Microsoft is innovative because you can now purchase a dedicated hardware peripheral for some software feature the touchscreen was designed to replace.
Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company should completely fail and dissolve.
I'll stick with Apple who, though not without faults, works hard to:
- build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
- secure the integrity of my machine and my privacy
- deliver industry-leading user experience
Apple isn't perfect. The 1st-gen Magic Mouse (I haven't tried the 2nd gen) is utter garbage. Some iOS 10 UX are inconsistent and flawed. They probably should have included a USB-C - Lightning cable in with their new iPhones.
But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
Any reason to believe MS does this more than Apple does?
> their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level.
MS making their own hardware looks to be at least partially a response to that.
> - build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
Again, this really isn't the advantage it used to be. MS first-party surface hardware is really high quality.
> But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
Apple has long offered an excellent direct user experience but extremely poor interoperability. You're still not allowed to run their OS in a VM or on third-party hardware, nor develop programs for Apple systems on non-Apple systems - and if you want a different configuration than the very limited choice Apple gives you, tough. There's plenty wrong with MS but I feel like they're at least somewhat open to alternatives if I don't like their way of doing it. Apple is very much "our way or the highway", which is not where I want my software to be.
> that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors
Dunno, I bought a top-of-the-line rMBP in late 2013, and the anti-glare coating has come off from the screen -- Apple didn't honor the warranty (this is Europe). I sold it because it was crap to use, then some months later Apple confirmed that it is a widespread problem and they will replace the screens for free. (Except in e.g. Hungary where the official dealers didn't give a crap, because the 1 year warranty was over.) Also it had problems with overheating and wifi.
On the other hand, I had a bulky, unsexy HP Zbook G2 that had a GPU problem after 2 years. HP guy came to my house with a new GPU, disassembled the laptop on my desk, put the new GPU in, run some diags and left. In 24 hrs. I sold this one and it is in service at one of my friends, rendering in 3DSMAX 12 hours a day.
I had a MBP a few years ago. I installed the Boot Camp beta. When it went out of beta it locked up with no ability to change the configuration or installed OSs. The solution was to upgrade (30$) to the latest version of OS X. Which meant I lost all the software that came with the laptop since I didn't want to pay for it again.
I had an iPod touch. When I was using it on a certain network it couldn't hit the NTP servers. This set the time to 1970, and I couldn't change it manually due to some integer overflow bug. Trying to scroll those wheel things to the current date, it would start skipping 30 years forward and backward. The time not being set meant I couldn't use the app store, upgrade the OS, etc., rendering the device useless.
I'll stick to Linux and Android. At least I can fix those when they break.
> You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
I did try my hand at an apple machine for awhile. Bought one of their "high quality" laptops. Used it until multiple keys broke - the < key angled sideways when part of the hinge broke, and the capslock key literally snapped in half. There are less extreme measures to discourage me from macro and template metaprogramming...! I've never had a laptop break that fast before or since. They wanted me to leave the entire laptop with them for weeks to replace the keyboard, IIRC, so I passed and just used the exposed membrane for awhile.
Since then, I've turned down a free MBP at work. I'd exhaust the max memory linking. I want a sane, tactile keyboard. They didn't splurge enough on the SSD to fit my projects on. The display isn't even 4K. I'll be forced to dual boot if I try to use it as a laptop. It's overpriced - and while an overpriced iPhone dongle for iOS development may be necessary, I'd much rather have a Mac mini and have the difference spent on more 4K monitors, more RAM, more SSD space, and more cores for my PC build.
I've finally gotten around to retiring my 2009 PC build this year. Admittedly, I replaced the motherboard once when it failed, and upgraded the RAM, but that's still doing better than a dead-out-of-the-gate MBP I'm afraid. Which is a shame - I'd like more competition for my money.
I bought the first 13" Macbook Pro with the Thunderbolt port, expecting the whole world to switch to Thunderbolt in a couple of years. It was predicted that there would be Macbooks in the future with only Thunderbolt ports, as it could connect to everything.
Guess what, that didn't happen. It became a high-end niche market. Not saying that that's where USB-C will be going but I have a bad feeling about this.
Enough with this rubbish claim, please. Everyone I've asked to actually substantiate it resorts to angry handwaving. How about you?
The telemetry collects crash and feature usage data, the same as macOS and all of the phone OSes does. You want that on because it tells MS where the bugs are. If you turn it off, you don't get to complain about bugs because MS has no idea you encountered any.
This is about Innovation and this is something Apple really never was good at even though people threw the phrase at Apple all the time.
"Instead, the company is tremendously iterative which is a fancy way of saying that they’re good at making steady, small improvements over time." http://time.com/3712678/apple-innovation/ from 3/2015
"Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company should completely fail and dissolve." - an google and apple don't do this?
There's no real underdog now. Microsoft has a pretty consistent track record of looking at other companies making money, and making a microsoft version of that. Bing, xbox, azure, and zune are pretty obvious examples. Surface doesn't seem to fit that mold at all. They're giving every indication of doing something new.
I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good, right now, or die. Microsoft can throw a lot of money at something and still be ok. The surface looks very good, and it's a unique vision.
