this may be the single the most expensive single-user software license Microsoft ever stole.
lmk if you run into problems: I have Office 2010 running super stable in Arch on wayland in hidpi. It's a pleasure to use it: excel cold starts in about 1 second
Should also note that this in the US. Worldwide it's still about 72% (but also trending down). I'm going to guess there is something to do with US wallets more easily able to afford Apple products.
Honestly I haven’t turned on my windows desktop pc for over a year now I just don’t need the power. I still use the laptop occasionally for websites with a poor mobile experience but mostly mobile has taken over
Looks like the downturn accelerated to its current more-rapid decline right after the release of the latest Windows 11 22H2 version in late 2022.
This would have been the time the true enthusiasts who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy could finally be giving up for good.
And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach.
So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough.
Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview.
As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN.
But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users.
Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either.
75 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadin as much the javascript ecosystem is a pita. it freed a lot of software - and made it be accessible on all platforms either via the browser or electron.
now what someone needed a windows machine for can be done on an ipad, linux box, chrome book etc.
the next evolution of course will be the transition of professional software to run on web-assembly, then people can finally be free of microsoft's tyranny.
The market segmentation is ridiculous. So many deliberately shitty builds and subpar screens that cost $25 less than a good screen, on mid range laptops. Awful web cams everywhere. The PC market is killing itself, by trying too hard to extract an upsell, rather than making smart compromises that try to deliver good value. Frigging unbelievably sad.
Actually I take back my starting place! Apple now has great very capable well built $1k laptops. That's borderline perfectly fine for a very solid low-compromise machine imo. Disruption from above coming down (so damned rare in today's world!). I was more thinking MBP prices but you just don't need it now.
The advantage of Microsoft is actually a widely compatible ecosystem. There might be vendor lock-in, but it was always collective vendor lock in, so at least it was easy to exchange stuff. If everyone is using some different incompatible SaaS, we're going to experience all the downside and non of the upside.
Overall it's great but don't go into thinking it's terminal focused or bug free just because it's not Windows and has a *nix background. It's more like trading one set of weird decisions for another, albeit with less attempts to gather your data or sell you things (but not 0 attempts). The hardware lives up fully to the hype though.
As far as the original "real terminal" it used to be the the macOS Terminal app was miles ahead of Windows but now that's not even that different with both system's "Terminal" apps having tabs, panes, 24 bit color, decent ANSI VT sequences support, transparency, ligatures, customizable shortcuts, and so on. Windows will actually ships OpenSSH and a newer version of Python but macOS ships a lot more of the standard tools like screen, awk, and nano but as mentioned they can be woefully out of date anyways so it's not a huge upsell and you'll still be adding a 3rd party package manager like homebrew.
On the bright side homebrew is much easier to work with than e.g. cygwin IMO. That said WSL2 is much easier to work with than any of the "Linux VM on macOS" systems so it's a bit of a give and take there. Asahi (native Linux on Apple Silicon laptops) is fantastic but unless you're a diehard Linux user that's fine with working around fairly core features being unsupported it's not quite there yet so Linux dual booting is a bit of a loss right now too.
Define "standard" and "non-standard", given macOS is POSIX-certified to the UNIX 03 Product Standard:
* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3683.htm
* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3688.htm
> The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards: Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4, C Language V2, and Internationalized Terminal Interfaces.
* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xym0.htm
Not meeting your expectations ≠ non-standard. :)
In that regard the stuff I mentioned in the comment is what I was referring to as standard. No 20 year old document to reference or certificate on file but I'd bet more people here are interested in things like how docker or package managers compare between systems than knowing df on macOS is certified to report in 512 byte blocks by default. I forget who said it but "the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from". If you're expecting the GNU awk which has been on every machine you've ever used it doesn't matter you have POSIX awk, it's not the relevant standard to check.
It's good to keep that last bit in mind when looking at these graphs. It's technically possible for users to have increased usage on a platform AND for more users to have started to use the platform but the platforms usage share goes down. This is because more users are present over time and users can browse on more than one device more than once per day.
Larger feedback: Why is iOS on that graph? It's supposed to be desktop software but it shows a small spike for it a few years ago.
Regarding OS X calling it macOS wouldn't be any better since it includes counts of users from both. It'd probably make more sense to just call the group "Mac" or "macOS/OS X" but it's too late to change the name of the category since paid users had been exporting the data into tools expecting "OS X" and it's a silly thing to break that for. Similarly splitting the two into separate categories or changing the display name vs data name is more problematic than using the old name. The OS version breakdown for macs started in 2017, after the name change, and uses the macOS name for the overall category as well as for the newer operating systems in that category so they are definitely aware and keeping up with the name changes where it makes sense to.
If you change the graph settings to include tablets it'll give an in-graph note that they weren't tracking tablets and consoles as different from desktops until the start of August 2012. It'd probably be good to include that note in the desktop view as well though. For iOS that means iPads (launched April 2010) were bucketed as desktop browsing sessions rather than tablet until that point. While it's safe to assume all of those should be relabeled tablet their policy on data changes is after 45 days they will not go back and modify/correct data.
