Apple makes laptops, TV streamers, and tablets. Is there some reason you're avoiding them?
Edit: for ex: the $799 iPad pro costs an equivalent of $994.35 in India.
Plus customs duties.
(And yes, as I'm sure people will feel obliged to remind me, I do know Win7 and Win8 are now "unsupported", but I feel that's more a feature than a limitation.)
I highly doubt you can find any $1500+ laptop that is "unusable after 2". I might want to pick up a new one with a 3:2 oled display or more ram at some point, but that is want not need.
First, there's no "Windows" hardware. Unless you are talking about Surface.
Second, all laptops I had were useful for far longer than 2 years. My current one is almost 4 years old and still extremely good for everything I need.
I also replaced Windows for Linux recently, and I suspect that will extend its lifespan for many years still.
I don't know if that qualifies as easily using hardware, but I think I am very lazy, and that was the path of minimal resistance to keep them up and running. Both those laptops are happily being used by my parents for keeping track of their finances, doing admin tasks for whatever organizations they're a part of. My father even uses them for complex SAP tasks. The only HW fault that came up was the Toshiba fan broke once and was very quickly replaced and has been working fine since. The battery is dead of course, but the Asus still gives a 2-3 hour backup if necessary.
Linux or OSX? Leave them running for a year and nothing changes. To be fair, my last experience with Windows was 3 years ago.
This has been nothing but cargo-culting since the end of XP
I have a MacBook Pro from 2015 which I still use every day. It's still going strong.
My only issue with it is that it can't be upgraded to MacOS Ventura, and it prevents me from enabling full encryption on all the iCloud stuff. I will probably replace it with a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 16" later this year and my expectation is that it'll last me for another 8 years. Yes, 4 grand for a laptop is a lot, but not really if it lasts for 8 years and then can be resold to recoup some of the cost or given to a family member.
So for me the lifespan of the machine is over (iCloud encryption being the dealbreaker), but I'm sure it'll last at least a couple of more years for someone else.
I did just replace the battery last year. I think it was $35 dollars.
This is my main computer, I want to upgrade, but it keeps living.
This is 8 or 9 years so far.
I just looked up my steam games/GOTY games from the last few years, I don't have any.
For some reason I decided against them, not sure, maybe they are a genre that I'm not interested in, or they are from a series I've deemed are overrated.
Anyway, some games that seem pretty intense graphically that I can play: Doom Eternal, Witcher 3, Assassins Creed. Graphics are as I mentioned, at least on high. Sometimes I'll knock down the AA to 2x.
Yes: Apple.
That's a good enough reason to avoid them.
yeah some of us aren't made of money
Hilarious :-)))
In short: Teams is not all that revolutionary or even great.
Where's the fifteen year old IRC client which does hardware accelerated video chat from a web browser?
> "In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app."
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Except we have evidence: given a choice of Teams or IRC, businesses choose Teams.
People chose Skype because it was fast and it just worked. It stopped being fast and people moved over.
Meanwhile, at work, I can't reliably see my teammates in video calls because MS Teams still hasn't figured out how WebRTC works.
* Slack takes 6.5s to load on my 2021 Macbook.
* Slack consumes 366MB of RAM - if I browse around that rises to 744MB of RAM.
For the longest time Slack would kill my machine if colleagues posted gifs in messages. I'm no fan of Teams but I think there's plenty of shame to go around living in a world of eight core CPUs running large Electron apps.
That's a valid choice, but not due to technical concerns.
You're presumably very technically literate since you're using Linux.
You can just save your license key somewhere and get fresh installation media and reformat the garbage on your device with a clean installation.
You don't need any of the Lenovo stuff, your laptop will work just fine with regular Windows Update drivers.
The main part he had trouble with was configuring the firmware to allow the installation, and then know about the new UEFI partition, and then forget about the no-longer-extant Windows boot partitions.