I wish someone would found the equivalent of BeOS, and sell BeBoxes for it. A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. A slot for a stepper driver card would be pretty cool. Maybe a geek port, or maybe a clever way to integrate a breadboard or FPGA, or both.
Things feel really stable right now. Google will keep selling ads, Apple will keep cranking out consumer electronics, Microsoft will keep selling its windows/office pair to the universe, Amazon will keep getting better at logistics, and Facebook will keep growing the social graph. None of them are going to bet the farm on anything. And, really, they're all big clunky slow organizations they rebelled against.
I hope there will be a big wave of innovation, I don't think it's going to come from the big 5. But i'd agree, yes microsoft is some percentage more innovative than apple. Big, radical, disruptive, change the world ideas? No, none of the big 5 are capable anymore.
Microsoft is an underdog in mobile devices. Google is an underdog in tablets/desktop devices. Apple is an underdog when it comes to services. It's like rock/paper/scissors :)
Oh... BeOS. Too bad I was born in mid 90s so I didn't get the chance to play with those systems properly. I read about them, a lot, and it seems amazing what does guys achieved with their system. They were really ahead of the curve in some aspects, but in the others... Oh well, it was OS for nerds and enthusiasts mostly.
I don't think big, radical, change the world tech ideas are going to come from the same type of technology startups they have come from in the past. It seems like the next generation of big ideas will come from infrastructure-heavy startups like Space X, Tesla/SolarCity, and Bezos' Blue Origin. There will probably be some potential Hyperloop opportunities as well.
All of these are huge, expensive undertakings. Making humanity distributed will be expensive and costly, but also transformative. Solving global environmental sustainability with solar power and energy storage, and revolutionizing planetary transport with hyperloop technology will also be hugely transformative. I don't see that happening without spending tons of money on infrastructure.
I've been reading all these Mac-related posts lately because I'm very seriously considering getting one. Why, you ask? Precisely because this:
> A linux laptop with flawless hardware support.
is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia).
You can get a Linux laptop with flawless hardware support right now, really. In fact, I haven't looked over HCLs when buying a Linux laptop for more than five years now. Hardware support is realistically not a problem with Linux anymore.
What is a problem is the fact that, once again, we're going through one of those Let's Rewrite Everything phases and nothing works, for any serious, productive, professional definition of "works", not in Gnome land, not in KDE land, and thanks to the ever-encroaching XDG & friends land, not in fuck-it-i've-done-this-throughout-my-teenage-years-so-blackbox-and-a-bunch-of-xterms-it-is land.
It's great, it's the system that gives you the most control over your system, it's the one that doesn't spy on you and doesn't force you to buy overpriced hardware (look, I'm all for good design and thinness and whatnot but Powerbook G4s were a good bang for the buck, despite the funky hinges, not today's MacBook Pros), and I've grown so accustomed to it and so fond of it on a personal level that the thought of leaving it behind is unpleasant, and compensated only by the fact that I'll still be using it at work.
But I'm sick of nursing my system back to health after every other dnf update. Gnome 3 looks good and it's great to use, but it's a maintenance nightmare, since virtually everything breaks from one minor version to another. Plasma 5 is a step forward from KDE 4 but it still crashes and Kmail2 is still a nightmare. Mind-boggling bugs pop into existence with each new release.
Whenever I show the latest and greatest to someone (this week it was my screen going blank when switching virtual consoles, and if your next question is "why would you switch virtual consoles in 2016", the reason is that gdm was freezing and I wanted to restart it), they shrug and swear they've never seen it before on their system. Unfortunately, this type of thinking is so ingrained in our community (by "our community" I mean "Linux programmers") that I doubt we'll ever devise anything that will stay usable for more than six months.
This was all very fun many, many years ago, when I was in high school and I had a lot of free evenings and when, if something suddenly stopped working after an update or crashed or whatnot, my reaction was "whoa, cool, what's causing this" rather than "well, I'll think about how to fix this while I'm making dinner so that I can still have an hour of two to hack on something". This is not only no longer fun, it's not understandable. Fifteen years is a long time.
I've been messing around with Windows on an old laptop I have around. Windows 10 is pretty slick (maybe it doesn't seem so impressive to you, but please realize that the last time I used Windows routinely, it was Windows 2000) but the *nix-style usage is too ingrained in my brain by now. However, I'm not really looking forward to having to wrestle with my OS for privacy, nor do I trust Microsoft with my computer-related well-being on a ten-year period -- and, being a programmer, I guess it's understandable that "computer-related well-being" is a pretty big deal to me.
imho there's stagnation in hardware computing as well as mobile phones. It seems the fastest innovation is either in electric cars (both USA/China) or in machine learning.
I would agree with that. A lot of these big companies have been around for a while and rose to power as PCs became prevalent in the average household, or when internet access proliferated and became part of everyday life.
The idea that small startups will usurp large companies in nature industries is folly. Examples like Uber aren't valid because fundamentally it's a different kind of company based on technology. A better comparison would be what are the chances that a small startup, competing in the same market as Uber, will take over that industry or change the landscape dramatically?
For PCs what we have is what we see right now in terms of companies and choices.
