Did apple simultaneously fire all of it's hardware team along with it's QA dept? (we know the 2nd one happened).
I love apple, but it feels like they have a CEO who's running it in "latter years" mode. Zero risk, minimize cost everywhere, maximize profit even if it results in absurd cash piles...
This is what you get when bean counters run tech companies.
Apple could repatriate its overseas profits at any time. It would have to pay taxes on those profits, yes, but that would be no different than their domestic profits. Apple would be able to deduct foreign taxes, including foreign VAT payments[1], which would put their foreign profits in parity with their domestic profits in terms of tax burden.
[1] Unlike foreign income you can't take a credit on VAT payments. But VAT payments are deductible like any other business expense. Because corporations are taxed at a fixed percentage (no progressive income brackets), it's a distinction without a difference.
Yeah, letting the COO be CEO isn't necessarily a good idea in a tech company.
Microsoft makes good hardware, but you'll pay borderline "Apple Prices" for it.
Only big mistake Microsoft has made is trying to ship the Surface Laptop starting at $999 and topping out at $2199, with Windows 10 S, which you'll be able to "upgrade" "free" for a "limited time only." Meaning, when that promo runs out you may need to pay a $50 fee on your $999 Surface Laptop to get a full copy of Windows 10. To say that annoys me would be a huge understatement.
Anecdotal, but two out of three T series Thinkpads has sudden motherboard failures. No problems with 3 MacBooks or 3 Inspirons. We're done buying Lenovo.
Absolutely zero reports of problems. None.
See this comment from 2 months ago on HN [1].
Because of that negative point, I'm now considering one of the Ubuntu Dell Precision models and would appreciate any experiences on HN of Dell and international support for business class laptops.
Still being sent back and forth between Microsoft UK and Microsoft US with an occasionally unusable laptop.
This makes absolutely no sense since the only buyers of Surface products are as of now pretty much only "pro" users.
What kind of specs/graphics/resolution do you get on that for games?
More performant, cheaper, better screen.
I own a Surface Pro 3 and a Surface Book. Both have only been improved through firmware updates after release. There was actually some pain points on the SP3 right around release that caused some headaches.
My Surface Book was a spotchy experience for the first 6 months or so. by month 6 it was running acceptably.
It depends which Mac you feel is most comparable to the Surface Laptop, what value is placed on Touchbar (if any), what value is placed on a touchscreen (if any), how much value you place on a slightly faster integrated GPU or a slightly faster CPU (Macbook Pro 13" or Surface Laptop respectively), and numerous other metrics.
Broadly speaking I'd likely say, "similar," but there might also be a $200 saving buying the Surface Laptop relative to a similarly spec-ed Macbook Pro 13". I don't consider that a significant saving when we're discussion laptops costing over $1200, but the savings grow as price increases.
Disclaimers: Inside the US, Microsoft employee, Nazgûl
I went back to the 2017 rMBP and really like it. I use Windows in a VM and have the Cmd -> as end and Cmd <- as home and it works great.
I'd still buy a Thinkpad if they put their old keyboards back in service.
Yes. But they are still fugly.
I just bought a Lenovo gaming laptop (it was an amazing deal) and I'm actually surprised that it isn't super fugly. Gaming laptops are all a bit over-the-top design-wise but Lenovo actually used a little restraint. It also came with no bloatware.
* Containers (LXC, systemd-nspawn, Docker, etc. and native virtualization with QEMU/KVM), Apple doesn't even come close here.
* Use the WM/DE of your choice.
* Superior package management (pacman, apt, dnf, flatpak, etc).
* Use the distro of your choice.
* Use the latest GNU software unlike some crippled bash version like in Mac.
* Decide if you want bleeding edge or not.
* Use any hardware you want (older or new, Linux doesn't care and it will still perform well even with older hardware).
* Get more performance with Linux.[1][2]
* Freedom.[3]
* Privacy, security and transparency.
* Peace of mind, never be forced to upgrade your hardware or software. Your hardware is yours and you can use it until it literally breaks. You control your computer and not the other way around.
IMO, GNOME 3 and i3/sway are way nicer than the GUI on macOS, and you can use all the same development tools and editors on Linux today, tmux, Vim/Neovim, Emacs, Atom, VS Code, Sublime Text, etc.
There are so many other reasons.[4] Feel free to mention your reasons too.
I don't see what's the appeal with Mac at all, it seems like you are just paying for a logo.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos-sie...
[2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=macos-101...
* Docker is supported and it will get better. Nano server supports it otb.
* Chocolatey is a great package manager. Others also exist.
* You can use most GNU tools.
* You can use any hardware you want
* Performance is good on Windows
* Freedom, i.e. FOSS is ubiquitous on Windows too (not as much as on Linux for sure tho).
* Privacy and security is good on Windows 10. Linux desktops are honestly not that safe.
Things not supported on Windows are:
* WM/DE - this is not a thing on Windows
* There is only 1 distro of Windows, but you can basically create your own with package manager, its just there aren't currently any OTB.
There are things Windows has better:
* Powershell is way better shell then anything Linux has to offer.
* Games still work better and there are more supported.
* More commercial tools are available for Windows.
Honestly, the only difference now is the culture around it. Although I use Windows as my desktop (which is irrelevant as I live in the shell and browser 24/7, so any OS will do), i prefer Linux engineers.
Server side ofc. you can't really bit the fact that linux servers are mostly free of charge. Windows Enterprise is terribly expensive.
.. and:
* Freedom.[3]
* Privacy, security and transparency.
* Peace of mind, never be forced to upgrade your hardware or software. Your hardware is yours and you can use it until it literally breaks. You control your computer and not the other way around.
?