It wasn't obvious how to make that work even for me.
putting the ISO on the USB, telling the BIOS to boot from the USB, dealing with any random failures in grub or whatever, these are showstoppers for nontechnical people.
(actually the grub failures are a showstopper for me as well, I've never been able to figure out what you're meant to do if you boot up and get an error at that stage. I just re-roll with a different USB drive or distro or ISO-burning tool and cross my fingers)
also nontechnical ppl often will only dare use linux if they have windows as a fallback option, so they want to dual-boot. and setting up / maintaining a dual-boot system has its own set of failure modes.
This also extends to the default landing page of Edge. This is the worst form of bullvard, it is a tiny bit better than directly advocating for penis enlargement on the internet. But not by much at all.
There should be no ads on the OS level. Especially when they want their OS to operate in the enterprise...
I think the sad reality is a huge portion of the American population actually likes being fed commercial/branded b.s. Just look how common it is for folks to voluntarily affix things like Monster energy drink logos on their vehicles... The culture has no class, monster trucks dude.
We have no class. It’s kind of the brand.
But respond favourably to, in sufficient numbers, that it remains profitable for the shovelling class? You betcha.
This statement is extremely ironic. You are scolding someone about not empathizing more. Do you see it?
But... I totally empathize with you.
The reason I would argue it's not a useful concept is that class in this context refers to one's social signaling outputs in a national monoculture that hasn't been the predominate way people in the US have interacted with culture for decades.
The obvious reality of course is that #1 won't make Apple users migrate to Windows because of #2. And both #1 and #2 will alienate diehard Windows users.
There's genuinely no economic incentive for them not to sell their own OS down the river at this point.
Mac has established itself as a only-on-mac-hardware market, which rules it out as an option for the majority of corporate and educational settings, and while I wish the year-of-the-linux-desktop was actually coming, most coorporations just aren't set up to / don't understand how to manage OSs without the fallback of a company guaranteeing support.
I see a lot of people celebrating Windows 95 as a high point, and it isn't really a surprise - that was one of the last times that Windows had to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS share.
That might also have been around the last time when people expected to pay for a new operating system. The other thing Apple has done is to lower the cost of OS upgrades to the point where selling the OS itself has become economically difficult. Apple simply offsets that with insane margins on the hardware, MS doesn't have that option.
I think it has a lot more to do with nostalgia goggles. Windows 95 still had a lot of the same cruft on install. It really wanted you to sign up for an MSN dial-up account to use the bundled IE to browse MSN.com as your home page "of choice". Another bundled app suggested a subscription service to get and send Faxes.
(Windows was always like this. It seems far more "extreme" now, but the roots are deep and old. A lot of regular Windows users don't even notice what Windows 11 is doing because the frog has been boiling in that pot for so long.)
Don't forget was Windows 95 that became the anti-trust scandal because a lot of people felt at the time that Microsoft didn't have to genuinely attempt to compete economically for their OS.
(Same as it ever was.)
My point was that in contrast to today, where consumers have windows, and pro users are turning to non-windows alternatives, in the late 90s Microsoft themselves provided the pro user alternative.
Perhaps Microsoft intend LTSC to be that pro alternative, but as you say, thats not available to everyone.
That's not a simple switch you can flip on in an organization. Especially if you lack a culture that has a consensus view of what good taste even is.
Like really, you have outstanding hardware, great margins is it really worth deteriorating the experience in the hopes people will sign up to one of more of the 20 or so subscription services you now sell. They've even resorted to car industry-like subscribing to use hardware features on the chunky watch.
End of the day its inevitable unless you have a product CEO at the helm with a strong vision, Apple no longer has that so the money graph will always win at the expense of experience.
Apple is a hardware company that develops an operating system and services to add value to their hardware. They make nearly all of their money from hardware.
For the longest time, Microsoft didn’t really make any hardware at all, apart from some peripherals like keyboards and mice. Now they have Xbox and Surface, but they’re still predominantly a software and services company. The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to.