Lot of people in this thread crapping on Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft is more brave or more innovative than Apple yet, but I know one thing, they are more brave and innovative than Microsoft five years ago. That's all that matters.
While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just need to keep iterating it. They also need to introduce a Surface product that the average consumer can afford--even Apple has done this with the Air line and the non-Pro line.
I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings, and provide a $1k Macbook Air equivalent, along with a sub $2k iMac equivalent, they'll win.
Microsoft also has one other major hurdle. They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks. They have to build an update to 10 that wins over the people they lost. They have to come out and say "Yes, we want your telemetry data, but we aren't going to force you to give it to us, so from now on, it's opt-in".
As far as Apple goes, I think they know they aren't innovating at the same pace. I think the headphone jack, the escape key, and touch bar are them trying to figure out how to innovate without Steve Jobs. I think Jony Ive is capable, but he needs room to fail to learn. Steve Jobs talked a lot about how as a company, you produce a lot of failures for each success. Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Either way, I don't care who the most innovate company is. I'd rather see them all trying to innovate, because the good stuff they come up with can only benefit the consumer.
> Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones.
This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows 10 still has some serious pain points that need to be worked out, specially on the Surface line with touch interfaces.
To me, its different philosophy, I never consider Apple very innovative technically. they have always been (even with jobs) more innovative on product strategy and marketing. Iphone wasnt the first of its kind, nor its Ipod. However, They have always choose the correct package for a stable technology that fits the mass.
Buying Iphone, Ipod, IMac, or air its more of a fashion statement than a Technical one, and coding does look cool on Mac, and time may be changing, but most people that i know who code on Apple product arent your typical computer science, nerds with no art back ground kind of coders.
Opt-in will never happen for things like this. There are just too many people who don't care. Look at the rates of organ-donors when comparing opt-in to opt-out.
I'd be happy if they made things opt-out. As in you can opt out of them. I just had a miserable time getting my default documents folder to not be the onedrive folder so things stopped saving there and microsoft stopped complaining about me being over my pitiful 5GB.
> I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings ...
The problem isn't so much the hardware but the OS. I have awful memories of Windows. I suppose it has gotten better, but I wonder if it's a realistic replacement to Mac OS X? Essentially, I want something that just works and where I can use common unix tools. Maybe the new Unix subsystem + an X server will do it.
Concerning the new MBP, I don't mind the touch bar or the specs but they are really expensive (esp. in Europe). If they don't get cheaper, I may try a windows machine.
The telemetry data will continue to harm them so long as it's a mystery. They need to say what's in it. Maybe one of the EU data protection commissioners or an alert PCI-DSS auditor will ask the right question with legal force.
>They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks.
Why does this suck for users? This is actually one of my favorite aspects of W10.
MS does not have an iMac equivalent yet, but you can get an Air-equivalent Surface Pro for $1100. It does have some drawbacks over the air (which I guess has been merged into the regular MacBook now), but also has a number of advantages.
Microsoft has almost always been a more innovative company.
Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.
Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways.
They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else.
They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company).
Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.
Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.
Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better.
Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.
I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack.
I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.
The central premise is that Apple isn't innovative anymore. Let's look at the technologies Apple has materially advanced over the last few years.
* Custom screen technology leap-frogging 4K displays directly to 5K, at a full-system price below that of a 4K screen alone from competitors at the time.
* wide colour gamut screen tech putting them several years ahead of the competition.
* Brand new screen digitiser technology in the iPad Pros that also puts them several years ahead of any of their competitors.
* 3D Touch technology nobody else even appears to have a path to implementing because it requires such close design integration with the hardware and software.
* mobile processor designs putting them years ahead of any of their competitors in yet another technology category.
* A new variant of iOS (Watch OS) that's now powering two completely different product categories.
I venture to suggest that the death of innovation at Apple is being declared somewhat prematurely.
They're working themselves there, it still feels like parts of Microsoft haven't caught up. Windows 10 comes to mind, and other areas that still seem painfully behind the times. It would be nice if Microsoft made some Windows Components that are open sourced out of the box, like full disk encryption software. I've personally moved to Linux for over a year now because it meets all my needs without getting in my way. Linux has come a long way, but Windows 10 feels like it's pushing me away. There should be a minimalist / developer centric version of Windows that has no ridiculous services on or even installed on the OS, has sane update installation (once a month or so is fine, unless critical). Maybe even turn the old dated Windows Update into the same style as a Linux package manager if that's possible enough for Windows. There's also two different Windows Update screens and they each fight each other.
I wonder how much propaganda do we read every day ?
Tip: A lot.
I think that almost every piece of information which is not pure art or mathematical formulas - is some sort of propaganda..
Meaning someone somewhere is pushing his own agenda, directly or indirectly.
It is strategically wise for Apple competitors to put out all kinds of negative articles right now.
Apple does something unpopular - use that as a lever to swing the opinion - that's when some customers fall into your own nets.
After all, competition is not messiah - they desperately want to push their own products and inflict as much damage as possible to the top dog, which happens to be Apple right now..
