"I have to say this is the first time in years when there's a feeling that MS has outpaced Apple. The product looks amazing."

That is what I came here to say (as a mac user who uses only apple computers, currently[1]).

See this animated gif from the article:

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kFQXkfWYVYCRnSfXpAhRBTVXH4M...

Now ... I don't know what that's about and I am pretty sure that's an action I will never use, but that's something new and interesting. That's innovation.

[1] 11" macbook air, mac mini HTPC and 2009 mac pro as primary desktop

Presumably you can use the jog dial off-screen and for any number of things, in which case it would be useful to almost everyone for volume control, scrolling through lists, adjusting values in control panels and so on.

Obviously video editors use them, but I know of professional photographers who find them really useful in moving through a catalogue while editing photos too.

Yeah this seems to aim straight at the complaints that Apple has been ignoring the creative segment of their market.

Both digital illustrators I know work entirely on PC's these days simply because the tooling there is more flexible. I have no doubt they will migrate to this device over time.

Apple these days are designed for optimal usage of iTunes and Safari.

It is no longer the platform of choice for creative content creation.

Surprisingly, two of the worst pieces of software that come with OSX. I would love it if they were really optimizing anything about iTunes.

> I would love it if they were really optimizing anything about iTunes.

Indeed. iTunes has become so bad I bit the bullet and signed up for Roon - despite its eye watering price. It's a vastly better (and of course in some other ways inferior) alternative.

One thing which I like about Roon and indeed a lot of 3rd party software from smaller companies is that I can talk to the devs and product managers on the community forums and find out where the product is headed or make suggestions and get feedback.

As far as iTunes goes, I have no idea where in the hell it's going. It went from a music manager to an eBooks platform, an App Store and now a Spotify clone.

Good time to be a software company specialising in catering to the disgruntled user who wants something a little more sophisticated than what Apple's currently selling.

Safari is my favorite browser except for non development. I agree about iTunes though.

iTunes has been completely awful since the last update. For a while it wasn't usable at all if my laptop woke up from Sleep mode, and a patch a couple weeks ago seemed to fix that, but it still happens. It's like the application doesn't have logic anymore to handle reconnecting to networks.

Plus most of the interface feels unnatural to use, at least for Apple Music and the Store.

Since the last update? I think you mean, for the last few years...

Well, specifically the issue I mentioned with reconnecting after losing network connections. I've never noticed anything like it before this major iTunes version.

if they can optimize iTunes it would represent as a momentous shift in general computing.

Indeed. Coreaudio is much than whatever it is on Windows. Easier to sync software and lower latency overall.

Indeed. Safari is lagging behind, it's like IE in the old days. iTunes is the shittiest App I have interacted with in the OSX eco-system.

Maybe for visual content. The music technology classes I teach are a sea of MacBooks.

My thoughts exactly.

Not sure if anyone listened to Satya's closing comments but they sounds eerily similar to something Jobs would say.

Either way, good for Microsoft on putting out a product for the high end creative segment.

This seems to compete with Wacom Cintiq more than any Apple product I'm aware of.

I think that's part of the point the parent. This is a combination of an iMac and Cintiq. Something Apple currently doesn't have a answer to.

And it's based off NTrig tech, too. Competition is good ;)

The indie tool market has a much stronger foothold today than they did a few years ago. Adobe, Autodesk, etc. still reign supreme, but that's slowly changing. They are being overtaken by smaller, more niche products. See affinity, sketch, figma, etc. Unless Microsoft can woo these companies into building apps for their platform, I don't see MSFT making a dent with this market.

Affinity Designer for Windows [1] is currently in beta. Figma is available for Windows too [2].

1: https://affinity.serif.com/fr/windows/ 2: https://www.figma.com/downloads

As an Apple (Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, PowerBook, PowerMac G5) user for 15 years, of photo processing & inDesign layout, I agree.

XCode & iOS development is going to keep me on Apple for now, though, but the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing. The BSD Unix environment is the whole reason I went with Apple in the first place. OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be.

Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s, & Win 10 still a little clunky compared to OS X.

> the Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing

In theory. To anyone who feels that way, please try it out for yourself before making a leap. I thought it would let me develop Ruby on Rails under Windows like I could do on Linux or macOS. I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this. After a couple of months of commenting on bug reports and watching and trying, I gave up. I'll check back later. YMMV.

I'm a bit of a WSL fanboy, but this is the right advice if you're not a windows user normally.

When it works, it's great, but some things just don't work and you're stuck.

I've found the WSL devs to be fairly responsive, but not to everything.

However, I've found open source projects to be pretty responsive to bug reports of their projects running on WSL; it's far easier for them to support that than support a native windows build.

There are often workarounds for issues, but their coverage is certainly not where we would all like it to be yet.

For the good of the world, I hope no one except Windows has to deal with WSL specific code. When programs start to have to include WSL specific code, the 'extend' part of EEE has begun. While it would be foolish to believe a few programs here and there including support for WSL means doom, it is certainly not the right direction.