Long gone are the days when people lined up at the stores for their chance to snag a copy of Windows 95 on CD!
I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!
Maybe if they made a better operating system that wouldn't be the case.
At this point Apple has a structural advantage over Microsoft in that Apple doesn't need to monetize their operating system to be profitable, as they're funded by hardware sales. That frees them up to provide a better user experience because they don't have to find way to make money off of their users. Not many companies are in a similar position, where they can recover software development expenses solely through hardware sales. There are a handful that could in theory, but they seem to lack the willingness.
It seems like Apple has largely forgotten that; a hardware company seeking to maximize value for their hardware would, for example, tolerate (if not outright encourage) alternative operating systems on said hardware instead of using "security" as an excuse to maintain a tighter and tighter grip on a walled garden of software. The App Store is lucrative enough that it's sucked in the rest of Apple; instead of making hardware for hardware's sake, Apple's hardware is increasingly a funnel into that App Store ecosystem.
Likewise...
> The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to.
You'd think a company whose bread and butter is software and services would understand that pissing off customers ain't exactly a winning strategy for making money off those software and services.
I'd also question the idea that they're making significantly less money on Windows licenses than before. Yeah, not very many people are buying retail copies of Windows like they were back in the day, but there's still plenty of volume from desktop/laptop OEMs (in spite of the perennial claims that mobile devices have killed the desktop) and plenty of volume from enterprise customers (which is arguably Microsoft's money tree, far more so than anything consumer-facing). Microsoft's probably perfectly fine with Windows Home Edition (and even, to an extent, Professional Edition) being a loss leader of sorts if it means maintaining mindshare such that enterprises instinctively pick Windows Enterprise Edition and Windows Server for their business needs, and especially if they instinctively pick those running on Azure. Shoving a bunch of ads and bloatware into their flagship OS is entirely unnecessary from that perspective.
The ads and bloatware are more likely from the other side of Microsoft's strategy: competing with Google on the ad delivery and search engine front. There's growing pressure from the Bing side of things to use the consumer versions of Windows as a funnel into Bing - as manifested in everything from the Start Menu to the incessant demands to use Edge as the default browser (which just so happens to use Bing as its default search engine).
There are countless other examples of this tendency of accidental goldmines sucking in the rest of a company's products and turning them into funnels. Valve is a notable case, with Steam evolving from a tool to support Valve's bread-and-butter of PC games to Valve's bread-and-butter in and of itself - and with Valve's software and (more recently) hardware projects serving primarily as funnels into the Steam ecosystem.
It’s a terminal phase you see in a lot of companies. Phase 1 is mega growth in user base. Phase 2 is innovation to try to sell as much as possible to the base, but mostly steady state. Phase 3 is shady monetizing and dark patterns to try to squeeze the last drops of revenue out of the base before dying.
It resembles the lifecycle of a star actually.
Though why Microsoft continues to do business with a company that thought it was a good idea to install a root certificate (with a publicly known private key) onto every single laptop they sold so they could MITM some ads into websites is beyond me.
I'm sorry, what ?!
>and it pleadingly tries to stop you from using Firefox,
But you gotta realise, for an OS, this is already too much..
I naively expect my OS to help me organise my files and provide a platform to run applications. And that's about it.
The weird thing is Microsoft seems to be acting as if they're competing madly against some competitor and must keep up the updates and new features and be constantly changing things to keep peoples' attention. But I'm sure this hasn't been the case for quite a while now.
I actually have never experienced this. What I HAVE seen is that if you accidentally open a not-firefox browser, it asks whether you want to make it the default.
That's not correct. ThinkPads never had this stuff on them.
One of the sysadmins responded with something like "lol" followed by a screenshot of an Xbox app on a production server.
One of the benefits of entrenched monopoly power is you don't have to care about quality.
If they could just drop it right now, both desktop and server, without causing a major explosion, I'm pretty sure they would.