I don't know about this particular article, but I'm just saying - I've seen so much negativity and wining about the MacBook Pros - that the "pro" people are left behind, there's no ESC key and so on - I'm really curious to actually try it for myself..
What if I like it ? Is that a strategy too ?
I find it harder and harder to believe anything on the Internet now, because it's all twisted and bended and distorted.. It's a war out there and the battlefield is our minds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBma82g3Uag Young Steve warned us about the risk of having "toner heads" running tech monopolies. So weird that it was Jobs himself who picked this guy to be his successor just as they were becoming the biggest corporation in the world.
The word "brave" still feels laughable in the corporate context. At most, a company has calculated it wants to take a larger risk.
"Brave" probably makes sense in the context where a company is ready to literally bet it all on something they believe in when they're in a sustainable position.
Apple has for a very long time been a marketing and branding innovator. Jobs recognized something important: branding and marketing matters more than technology, but the technology has to be good enough to support the branding and marketing efforts. So he took the company in a direction that was quite clever: wait until the tech was good enough to wrap in a marketable package, then blitz the market with it suggesting they'd been the technology driver the entire time.
It has worked fabulously. Just look at the number of people who think Apple innovated computing at any level: from portable music to smart phones to displays and on and on. These days you're a "tech geek" if you have a couple of Apple devices in your kit. This phenomenon has almost nothing to do with innovation in technology but quite a lot with their marketing efforts to present themselves as fashionable technology innovators.
In the last 20 years or so there aren't very many technologies Apple has actually innovated on that didn't already exist in some form or another, just without the Apple Marketing Magic behind it.
Curiously, one of the things I'm rather liking about Windows 10 is that it now has an Ubuntu module in it... Back at the end of my PhD I switched from a combination of Windows and a Linux server, to a Mac, largely because of bash on Mac. It sort of feels like Windows has started to one-up them there too. (Though it's still prettier on a Mac)
Some of the cool stuff from HCI labs in the early 2000s seems to be arriving in products on Windows faster than on Macs too (tangibles, large touch displays, etc).
It seems to me that Apple is somehow now missing the "obvious plays". They put a bunch of effort into Siri, but were late putting it on the Mac. They put a bunch of effort into multi-touch; but Macs are now just about the only notebooks without a multi-touch screen. They put a bunch of effort into the Pencil to make it low-latency for artists; but you can't use it on a Mac. Another obvious play was to make it so you can plug in the ipad and use it as a secondary display with pencil support, but it took Duet Display to do that for them so they've never been able to promote that you can do that.
Perhaps they bet single-mindedly on the tablet replacing the computer, and were caught out when the tablet market saturated and started getting eaten by phablets? Either way, it seems to me they've found themselves left with an anaemic laptop product pipeline.
It seems people manage to get it going, some have forked the Kernel to provide top notch support, I just wish it were baked into Ubuntu out of the box.
Not so fast. Let the respective products come to market. Armchair visionary technologists have already spelled death of Apple and Resurrection of Microsoft. Not so fast.
To be fair, Apple's last 3-4 Quarters have been huge consecutive disappointments, and this line up was their last chance to turn that around I believe. And they've clearly failed. Who will pay $1,500 on a laptop that has second-grade components, a rather standard keyboard, etc. etc.
Heck, Asus' Zenbook 3 line costs around $1500 and it has the best possible components, better screen, better keyboard, better everything.
Yeah I don't know. I mean it's great that Microsoft is starting to actually being able to bring innovative products to market rather than staying at the concept stage. Panos seems to infuse that part of Microsoft with some great leadership and design ethos. They are are on an upwards trajectory while Apple can be seen as being on the down slope.
But Apple has and still is doing some great things when it comes to innovation. The taptic engine is a great addition, so was touch 3D, Touch ID, and a few of the other things they've introduced. The problem with Apple is more that they now seem to lack some judgement and vision together with a putting the bottom line before everything else.
That could be perceived as "braver" than Microsoft if it weren't for the fact that Microsoft isn't exactly throwing money at problems either any more, but seems to keeps things more focused and picking its battles. Overall though the competition is great and will lead to better products.
I'm sceptical about Microsoft innovations, especially adding touch screen to laptops and AI/VR, but at least they're still interested in desktops, unlike Apple and Google that are thinking that everyone need only Instagram and Clash of kings.
I thought this was going to be about OSS, Linux on Windows, S2016 docker containers, etc. That's where MS has been moving in an innovative direction. Instead it's making gross over-predictions based on the release of a very large tablet.
I think it would be fair to say that Apple is not that great anymore and Microsoft sucks less. However Apple is still a better choice for many pro consumers. For example Microsoft/Windows doesn't have avb support.
Is it bravery when you have no other choice? Microsoft is trying to "make the PC great again" because everything else they tried has failed. If the "Windows workstation" (oxymoron alert, I know, but it is the best way to think about PC vs smart devices) goes down, Microsoft goes down.
Compared to this amount of existential dependency, Apple continuing the Mac line is more like when Microsoft was still continuing their Flight Simulator despite already chasing much bigger prey in computer entertainment with the Xbox division.
