As for MacOS looks - Windows also are releasing update to their visuals this year which looks pretty darn aesthetically pleasing. [0]

[0] https://blogs-images.forbes.com/amitchowdhry/files/2017/02/P...

I'm a UNIX developer (mainly Go), and I use a surface pro 4 with win 10 for development. Bash on Ubuntu on Windows already runs great, and I have the ability to sketch diagrams whenever I want to. Additionally I have docker running flawlessly and a system that just works 99.9% of the time. (as opposed to Linux where I have to hack my way through most of the things)

With early Windows 10, the Settings app didn't even have a title bar so there was no clear demarcation from the window grey to the titlebar grey - how would I know that the grey bar at the top was the way I moved the window but the grey bit beneath the grey bit at the top DIDN'T move the window??

With current Windows 10, the Settings app finally has a title bar that has a colour like all other applications. But the paradigm we learned 20+ years ago (double click top left to close the window) and the ability to get the window menu HAS GONE. I can still press Ctrl-space and get the window menu but the ability to get the window menu from a Metro app or a metro-style app using the mouse has completely gone.

So now I have to learn another method of interacting with the basic building block of the system - windows. When each window behaves differently according to the "metro or not" measuring stick, this does not make for a great user experience. And this is me coming from using Windows since the 90s. How do you think new users and my mum is going to get on??

What's the point of having window guidelines if Microsoft themselves don't even follow them??

So although the screenshot is aesthetically pleasing, I remain very concerned about the direction usability is taking on the platform.

Somehow, I'm not bothered about ignoring learned paradigms from so many years ago. For example, my 12 year old daughter could care less how you learned windows management 24 years ago. She's learned to Windows as it is today.

This expression implies that you currently have a high level of care about a subject, and that you have a range or distance to travel until you reach rock-bottom/zero regarding your level of care for the item.

In fact, if you were to care 80% or 100% about an item, the expression would still be true: eg. "I could care less about my health" which would mean I care GREATLY about my health and therefore have range to drop my level of care from its current position.

The expression that everyone should use is "I couldn't care less", or "I could NOT care less".

This implies that you are at 0% of your care about an item, thereby having an inability to move below your current level of care. It is already at rock bottom. It cannot get any less. It cannot go any lower.

Subsequently, I am assuming that you meant that your daughter COULD NOT care less about how I learned window management. i.e., she wouldn't care in the slightest.

I had to ask because I am hearing this expression more and more and it's incredibly irritating because it is wrong.

I never hear any native speakers here in the UK saying it, but judging how manners of speech drift over here I imagine it is only a matter of time before I hear people saying it, much the same way I now hear the word "like" sprinkled into sentences needlessly. When I hear this expression over here I think I'll suffer an apoplexy and drop down dead.

EDIT: By the way, I don't think Apple's changes have been courageous. I find that they stuck their head in the sand for too long and finally did sensible things. For example, on Snow Leopard and prior, you COULD NOT resize the window from any corner but the bottom right. This was officially STUPID. Thankfully they realised how stupid this was and enabled the ability to resize a window from any edge. Only took them 30 years.

Also in recent versions they have been making a big fuss about the ability to go full screen with applications. Windows have always been resizable, so the ability to get a window fullscreen and not see the menubar is not really a big feature. Nor is the ability to run two fullscreen apps side by side - surely we have been able to put windows side by side since the 1980s? Just because the menubar has gone does not make it a feature. This is not courageous, it is dumb.

They have also made regressions. For example, now when you want to use Mission Control you must move to the top of the screen to see the desktops. Hang on - just tried it again and now it works again. Hurray!

Their new filesystem is still significantly behind NTFS for features. Sad to believe we're all still hobbling along on HFS+ with byte swapping for big endian to little endian metadata every read/write of metadata.

I am not saying that Apple does things any better with software development, but the feel across the OS is generally consistent. This is not the case on Windows 10, eg. how do you find out which build version you are on? Press Windows key + Break to see system properties.... oh it's not in there. I suppose I need to run the Settings app > System > About to display a duplicate window. How do I join a domain? I could use the Settings app and it'll mention joining a school. I could also use the duplicate domain settings from Advanced System Properties and join there, but there's no mention of the word "school". Why do the two sets of windows look different? Why is there even two sets of windows? What the heck is going on?

So now I have Control Panel, the Settings app, Microsoft Management Console and its snap-ins. They all do the same thing. Are the teams not talking to each other at Microsoft? Is nobody at the helm?

