In other words, Windows became one of those toolbars that we all have to remove from our grandmothers' browsers.

For me, the answer was Linux, but for a lot of people who don't want to use a terminal daily, MacOS is the answer.

If you are a user, Windows hates you. MacOS doesn't.

Microsoft was expecting people to line up around the block and fork over $100 for Windows ME and everyone was just confused.

I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it, 95 especially. 98 OSR2 improved quite a bit on the situation, but I don't recall having a great time with 95. It was still a glorified DOS extender in many ways, often slow to start up and shutdown, PC hardware and drivers were a mess and system stability therefore poor. This was right at the beginning of the concept of "PnP" in the PC world (plug and play) and it was a cruel joke most of time.

Windows 2000 being from the NT line was peak Windows in many ways. I resisted XP but it was ok for most people admittedly.

The "UI that runs on DOS" was a feature not a bug for legacy game/software support.

I was trying to figure out how to express myself, but I think you got it.

98SE was still pretty bad because pre-NTFS filesystems would decay over time (of course so would ext2, but linux generally crashed a lot less).

Yeah, a lot of software engineering types switched to MBPs because the OS isn't a steaming pile of garbage and it reliably works with the hardware. The former can't be said for Windows these days and the latter is generally hit-or-miss with Linux.

But I wouldn't be surprised if that's a rounding error when you're talking Macs doubling or tripling their market share. I'd imagine most people walking into an Apple Store in their local mall and buying a Mac with Apple Pay on their iPhone don't really know or care about the telemetry added in Windows 10. I still think Apple deserves the vast majority of the credit for the success of Mac.

My Windows PC is slow, ad-ridden, buggy, and unpleasant. Also, the physical device feels cheap and the plastic is separating on the corner, and the hinge is broken.

Hey. Look at that super sleek aluminum MacBook there…

It was effectively the trojan horse of the Apple eco-system.

Secondarily it was due to Apple switching from PowerPC to Intel chips, allowing it to compete more broadly with support for Windows.

As an aside, Windows 10 is largely a pretty great operating system.

Not only do I use the terminal daily, I live in the terminal on my Mac.

I consistently hear from Linux users they wished there was a terminal emulator as good as iTerm2 for Linux.

The only hedge against that is the ecosystem for phone & ipad development is still the macbooks - so it does hurt Apple to take away the ability to write your own apps on a Macbook.

I got a new ipad this week and it is pretty clear that 99% of my non-work life can be lived on it - banks, games and all the streaming apps. I don't have any more collections of DVDs, games or music.

Even writing/drawing is better on a device which I can pick up and sit in a chair to read like a printed document, now that usb-c lets me plug it into my existing setup for screens when I do need a bigger screen.

For example, the Surface Laptop Studio form factor in MBP form would be really nice.

I'd like to use the iPad form factor for managing photos and reading books. But when I've used an iPad, I usually end up wanting a keyboard, so I add one, then I realize I have a MBP that can't do as much.

So to me it makes sense to take a 13" MBP, add touch to the screen, and hinge the screen in such a way that it turns into a thick tablet.

At any rate, never say never, but I would be surprised if Apple releases a version of macOS that runs on iPad hardware, even if it's running in a lab somewhere in Cupertino. I've been half-seriously predicting an entirely new operating system built around Swift and SwiftUI that replaces both iPadOS and macOS down the road, but I don't think that's in the near future -- and stuffing macOS on the iPad in the interim just seems implausible to me.

And there are any number of ways around that. "Developer mode" iPads that run Xcode and a Unix shell and that start at $5000, or a web development environment that does builds on Apple's servers, or just release the internal Windows/Linux Xcode versions that they almost certainly have.

Fortunately Macs are currently too profitable for them to kill, but that can change quickly.

He is the one responsible for Azure and cares far more about Microsoft 365 and getting their services onto as many platforms as possible. So use your Mac long as you're using Word, Outlook, Teams etc.

I wonder how much money Microsoft could save if they simply maintained Windows with the minimum effort possible, instead of spending all this extra effort doing horrible things to it.