If you're a student of - particularly - the last 50 years of tech industry history, then you understand there is always another choice: established tech companies have frequently chosen to stubbornly die off tightly clinging to their own past, rather than attempt something else. Microsoft was previously well on its way to that land of eroded or dead tech giants.
This Microsoft media push is becoming tiring. Surface Studio is an expensive touchscreen on a stand and for some reason it seems to be worthy of 20 articles a day, and dozens of articles 'spontaneously' wondering whether some mantle of genius has passed from Apple to Microsoft. Neither Apple nor Microsoft are particularly innovative companies. Microsoft is gradually moving from the general purpose computer OS business to the locked down appliance business that Apple pioneered, aiming for an unprotected flank (did graphics people really need Apple laptops? Nope - they'd probably like a drafting table with a tablet surface better), furiously press releasing its ass off, and unleashing the shills.
edit:
"Apple just handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom"
How dumb do they think Mac users are? Pretty fucking dumb. I'm not sure they're wrong, but it's going to take a lot more than a touchscreen on a stand and a flood of credulous articles to make Microsoft cool.
So far at least; Candy Crush Saga has not repeatedly downloaded onto my Mac without my permission and installed itself into my Dock; as 'a suggestion'. In this respect at least; I will take the less innovative Apple every time. Microsoft have embraced and extended the Apple App store concept into something profoundly irritating; intrusive and annoying.
[+] [-] whytaka|9 years ago|reply
Let's completely forget that Microsoft 'upgrades' your OS without your permission, spies on you, embeds ads into the Start Menu, and their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level. In my opinion, these are actual reasons a company should completely fail and dissolve.
I'll stick with Apple who, though not without faults, works hard to:
- build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
- secure the integrity of my machine and my privacy
- deliver industry-leading user experience
Apple isn't perfect. The 1st-gen Magic Mouse (I haven't tried the 2nd gen) is utter garbage. Some iOS 10 UX are inconsistent and flawed. They probably should have included a USB-C - Lightning cable in with their new iPhones.
But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
[+] [-] lmm|9 years ago|reply
Any reason to believe MS does this more than Apple does?
> their OEMs like Lenovo will listen in on everything you do at the hardware level.
MS making their own hardware looks to be at least partially a response to that.
> - build quality machines that seemingly never wanes in performance while provide enduring support that make them last so much longer than their competitors that it shifts the arithmetic when comparing the YoY cost of their wares to their competition
Again, this really isn't the advantage it used to be. MS first-party surface hardware is really high quality.
> But let's all calm down. Apple is still a cut above. USB-C connected peripherals will likely storm into the marketplace. You'll probably get the new MBP. If you really can't handle the dongles, get the 2nd to latest version. It'll last you more than 4 years easily. If you're the type to get a new model every year: either you work very closely with the MBP hardware itself or you need to re-examine your life.
Apple has long offered an excellent direct user experience but extremely poor interoperability. You're still not allowed to run their OS in a VM or on third-party hardware, nor develop programs for Apple systems on non-Apple systems - and if you want a different configuration than the very limited choice Apple gives you, tough. There's plenty wrong with MS but I feel like they're at least somewhat open to alternatives if I don't like their way of doing it. Apple is very much "our way or the highway", which is not where I want my software to be.
[+] [-] sz4kerto|9 years ago|reply
Dunno, I bought a top-of-the-line rMBP in late 2013, and the anti-glare coating has come off from the screen -- Apple didn't honor the warranty (this is Europe). I sold it because it was crap to use, then some months later Apple confirmed that it is a widespread problem and they will replace the screens for free. (Except in e.g. Hungary where the official dealers didn't give a crap, because the 1 year warranty was over.) Also it had problems with overheating and wifi.
On the other hand, I had a bulky, unsexy HP Zbook G2 that had a GPU problem after 2 years. HP guy came to my house with a new GPU, disassembled the laptop on my desk, put the new GPU in, run some diags and left. In 24 hrs. I sold this one and it is in service at one of my friends, rendering in 3DSMAX 12 hours a day.
Anecdata, I know.
[+] [-] TACIXAT|9 years ago|reply
I had an iPod touch. When I was using it on a certain network it couldn't hit the NTP servers. This set the time to 1970, and I couldn't change it manually due to some integer overflow bug. Trying to scroll those wheel things to the current date, it would start skipping 30 years forward and backward. The time not being set meant I couldn't use the app store, upgrade the OS, etc., rendering the device useless.
I'll stick to Linux and Android. At least I can fix those when they break.
[+] [-] MaulingMonkey|9 years ago|reply
I did try my hand at an apple machine for awhile. Bought one of their "high quality" laptops. Used it until multiple keys broke - the < key angled sideways when part of the hinge broke, and the capslock key literally snapped in half. There are less extreme measures to discourage me from macro and template metaprogramming...! I've never had a laptop break that fast before or since. They wanted me to leave the entire laptop with them for weeks to replace the keyboard, IIRC, so I passed and just used the exposed membrane for awhile.
Since then, I've turned down a free MBP at work. I'd exhaust the max memory linking. I want a sane, tactile keyboard. They didn't splurge enough on the SSD to fit my projects on. The display isn't even 4K. I'll be forced to dual boot if I try to use it as a laptop. It's overpriced - and while an overpriced iPhone dongle for iOS development may be necessary, I'd much rather have a Mac mini and have the difference spent on more 4K monitors, more RAM, more SSD space, and more cores for my PC build.