Some things may exist (e.g. Chocolatey), but why not use a better package manager?
Did they solve long file/path name issue? Remember Windows 7 slow FS with large file count and npm/js breaking everything due to long, nested paths.
Docker on Windows is not native, it runs on a VM and uses Linux under the hood.
> Chocolatey is a great package manager. Others also exist.
Chocolatey is a step in the right direction, but it probably doesn't integrate as well as apt or dnf, you still have the Windows Store to update separately, and the Windows Store is what Microsoft wants you to use.
Chocolatey is more like a bandaid solution that was made by the community to deal with the limitations of software installation on Windows.
So I think Linux does package management much better than Windows, but this isn't to say that Chocolatey is bad, it's just that Microsoft has total control over everything on Windows.
I also like how Linux distros share a common file system hierarchy and share libraries between programs, while minimizing disk space and reducing security issues.
> You can use most GNU tools.
Yes, that's because those GNU programs are cross platform, which is good.
Free software also allows others to port programs to other platforms, which is also a very good thing.
> You can use any hardware you want
This isn't completely true, you cannot take your existing Windows drive and just plug it into another computer and expect everything to work, but you can do this just fine with Linux.
An existing Windows install and its license is associated to the machine where you have it installed.
Also, Windows won't run on other architectures other than x86 and I think ARM? Linux is known to work with ~20 different architectures or more.
Another advantage with Linux is that the drivers are built into the Linux kernel, so when a driver is added to the Linux kernel, it will be maintained and improved as part of the kernel, so your hardware will be supported for a very long time / forever.
This is unlike Windows where hardware vendors will release a blob for Windows and won't provide updates after the hardware is EOLed or for the next version of Windows.
I still have old printers that still work fine with Linux but the same printer doesn't have drivers for the current version of Windows anymore.
Linux is the only OS kernel with more hardware support than any other OS out there.
> Performance is good on Windows
Performance tends to vary depending on what you are doing and what you are comparing against.
So this is debatable, and one would need to run benchmarks to be sure.
That said, I find Windows to always be slower than Linux, running Linux on the same machine tends to be faster for the things I do, and Windows tends to slow over time whereas Linux doesn't.
> Freedom, i.e. FOSS is ubiquitous on Windows too (not as much as on Linux for sure tho).
You don't have freedom with Windows, you cannot give a copy of Windows to your friends, and you cannot inspect the Windows source code to learn and/or to modify it or fix anything in it.
> Privacy and security is good on Windows 10. Linux desktops are honestly not that safe.
[citation needed]
Do you have any sources to back this claim? There are a lot of security/privacy concerns with Windows 10, especially with the likes of telemetry and backdoors.
> Powershell is way better shell then anything Linux has to offer.
How is PowerShell better than the many different shells we have on Linux? I don't think this is true.
There is also PowerShell on Linux.
> Games still work better and there are more supported.
Linux has Steam now and many games are being released with Linux support every day, Vulkan is also taking off on Linux.
> More commercial tools are available for Windows.
There are many commercial tools coming out for Linux too, and this is only going to increase.
> Honestly, the only difference now is the culture around it.
It's not just about the culture, GNU/Linux and Windows are different operating systems with different ideas, purposes and design.
Windows is merely a company's product.
GNU/Linux is about freedom.
Sleep and hibernate still manage to break periodically.
Higher battery consumption unless I'm willing to break out powertop and tweak endlessly.
Meanwhile, the dev I do is all cross-platform Java and scripting. WSL provides a useful unix-like environment when I need it. And when it really matters I break out a VM.
These days tlp gives power management on Linux a good set of defaults. Powertop tweaking should not be necessary as long as you use a distro that supports tlp.
Happened right around the switch to systemd with Debian Sid on my old T410, which by that point was probably 5 years old. IIRC, the system would resume from sleep or hibernate but the console would not recover properly, so you had to force a VT switch to get the video to reinitialize. Just a huge PITA.
I agree, it had been stable for some time up to that point, but when it broken again, that was the last straw for me, and as a consequence I've stuck with Windows 10 on my Carbon.
These days tlp gives power management on Linux a good set of defaults. Powertop tweaking should not be necessary as long as you use a distro that supports tlp.
Could be. But I'm happy with Windows 10 on my Carbon and have no intention of switching.
It used to be that Linux was on balance the better choice for my use case, being more stable (as in, fewer crashes) and more transparent, with a superior dev experience. Yes, it was always a platform for tweakers... things never seemed to consistently work quite right (hell, back around 2010, it was a miracle if sleep or hibernate worked at all). But since you could open up the hood and mess around, I was willing to live with that given the benefits. As a result, for 20 years Linux was the operating system I ran on every piece of hardware I owned. I even built a 3-tuner MythTV backend and two front-end systems for my home back when I still had cable... you can't imagine all the tweaking!
But over the years the gap has closed considerably.
Windows has become substantially faster and more stable, and tools like WSL have made it a much nicer dev platform. Linux is still far more transparent, obviously, but the stability of Windows 10 means that just doesn't matter that much.
Meanwhile, with Linux, in my experience the need to continuously tweak and deal with random breakages continues to be a fact of life, while distros have become far less transparent through the switch to systemd, making tweaking and fixing things substantially harder (trying to diagnose those issues I described earlier was basically impossible).
As a result, Linux simply doesn't offer enough value for me, at this point, to motivate the hassle.
Of course, as always, YMMV. Some people have a higher threshold for this stuff (certainly I used to be a lot more willing to put up with Linux's idiosyncrasies), and different hardware, distros, etc, perform differently. So I'm not going to claim my experiences are universal. But they are my experiences.
QubeOS is a good OS to provide these isolation techniques.