That doesn't even really qualify as an "article".
More just like an excuse to send out links to a website...
EDIT:
As pointed out by several child comments I’m off by a year, so I have no idea what is special about 2019 for Macs.
The data seems very questionable in general, so who knows.
I don't even use an iphone or have any other apple products but the hardware is just _that_ good! The M1 totally changed how I could use my laptop and windows has to at least match it's efficiency, not to mention that the unibody chassis of macs is extremely durable and I no concerns traveling with it without using a case or sleeve of any kind.
My battery drops by more or less 0.5%/h so a 10h sleep = 5% drop.
But from a tech perspective, I see minor annoyances caused by complex systems with parts from many companies where 1 error in coordination can have very large bad consequences (ex: losing the Intel Serial IO on the Fold due to errors in the Intel drivers = no bluetooth, no touchscreen, so you will think it froze while it just needs the drivers reloaded, say by doing that from a USB keyboard or by RDP)
Our current hardware is great, and never has been simpler to use, but it has also even more complexity than before: this is increasing the risk of subtle issues that even most readers of HN would have no idea about if they hadn't read first about it here (like Dells catching fire due to ACPI S0 idle).
But nothing is set in stone! You did that in the 2000s? You can still do that if you want a great experience! You may already know about tweaking IO and IRQ addresses from before? That's not very applicable anymore, so update your knowledge to today's problems: learn about the the DSDT, the default APST settings per device, etc. It may take some time.
However, once it's done, 1) you have a much finer understanding of how your computer works allowing fixing the root cause, 2) so the problem rarely comes back but if it does you are ready 3) you're ready to tackle more challenges!
This year I'm moving to Linux on the Laptop using arch. Everything I learned on Windows is extremely helpful. The rest, I'm learhing it along!
TL;DW: There's a bug in the implementation of windows modern standby that can cause it to activate energetically expensive operations while "asleep", and most PC manufacturers didn't bother to write drivers for the more effective, but less "feature rich" S3 sleep mode.
My laptop is an Asus with a Ryzen 9. If I wanted to have to muddle around with wifi drivers and wakeup timers to have a barely functioning device I'd install Slackware on a 2010 Thinkpad.
Meanwhile, my foldable OLED thinkpad and my regular one, both with ridiculous Intel CPUs that are totally crushed by Ryzens are perfectly functional, both on Windows and Linux, and I enjoy them a lot!
Yet you call them "barely functioning" and insinuate they are as primitive as "Slackware on a 2010 Thinkpad"? Wow, if that isn't entitlement, I don't know what it is!
If you had been a little nicer, I would have offered some help to improve your S0idle experience.
I would suggest a little bit of self reflection, as I think your hardware is wasted on you due to your unwillingness of correctly configuring modern options.
lol no
Give me OLED, ECC, a touchscreen then we can start talking about the finer details like a physical shutter for the webcam, or a non-soldered NVMe so the drive can be physically destroyed when the machine is EOLed (or just retained when the machine needs to be shipped for warranty stuff)
I care about great OLED touchscreens, comfortable keyboards, and ECC RAM.
You may read between the lines some other things I don't care about, and maybe they are important to you and you find them on a mac? Not me.
Get any distribution, and someone in the community is reminding you to feel ashamed because it's bad (get Ubuntu, and you're a traitor to the cause and a newbie. Get Arch, and you're pedantic and unproductive, ...)
Everything is text (configuration files and streams). It is neither user friendly, nor enjoyable to script.
Because of the complexity of the env, you are not hired to work on Linux if you don't have all the certifications (Ansible, CKA, ...), while companies assume that you know how to use Windows.
'Linux' doesn't cater to end users, really.
It feels more dated than Windows or Android.
And it's not advertising anything but speed, which isn't a selling point with modern computers. (Despite the fact it has plenty of other advantages)
Why would you use Linux on a 1000$+ laptop, if it isn't to make a point about OSes ? I believe that most have non-IT jobs and couldn't care less.
Because, for me, it's a far less stressful experience than using Windows.
(Can't comment on MacOS as I've not used it).
Which version? I just moved from Windows 11, but Office 2010 was flying: Word opened faster than Wordpad!
> I had to buy a 365 subscription.
I refuse to do that, and TBH that's why I moved to linux on the desktop (actually, the laptop)
I want my software subscription free, working offline, and independant from the OS.
Wine does just that, and now my licensed Office 2010 that I got for cheap NIB on ebay will be with me forever.
Anyone from Micro$oft care to comment? Given the exposure here, this may be the single the most expensive single-user software license Microsoft ever stole.
I use 2010 for a reason: the wine platinum level of compatibility.
Just follow the install guides to throttle the installer IO and you'll have something wonderful, either in WSL or baremetal linux.
That doesn't even really qualify as an "article".
More just like an excuse to send out links to a website...
This would have been the time the true enthusiasts who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy could finally be giving up for good.
And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach.
So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough.
Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview.
As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN.
But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users.
Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either.