I've finally gotten around to retiring my 2009 PC build this year. Admittedly, I replaced the motherboard once when it failed, and upgraded the RAM, but that's still doing better than a dead-out-of-the-gate MBP I'm afraid. Which is a shame - I'd like more competition for my money.
[+] [-] systemtest|9 years ago|reply
Guess what, that didn't happen. It became a high-end niche market. Not saying that that's where USB-C will be going but I have a bad feeling about this.
[+] [-] RandomOpinion|9 years ago|reply
Enough with this rubbish claim, please. Everyone I've asked to actually substantiate it resorts to angry handwaving. How about you?
The telemetry collects crash and feature usage data, the same as macOS and all of the phone OSes does. You want that on because it tells MS where the bugs are. If you turn it off, you don't get to complain about bugs because MS has no idea you encountered any.
[+] [-] baldfat|9 years ago|reply
"Instead, the company is tremendously iterative which is a fancy way of saying that they’re good at making steady, small improvements over time." http://time.com/3712678/apple-innovation/ from 3/2015
[+] [-] UK-AL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoutz|9 years ago|reply
I can't think of a real underdog right now. Apple had this sort of desperation to do something good, right now, or die. Microsoft can throw a lot of money at something and still be ok. The surface looks very good, and it's a unique vision.
I wish someone would found the equivalent of BeOS, and sell BeBoxes for it. A linux laptop with flawless hardware support. A slot for a stepper driver card would be pretty cool. Maybe a geek port, or maybe a clever way to integrate a breadboard or FPGA, or both.
Things feel really stable right now. Google will keep selling ads, Apple will keep cranking out consumer electronics, Microsoft will keep selling its windows/office pair to the universe, Amazon will keep getting better at logistics, and Facebook will keep growing the social graph. None of them are going to bet the farm on anything. And, really, they're all big clunky slow organizations they rebelled against.
I hope there will be a big wave of innovation, I don't think it's going to come from the big 5. But i'd agree, yes microsoft is some percentage more innovative than apple. Big, radical, disruptive, change the world ideas? No, none of the big 5 are capable anymore.
[+] [-] mhomde|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Philipp__|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamUK96|9 years ago|reply
I mostly agree, but seen some of Google's acquisitions and what they're doing now? Boston Dynamics are making some huge strides in robotic motion.
[+] [-] illumin8|9 years ago|reply
All of these are huge, expensive undertakings. Making humanity distributed will be expensive and costly, but also transformative. Solving global environmental sustainability with solar power and energy storage, and revolutionizing planetary transport with hyperloop technology will also be hugely transformative. I don't see that happening without spending tons of money on infrastructure.
[+] [-] notalaser|9 years ago|reply
> A linux laptop with flawless hardware support.
is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia).
You can get a Linux laptop with flawless hardware support right now, really. In fact, I haven't looked over HCLs when buying a Linux laptop for more than five years now. Hardware support is realistically not a problem with Linux anymore.
What is a problem is the fact that, once again, we're going through one of those Let's Rewrite Everything phases and nothing works, for any serious, productive, professional definition of "works", not in Gnome land, not in KDE land, and thanks to the ever-encroaching XDG & friends land, not in fuck-it-i've-done-this-throughout-my-teenage-years-so-blackbox-and-a-bunch-of-xterms-it-is land.
It's great, it's the system that gives you the most control over your system, it's the one that doesn't spy on you and doesn't force you to buy overpriced hardware (look, I'm all for good design and thinness and whatnot but Powerbook G4s were a good bang for the buck, despite the funky hinges, not today's MacBook Pros), and I've grown so accustomed to it and so fond of it on a personal level that the thought of leaving it behind is unpleasant, and compensated only by the fact that I'll still be using it at work.
But I'm sick of nursing my system back to health after every other dnf update. Gnome 3 looks good and it's great to use, but it's a maintenance nightmare, since virtually everything breaks from one minor version to another. Plasma 5 is a step forward from KDE 4 but it still crashes and Kmail2 is still a nightmare. Mind-boggling bugs pop into existence with each new release.
Whenever I show the latest and greatest to someone (this week it was my screen going blank when switching virtual consoles, and if your next question is "why would you switch virtual consoles in 2016", the reason is that gdm was freezing and I wanted to restart it), they shrug and swear they've never seen it before on their system. Unfortunately, this type of thinking is so ingrained in our community (by "our community" I mean "Linux programmers") that I doubt we'll ever devise anything that will stay usable for more than six months.
This was all very fun many, many years ago, when I was in high school and I had a lot of free evenings and when, if something suddenly stopped working after an update or crashed or whatnot, my reaction was "whoa, cool, what's causing this" rather than "well, I'll think about how to fix this while I'm making dinner so that I can still have an hour of two to hack on something". This is not only no longer fun, it's not understandable. Fifteen years is a long time.