Usually it's issues with assumptions about the completeness of the platform; e.g. ZeroMQ assumes that if it's on a UNIX-ey platform it should use UNIX sockets rather than TCP and doesn't check to see if it's actually supported.

I'm not very familiar with OSX, but I'd be surprised if there weren't differences between it and mainline Linux that needed special care and I see this as similar.

To be honest Microsoft has a habit of layering on functionality on top of existing functionality in a piece meal approach so that you end up with a solution which is 75% compatible with the standards but not quite.

Despite being a software company (or because of it), I think innovating on the internals of Windows and its APIs and cleaning house on the software front will be the real challenge for them - making incredibly beautiful hardware might prove to be the easy part!

what you are saying may be true for now, but Microsoft is really trying to achieve 100% userspace compatibility, ( they set the line clear it is about user space programs ).

I couldn't cross compile simple toy kernel (xv6) in OS X (because I needed to have i386-elf-gcc, which need to compile whole binutils , which really cumbersome, and brew doesn't support it -as far as I looked into it ) but in BashOnWindows , it just works, it maybe a little slow (specially file system operations) but it works like charm. I actually tried to compile linux kernel and running it on qemu, It worked, but compilation (which is a lot of file system operation) was so slow it hadn't worth it.

Nadella (MS CEO) aimed perfectly, instead of introducing some limited amount of support for linux apps, his company tries to port whole ubuntu user space. After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation (which is dream of most developers).

> Microsoft is really trying to achieve 100% userspace compatibility

> After this project matures enough, rest assured, it will be equivalent of using linux workstation

Didn't Microsoft say WSL wouldn't support graphical apps? That's a big portion of userspace; and without that, it simply can't be a linux workstation

The biggest issue I have had with their subsystem is that of the file system (NTFS). The fact that I can't have long paths and can't soft link seem ridiculous.

NTFS has a functional equivalent to soft links in the form of reparse points, although I don't know to what degree that feature is exposed in the UI, if at all. Last time I looked into it (admittedly, years ago) they could only be created via the command line. Not sure what you mean by "can't have long paths" though, NTFS allows you to programmatically create paths up to 32,767 code points long:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx

Windows seems to have a certain hard limit on file path characters (a max of 160) which they seem to have recently removed [0] - So while my point is technically moot it's not enabled by default.

As for soft links, a lot of linux tools create soft links (ln -s from to) and generally that fails on NTFS (I tried installing a bunch of npm modules and all had this specific issue)[1].

[0] - https://mspoweruser.com/ntfs-260-character-windows-10/

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8232778/nodejs-npm-insta...

It's a max of 260, and it's a Win32 subsystem limitation, not the limitation of NT OS or NTFS file system - and even in Win32 there are escape hatches for it, it's just that you need to know of them and use them explicitly to get such support.

With respect to symlinks - NTFS supports them, but there are subtle semantic differences with POSIX. WSL does actually support symlinks (i.e. you can do ln -s), it's various other behavior around them that breaks, like trying to untar a file that contains symlinks.

The team said that they're working on a custom implementation of symlinks that would provide proper behavior (but wouldn't be seen as a symlink from Win32).

I think the problem here is that Linux NTFS drivers are all a pile of reverse-engineered hacks, so obscure features are overlooked or not fully implemented.

Now, Microsoft should be in a position to put something better into their WSL, but that might entail the risk that someone else will hack that implementation and provide good drivers for everyone, something they clearly don't want (or they would have provided open specs for NTFS support by now).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should be able to loopback-mount a "proper" file system (e.g. ext4) from a file on NTFS, and then you'll have no limits other than what ext4 imposes. Of course, you then lose easy interop with the filesystem from Windows side, but that is the inherent trade-off here.

WSL doesn't actually run a Linux kernel; it emulates the syscalls and process environment Linux offers and provides a binary loader. It's WINE in reverse.

So there's no ext4 driver, and no concept of loopback mounts.

Ah, indeed (although it's not quite WINE in reverse, since WINE emulates userspace calls, not kernel syscalls).

I see that there's considerable demand for this exact thing in their bug tracker already. If they go for a low-hanging fruit here, it'd be FUSE support - and that should give us ext2, at least.

>> I discovered a whole bunch of unimplemented features that prevented this.

I'd be very interested in a blog post about your problems and I don't think I'm alone.

"Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing." Have you actually tried it out?

I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.

When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.

I run a Windows 10 PC at work with the Linux Subsystem enabled. It has been a godsend. We are historically a C# shop, but have a new front-end web server in NodeJS. I continue to work on a PC because the NodeJS site consumes C# web services. I will sometimes work on the C# service and the node site at the same time and have the Node site point to my local builds of the C# services. Before, I used to use Vagrant, but it was extremely finicky and would break or corrupt randomly. While I know NodeJS runs on native windows, certain dependencies such as Couchbase have given me pain trying to get working. Now I do my NodeJS work running inside the Linux Subsystem. It's been extremely performant, and I always catch case sensitive bugs and other Linux issues that the Mac developers miss due to have a case insensitive file system.

Most binaries run really well. A lot of the stuff that didn't work in the first preview has since been fixed (like tmux, 24bit colors in bash etc.). Plus you can now call linux apps from windows with bash -c and call exes from bash which makes cross platform development amazing.