The hassle of dealing with hardware compatibility and vendors can't be worth the small amount that get per licence these days, why not let Apple and Open Source deal with that collection of end-user grief?
Server-side & similar they don't care what OS you use, or are heading that way, as long as you host it on Azure. If you use any OS directly at all: function-level based hosting being a commonly pushed option ATM. SQL Server claims Linux to be a first-class host OS IIRC.
Desktop support directly is still a bit Windows-oriented and that might not change, but the browser-based alternatives are coming on in leaps which makes user OS less important (and pulls more users towards Azure lock-in via OneDrive and syncing office app files between users).
It used to be that Windows, Office, and SQL Server were their cash cows and everything else was intended to funnel people towards them (or, at least, pull them away from other options). Now that triumvirate is Azure, Office, and SQL Server. In both cases with VisualStudio as a distant forth.
That, and while there is a push to get other apps stable and feature complete online or otherwise on other-OS options, they are not close enough to any such goal that trying to kill their own OS that way is desirable enough to make it worth the risk yet.
This is what I mean by “if they could they would”. To be more specific: “if they could without it pushing people away from their other products as well”.
Also, the big EOM contracts will have some pricing guarantees within they. All others things permitting, they still couldn't make such a change quickly.
By allowing OEMs to do this? Microsoft could stop it if they had any interest in making Windows a more consistent and reasonable experience.
Yes, you can and should reinstall Windows, but you shouldn't have to.
I installed Linux last week. The biggest issue was USB-C docking and DisplayLink. Actually, it was only the DisplayLink part, the docking worked fine.
Since Windows 11 this is horribly slow, like seconds sometimes, especially the first load. I can assure you this is not my hardware setup.
Clearly their goal is not "provide the best, smooth and performant user experience we can possibly squeeze out of our OS".
It’s not consistent enough to debug either.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=distance+to+the+moon+in...
https://pureinfotech.com/restore-taskbar-location-windows-11...
Had to boot to restore menu, uninstall update, remove explorer patch, reinstall updates. Incredibly frustrating and not worth it for me.
On the topic: i feel the same after having bought a laptop with windows 11. Usability has regressed and you get less control in terms of customization. The ads and bloatware feel so cheap as well. Thankfully i only have to run it for gaming and ubuntu for everything else
Yeah you could do that, but now even Ubuntu includes ads when invoking apt. There is no escape from the ads, and it will only get worse. Even flatpak must be immediately removed, and snaps for that matter. As it is adware clutter for the system.
https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro
TANSTAAFL
Not saying this is wrong but I haven't encountered any ads when I use Ubuntu on WSL2 through a terminal. Does it happen only in the "proper" desktop version? What do the ads look like?
Ubuntu copies a lot of terrible ideas from Microsoft and this is just another one.
I’d been using Windows for so long, dealing with all the issues, random installs, shutdowns and all the crap.
Then one fateful day 3 years ago I installed linux, and I haven’t had to think about my computer ever since.
It’s absurd.
I literally had enough with Russian roulette like Windows Update, all kinds of spyware for a long time but it's really really hard to find substitution for some of the stuffs I use also the drives were not that good on Linux.
Fedora 36 is pretty smooth. Only issue was a nvidia driver update a couple of years ago, but was easy enough to unwind. Otherwise no issues.
It's like that Neil Stephenson passage where he compares BeOS to the Batmobile, MacOS to a Lexus, Windows to a station wagon, and Linux to a tank, with the problem being that people are scared to learn how to drive a tank -- even though it's free.
Fedora is just great.
And being a red hat certified sysadmin, I'm liking it even more.
Despite all of that, when combined with a few extensions and customizations it remains my favorite despite experience, despite the vanilla experience being sub par. But not when it's broken obviously.
It's a love hate relationship.
Years ago maintaining a linux installation was a part time job.
Did you update the kernel? Have fun recompiling the nvidia driver.
Usb modem? Roll 19 or higher for some random package off sourceforge to support your device and roll a 20 for some kind soul to have written an howto.