I've been messing around with Windows on an old laptop I have around. Windows 10 is pretty slick (maybe it doesn't seem so impressive to you, but please realize that the last time I used Windows routinely, it was Windows 2000) but the *nix-style usage is too ingrained in my brain by now. However, I'm not really looking forward to having to wrestle with my OS for privacy, nor do I trust Microsoft with my computer-related well-being on a ten-year period -- and, being a programmer, I guess it's understandable that "computer-related well-being" is a pretty big deal to me.
[+] [-] mtw|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Unkechaug|9 years ago|reply
The idea that small startups will usurp large companies in nature industries is folly. Examples like Uber aren't valid because fundamentally it's a different kind of company based on technology. A better comparison would be what are the chances that a small startup, competing in the same market as Uber, will take over that industry or change the landscape dramatically?
For PCs what we have is what we see right now in terms of companies and choices.
[+] [-] wmccullough|9 years ago|reply
While I'm sure the grand plan is to eat Apple's lunch, they seem more focused on being better than themselves. I think they are onto something with the Surface line, they just need to keep iterating it. They also need to introduce a Surface product that the average consumer can afford--even Apple has done this with the Air line and the non-Pro line.
I have a MacBook now, but I'd love to go to a Surface Studio. If they can work to get up-to-date hardware in all of their offerings, and provide a $1k Macbook Air equivalent, along with a sub $2k iMac equivalent, they'll win.
Microsoft also has one other major hurdle. They lost a ton of ground they were gaining because they chose to force upgrades to Windows 10. I can actually get why they did this from a corporate perspective (Less OSes to support, therefore more money freed up to do other things), but as a user it sucks. They have to build an update to 10 that wins over the people they lost. They have to come out and say "Yes, we want your telemetry data, but we aren't going to force you to give it to us, so from now on, it's opt-in".
As far as Apple goes, I think they know they aren't innovating at the same pace. I think the headphone jack, the escape key, and touch bar are them trying to figure out how to innovate without Steve Jobs. I think Jony Ive is capable, but he needs room to fail to learn. Steve Jobs talked a lot about how as a company, you produce a lot of failures for each success. Steve Jobs was just much better at having many of those failures never see the light of day.
Either way, I don't care who the most innovate company is. I'd rather see them all trying to innovate, because the good stuff they come up with can only benefit the consumer.
[+] [-] wklauss|9 years ago|reply
Not even that. A lot of his failures saw the light of day, we have just forgotten about them. The same we will do with the current ones.
This, BTW, applies to all companies. To reach this point the Surface line has gone through a lot of mediocre products and bad decisions, we just don't think about them anymore. And Windows 10 still has some serious pain points that need to be worked out, specially on the Surface line with touch interfaces.
[+] [-] whoops1122|9 years ago|reply
Buying Iphone, Ipod, IMac, or air its more of a fashion statement than a Technical one, and coding does look cool on Mac, and time may be changing, but most people that i know who code on Apple product arent your typical computer science, nerds with no art back ground kind of coders.
[+] [-] jon_richards|9 years ago|reply
I'd be happy if they made things opt-out. As in you can opt out of them. I just had a miserable time getting my default documents folder to not be the onedrive folder so things stopped saving there and microsoft stopped complaining about me being over my pitiful 5GB.
[+] [-] yodsanklai|9 years ago|reply
The problem isn't so much the hardware but the OS. I have awful memories of Windows. I suppose it has gotten better, but I wonder if it's a realistic replacement to Mac OS X? Essentially, I want something that just works and where I can use common unix tools. Maybe the new Unix subsystem + an X server will do it.
Concerning the new MBP, I don't mind the touch bar or the specs but they are really expensive (esp. in Europe). If they don't get cheaper, I may try a windows machine.
[+] [-] artursapek|9 years ago|reply
The Surface Pro 4 costs $150 less than a comparable Macbook air.
https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Microso...
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drusepth|9 years ago|reply
Why does this suck for users? This is actually one of my favorite aspects of W10.
[+] [-] tw04|9 years ago|reply
They're trying to directly compete with their partners. Budget laptops are where literally everyone else they partner with focuses.
[+] [-] namlem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpgvm|9 years ago|reply
Microsoft Research alone is enough for this to be true.
Surface is a very very very old brand/moniker that goes back almost a decade at this point - originally a tech demo of a table that you could interact with in various ways. They explored touch, VR and all sorts of alternative interfaces before anyone else. They took a stab at PDAs around the same time as Palm (which was also an insanely innovative company). Their developer tooling is really innovative, the CLR itself, their IDE integration.
Hell the NT kernel was/is a really innovative piece of technology - it's driver model still completely stomps what is available in Linux/Mach.
Apple was never more innovative than Microsoft, they just executed way better. Jobs might not have been a technical or even design genius (though plenty of both worked for him), but he definitely was a business genius that really understood the value of crisp execution and marketing.
I say all of this as an Apple user, that also happens to be a fan of the technical and innovative achievements of Microsoft and as someone that contributes to and relies on the OSS/Linux/GNU stack. I have a horse in every race but at the end of the day you can't dispute that Microsoft is the clear innovation powerhouse remaining with IBM/HP/Bell Labs mostly winding down in comparison.