For extra fun, look at shell32.dll and see how many icon styles are inside that thing. That's not even an architectural change - that's just pictures in a single DLL, owned and controlled 100% exclusively by Microsoft. All of the icons are from different eras. If they can't get even little pictures to be consistent and uniform, I do not hold much hope of uniform system behaviour.

So you can see the cobbled-together nature that Windows 10 exudes, despite a fantastic opportunity to make the entire system coherent again. And I say this as a C++ developer on Windows as my day job.

They are moving slowly, but IMO to the right direction.

I just ran Win10 for the first time yesterday to work on a security guideline and I was blown away by how janky the whole thing was. Using it is like crawling through 20 years of computer history; there's things from every phase of Windows since '95 in that UI, and I don't mean UI hints, but entire applications.

I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

>> I bet somewhere in there there's still UI that dates back to Win3.1.

I'm sure there is, that's a mix of backwards compatibility and don't mess with stuff that works. Some people want it, some people don't; can't make everybody happy. Can I complain that OS X provides a terminal that looks like it dates back to the 70's?

To be fair, a lot of Terminal.app dates back to ancient Mac OS too. The menu bars, for example, are all still Carbon. There is still a full classic Mac OS main loop running alongside the Cocoa main loop in every macOS application. Apple's done a good job hiding it, but it's still there.

Anyway, cmd.exe is a bit of a special case. What you're really seeing is conhost.exe, which is kept the way it is because it's part of CSRSS, which occupies a similar place as PID 1 does, and Microsoft doesn't want to bring new UI into it for fear of increasing its dependencies [1].

[1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071231-00/?p=...

The ugly UI isn't even the worst part about the Mac OS though. The worst part is that it just doesn't even come close to offering the same sort of freedom that you get on Windows where Microsoft leaves hooks in to let developers actually do what they want.

Most of the problems with the Mac OS are by design too. I think it's hilarious that Apple folks think it's a really good idea to hide the label on most buttons. I guess you have to "just know what it is" before clicking it or hover over it and hope for a tooltip to popup tell you what the thing will do. Real efficient.

There's really no wonder in my mind why most people don't use Apple anything.

For me "insecure windows" is an old trope and not particuarly accurate any more.

Now that windows has nice workspaces and an already usable UNIX environnement (Windows Subsystem still has things to iron out, but it's very nice for a beta), my personal ranking became:

Linux > Windows > MacOS

I see nothing that MacOS offers that Windows doesn't, whereas Windows has potential for much better hardware specs, games, bigger user base.

The only thing left for Apple is their 16:10 screen and their per-monitor scaling.

I do miss a good terminal in windows but assume the Linux subsystem will fill that hole

For example:

- apt-get install php

- php -S localhost:8081

- Launch Chrome on Windows, go to localhost:8081 (it works)

There is zero awkwardness or extra configuration there. Only problem is that some things do not work properly yet (because still beta). For example `go get github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3` will not work because of some ?gcc? compilation issue. But it's getting fixed on next release.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Come on.

end this FUD

Best-selling to developers? Not a chance.

I find it hard to see any realistic alternatives for MacBooks in software development. They give you all the tools you need from the Windows world that are not available on linux like Office, Photoshop etc. and it is still a UNIX system which can do all the stuff that linux can without kernel panics, crashes, bugs and other crap. Also unlike Windows or Linux, a single macOS installation can last pretty much forever and doesn't need to reinstalled every year because of the lost performance like Windows. And last but not least MacBooks are well optimised for the hardware they run on which gives them 1.5-2.5 times the performance with the same hardware as on Windows or Linux.

The whole thing about complaining about new MacBooks is same thing as with iPhones. People complain because it's trendy to whine about anything Apple does even if they would create eternal world peace and still everybody will buy them because there is nothing better or even similar on the market.

You need to update your arguments. It's 2017, not 1998. I haven't reinstalled Windows on my desktop system in years and it's running perfectly fine.

Windows hasn't been less stable than a mac for years if you buy equivalent hardware (instead of scrapping together a system with junkyard parts or getting a cheap walmart laptop).

Windows does not need to be reinstalled every year if you don't treat it stupidly. My current work windows install is 4 years old, has seen two machines (disk swap) and two major windows versions (in-place upgrade), and it runs as well as when i first used it.

OS X is only faster than windows on mac hardware because apple ships bad windows drivers on bootcamp deliberately. On equivalent hardware from other vendors it is just as fast.

It sounds to me like you don't actually know windows all that well. I use a mac mini at home and a windows laptop at work, and I'd say that they're pretty much equivalent for my purposes.

1) A very large portion of other devs I know use(d) MacBooks, and

2) A very large portion of them said "F this, I'm out" when Apple released their most recent machine. Many switched to Surfaces.