> Plus you can now call linux apps from windows with bash -c and call exes from bash which makes cross platform development amazing.

Unless you need to pass a directory path.

WSL is still in very early beta. It works amazingly well when you consider how early this project is.

Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.

What did you try and what bugs did you run into?

There's a reason you have to go out of your way to install it. It's nowhere near a final product.

"OS X is basically a Unix workstation & perfected anything the Linux desktop wanted to be."

Exactly. How do they not know this ? Or, why do they not care ?

There is one big huge reason that "smart people" switched to OSX and the computers that ran it and that institutional knowledge appears to have evaporated at Apple.

When you know your core, core base is here for the UNIX, you don't take away the escape key ... or keep breaking and re-breaking crontab ... or introduce the weird-stuff-I-can't-do-even-as-root.

> "Surprised MS went with nVidia 980s instead of 1080s"

It's not even 980, its 980m which is significantly slower than 980, nevermind 1080. And the 980m only comes in the $4199 option, that's ridiculous...

Okay, seriously. The iMac comes with a 395x mobile gpu. It's pretty comparable to the 980m. The 1070m and 1080m don't exist yet. If you guys actually knew more about hardware than nothing, maybe you'd realize that it's not possible to get a 1080m.

iMacs and Macbook Pros (top of the line 15-inch with dGPU) have always used mobile GPUs. Also, illustrators/designers don't need dGPUs. That's why the designers/illustrators at hte tech companies that you work at can use macbook 13 inch laptops and 15-inch laptops without the dGPUs

NVIDIA got rid of the m distinction for the new gen. Razer (and I believe others) have already put a full "desktop" geforce 10xx in some of their laptops.

They got whupped bad in the mobile market, and PC market has been stagnant/in decline for some time now. They have to come up with something.

> PC market has been stagnant/in decline for some time now. They have to come up with something.

Quick, someone page Apple because Mac sales are declining even faster than the market. Surely they have to do something, that's the only possible motivation /s

Yeah, if only they had another product which makes tons of money............. hmmm................ I wonder what it could be......................

My thought is that it doesn't matter because MS missed the mobile market. People will default to the products that best integrate with their phones, and that will be iPad Pro or .... whatever the android space has to offer.

Do you think a lot of people care about PC/phone integration? I don't see it outside of "contacts and email" which is already fully integrated everywhere thanks to the cloud.

People don't buy Macs because they work well with an iPhone as far as I can tell. They buy Macs for all sorts of other reasons, but that doesn't seem to be one of them.

Every corporate office in the world is running Windows. I'm pretty sure people are going to continue buying whatever they use at work, so unfortunately for HN, Windows is here to stay...(sorry!)

I just installed macOS Sierra and have up-to-date iOS 10.1. I still cannot get handoff working. From reading the reports this is not just me. At least Chrome still syncs.

Similar experience here. I use iPhone, MBP and iPad. Originally thought that having everything under one umbrella would be a huge help, but the reality is the syncing is such a pain that I never do it. Took me many, many months to even get AirDrop working between my own devices. iTunes is very frustrating to use in managing iOS devices.

one of the things that apple didn't pointed out is that there are 2 versions of airdrop. i didn't know this and had an older version of osx that wouldn't sync with my iphone. no error message either.

"Every corporate office in the world is running Windows."

While many companies do use Windows, many others do not, including some very large ones. You think they are using Windows at Apple? That's the world's most valuable company and they have 70000 employees. What about Google? It's another huge company with tens of thousands of employees and you have to beg for permission to run Windows there, and very few do so.

I think Windows has a lock on mid-sized businesses that are large enough to have serious information management challenges, but aren't big enough to solve them. Outside of that zone it is by no means universal.

"Outside of that zone it is by no means universal."

I'd say that outside of your two examples, you'd be hard-pressed to find a Fortune 500 company that doesn't have >90% of its corporate fleet (not servers) being Windows boxes.

I feel like an iPad mini sized device might help break them into that market. Since I really don't make phone calls, when I have my iPad mini with me I don't really use my phone.

Nearly everyone in the world owns a phone. It's the default computing device for the world.

See: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/7/8/capitulation http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosyste...

Any additional computer purchase is some kind of conscious choice, and people will default to what they are familiar with. I.e. iOS and Android. This is a big hurdle for microsoft to overcome to convince anyone to buy a computer from them. That's my point, and I think it will be very difficult for them to accomplish at scale.

Can't wait to install Kaspersky on it! :)

Maybe there's some scenario I'm missing out on, but I've never had any issues just using Windows Defender.

That was irony :)

That was sarcasm. Irony is that you've confused one with the other :)

I'm sure he's being serious. I've stopped using other antivirus since Defender came on board. Whenever I buy a new laptop, the first thing I do is uninstall Norton and activate defender.

The guy kidding, was the one who wanted to install Kaspersky

uBlock Origin + Windows Defender = pretty good defence for people who don't click yes on everything that pops up

+ unchecky

It protects from toolbars, addons and other bundlewares of free software.