[+] [-] simonh|9 years ago|reply
* Custom screen technology leap-frogging 4K displays directly to 5K, at a full-system price below that of a 4K screen alone from competitors at the time.
* wide colour gamut screen tech putting them several years ahead of the competition.
* Brand new screen digitiser technology in the iPad Pros that also puts them several years ahead of any of their competitors.
* 3D Touch technology nobody else even appears to have a path to implementing because it requires such close design integration with the hardware and software.
* mobile processor designs putting them years ahead of any of their competitors in yet another technology category.
* A new variant of iOS (Watch OS) that's now powering two completely different product categories.
I venture to suggest that the death of innovation at Apple is being declared somewhat prematurely.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delegate|9 years ago|reply
I think that almost every piece of information which is not pure art or mathematical formulas - is some sort of propaganda..
Meaning someone somewhere is pushing his own agenda, directly or indirectly.
It is strategically wise for Apple competitors to put out all kinds of negative articles right now.
Apple does something unpopular - use that as a lever to swing the opinion - that's when some customers fall into your own nets.
After all, competition is not messiah - they desperately want to push their own products and inflict as much damage as possible to the top dog, which happens to be Apple right now..
I don't know about this particular article, but I'm just saying - I've seen so much negativity and wining about the MacBook Pros - that the "pro" people are left behind, there's no ESC key and so on - I'm really curious to actually try it for myself..
What if I like it ? Is that a strategy too ?
I find it harder and harder to believe anything on the Internet now, because it's all twisted and bended and distorted.. It's a war out there and the battlefield is our minds.
[+] [-] ingenieros|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
"Brave" probably makes sense in the context where a company is ready to literally bet it all on something they believe in when they're in a sustainable position.
[+] [-] sidlls|9 years ago|reply
It has worked fabulously. Just look at the number of people who think Apple innovated computing at any level: from portable music to smart phones to displays and on and on. These days you're a "tech geek" if you have a couple of Apple devices in your kit. This phenomenon has almost nothing to do with innovation in technology but quite a lot with their marketing efforts to present themselves as fashionable technology innovators.
In the last 20 years or so there aren't very many technologies Apple has actually innovated on that didn't already exist in some form or another, just without the Apple Marketing Magic behind it.
[+] [-] therein|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wbillingsley|9 years ago|reply
Some of the cool stuff from HCI labs in the early 2000s seems to be arriving in products on Windows faster than on Macs too (tangibles, large touch displays, etc).
It seems to me that Apple is somehow now missing the "obvious plays". They put a bunch of effort into Siri, but were late putting it on the Mac. They put a bunch of effort into multi-touch; but Macs are now just about the only notebooks without a multi-touch screen. They put a bunch of effort into the Pencil to make it low-latency for artists; but you can't use it on a Mac. Another obvious play was to make it so you can plug in the ipad and use it as a secondary display with pencil support, but it took Duet Display to do that for them so they've never been able to promote that you can do that.
Perhaps they bet single-mindedly on the tablet replacing the computer, and were caught out when the tablet market saturated and started getting eaten by phablets? Either way, it seems to me they've found themselves left with an anaemic laptop product pipeline.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|9 years ago|reply
It seems people manage to get it going, some have forked the Kernel to provide top notch support, I just wish it were baked into Ubuntu out of the box.
[+] [-] sidcool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SamUK96|9 years ago|reply
Heck, Asus' Zenbook 3 line costs around $1500 and it has the best possible components, better screen, better keyboard, better everything.
[+] [-] mhomde|9 years ago|reply
But Apple has and still is doing some great things when it comes to innovation. The taptic engine is a great addition, so was touch 3D, Touch ID, and a few of the other things they've introduced. The problem with Apple is more that they now seem to lack some judgement and vision together with a putting the bottom line before everything else.
That could be perceived as "braver" than Microsoft if it weren't for the fact that Microsoft isn't exactly throwing money at problems either any more, but seems to keeps things more focused and picking its battles. Overall though the competition is great and will lead to better products.
[+] [-] exabrial|9 years ago|reply
I don't claim to know a whole lot about the design of Windows, but what would be the possibility of seeing them become POSIX compatible at some point?
[+] [-] ungzd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseymarquis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themihai|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|9 years ago|reply
Compared to this amount of existential dependency, Apple continuing the Mac line is more like when Microsoft was still continuing their Flight Simulator despite already chasing much bigger prey in computer entertainment with the Xbox division.
[+] [-] adventured|9 years ago|reply
If you're a student of - particularly - the last 50 years of tech industry history, then you understand there is always another choice: established tech companies have frequently chosen to stubbornly die off tightly clinging to their own past, rather than attempt something else. Microsoft was previously well on its way to that land of eroded or dead tech giants.
[+] [-] pessimizer|9 years ago|reply
edit:
"Apple just handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom"
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-microsoft-macbook-pro-surfac...
How dumb do they think Mac users are? Pretty fucking dumb. I'm not sure they're wrong, but it's going to take a lot more than a touchscreen on a stand and a flood of credulous articles to make Microsoft cool.
[+] [-] amnesiac_200|9 years ago|reply