Your hyperbole against Linux and Windows does your point no credit. Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time, and Windows 10 is a pleasure to use, particularly on touch-enabled devices. MS went through severe growing pains with Win8, but those days are past. And the OS/hardware combinations that have emerged since make Apple's offerings feel old and out of touch.

This is not to disparage the kernel developers, package maintainers or the distributions themselves - there's a lot of people doing excellent work without being compensated at all. However let's not kid ourselves - linux can still be tough.

Unless you buy something from System76 or do very meticulous research on hardware support and build your own, Linux is not going to be seamless out of the box. But the real highlight is that it can be seamless at all these days.

My PC has four GPUs, 128GB of RAM and a deca-core CPU. I have four monitors, a bluetooth mouse, and I almost never turn it off. Instead, it automatically suspends. When I'm away from home I can ssh into my computer if needed. I have daily backups that are essentially seamless.

Now, it was difficult to get to this place. I would say that Linux is, and has for a long time been, rock solid if you're not using a GUI. In my opinion, the single greatest impediment to "Linux on the desktop" is xorg, which is terrible (to put it mildly). Nouveau is absolutely crap, especially since Nvidia puts out its own drivers. But my point here is that after a few days of careful installation and setup work, I have had a seamless desktop experience for something like eight months.

What needs to happen for Linux is a software company that takes something like Debian, fork it and dramatically bring it up to wider compatibility with modern hardware across the market. In some sense that's Ubuntu, and it shows in how easy my daily experience has been.

That being said, I only use Linux for server-side work, and I can easily say that it is every bit as stable as any other server OS I've used, and has been for a very long time. There are plenty of weedy areas to play in if you want to, of course. But if your goal is It Just Works, you can do that, too. Perhaps most importantly, you can do it easily, with just a little foresight during the spec stage of planning your project.

They switched to Surfaces because they wanted power-user hardware?

To pick one example: being able to flick through long documents with a finger while keeping focus on other parts of the screen alone has been a huge productivity booster, and I do not say that lightly.

Like I said before, I was firmly in the "touchscreens are a waste of time for me" camp until I actually started using my Surface. Not trying to sound like an ad, it just has been my actual experience.

Most of my "work" time I spend in terminal. White text on black background, keeping my fingers on home row. I cannot see scenario where touchscreen makes me more productive except in some edge cases, and btw they don't gain over what I already have now. But that's just me. Each to their own, that is only fair thing to say.

But making assumption and claim based on your own point of view is not best thing to do. With Apple, especially it is always the same story, customers leaving and rarely satisfied (it was period around Snow Leopard, IIRC 2009-2010), but still I can't find anything better than MacBook. Dell and Lenovo came close, but when I install Linux on them I make few more sacrifices, summing everything up, Apple just works for me. (I won't even mention Windows. 100% not my cup of tea)

So the only question is to know if they are winning some that were on other systems. Objectively, the MBP has more or less stagnated on a performance point of view, it has regressed in autonomy and the new features it gained are at best neutral for developers. Developers is typically the slice of the population that will be affected by reviews, and the reviews are not favourable to this new MBP. Last but not least, competition has not stagnated either. I don't believe there is a better laptop on the market for my usage pattern, but it took me much longer before I came to that conclusion.

It is reasonable to think that the new MBP is less successful than the previous one with developers. It could still grow in raw numbers even with the developers, but it is reasonable to think its growth has been dampened a bit.

I'm not strongly disagreeing with you, but you are not making a better point than parent. I do believe that if Apple has a spec bump release of the MBP ready end of 2017 and is back in the regular 1 year cycle the whinging will die and you will win the argument.

Says the guy who suggests Linux as a desktop.

If i need to build code that apple says can only be built on a mac, i simply spin up my mac VM and point some tools dont need to drink any koolaid to get the job done.

MDI + keyboard skills beats vim ninjas any day of the week.

Apple has never, so far as I am aware, deliberately targeted developers as a primary audience of a laptop computer.

Apple's laptops became popular because they ran an operating system that was Unix under the hood, with a nice UI and good set of non-developer applications, which made them good as machines a developer could use for work and for non-work (Linux on the desktop being not so great at the second part of that). Apple has certainly been happy to make money from developers buying laptops as a result of this, but has consistently ignored the expressed wishes and desires of developers when updating its laptop lines, meaning Apple was popular in spite of Apple's indifference, rather than because Apple lovingly catered to this audience.

In other words: if you were looking for an executive to run around the stage screaming "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!", I think that was probably some other company, and they got ridiculed for it...

https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=459

Here's an article about when they stopped targeting science.

https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-...