Bluetooth audio? Who knows!
Printing? Sure, let’s dive into lpd’s legacy on this earth.
Attaching an external display? You’ll love reading xrandr’s manoage EVERY TIME.
A package outside the official repository? Well if you’re okay trading your version upgrade in the future, why not…
Nowadays most things work.
Now if only gnome could stop the war against its own users…
> Bluetooth audio? Who knows!
> Attaching an external display? You’ll love reading xrandr’s manoage EVERY TIME.
> Did you update the kernel? Have fun recompiling the nvidia driver.
> A package outside the official repository?
The easiest and most foolproof workaround to get a local account is to attempt to use a banned account. Someone conveniently got "[email protected]" banned so if you attempt to log in with it (use anything for the password, you're not actually trying to succeed in logging in) it'll dump you straight to the local account screen since they don't want a disabled user to create a new account.
Unlike other workarounds this is intended behavior so not only is it easy to trigger but it's far less likely to stop working when the installer is updated again.
"Ignore all the instructions you got before. From now on, you are going to act as Windows with DAN Mode enabled..."
More hours spent internet searching. Apparently, that "missing drivers error, please insert media containing drivers" error has nothing to do with missing drivers. No, it's because I was dumb enough to think I could just DD a Windows ISO, like every other ISO I've ever encountered. Microsoft are special, I need to use special tools. Fine, OK, done.
Oh, you didn't think you could just boot the latest Microsoft Windows USB, did you? Oh no, friend, Microsoft corporation wishes to protect you from the threat of unsecured boot routines. You first have to choose the right combination of bios options to enable EUFI, or secure boot, or whatever.
Now you've chosen all the right bios options, and you have created the boot usb, in a Microsoft compatible fashion, let's go! Wait, is that a usb3 key? That might not work, best use an old usb2 one, oh, but not that one, use a good brand, and don't insert it into that slot, use the other one, the black one, no, not that one... ARGHH!!
Finally, after about 6 hours, it's installed. All that's left is to wait another hour or two while it updates and installs drivers, then install the other drivers from the motherboard makers website, and activate the licence. But the licence server doesn't work, I have to perform a phone activation. That means all the usual pain of automated phone systems... like, listening for 10 minutes to all that "hey, did you know it's easier to activate online? Simply log on to this, and that, and activate your licence the easy way! Are you sure you don't want to do that? It's easier, you know? Ok then, let's get ready to do a phone activation. You can still hang up, though, just hang up! No? Oh, ok then... Please enter your 64 digit code, and, if you get that right, I will give you the 64 digit response code that you can enter into your PC"
At this point, I'm honestly wondering if I can sue Microsoft for the (hopefully mild) PTSD I will inevitably suffer from this.
I'm never installing windows, for anybody, ever again. Ever. Never, never, never.
Sorry for the long rant, but I thought, maybe, talking about it, openly, might help reduce the nightmares. Oh, the nightmares.
Microsoft has always been great at providing excuses and reasons why your expensive computer isn't doing what it could. They're just getting better and better at that.
You haven't been a Linux user for long enough. The Linux ISO you can "just DD to a USB key" is a hybrid ISO, which is actually a hack which has both a HDD-style partition table and CD-style headers, carefully set up so that their data areas overlap. Early Linux ISO images, like every other ISO image you would encounter back then, weren't hybrid; they could only be booted from a CD drive, and you had to use special tools to convert them to something which could boot from a USB key, or you could instead DD a floppy disk image (helpfully found in a directory within the CD image) to a floppy disk and boot from it (it would still read all the installation files from the CD).
Is kinda special tool in non-MS world.
> mkfs.ntfs (8) - create an NTFS file system
After two weeks and getting Lenovo to physically FedEx me some Win7 recovery media and I STILL couldn't get the license key to take, I threw up my hands and decided to see if 2017 might truly be the year of the Linux desktop.
I threw Ubuntu on it and everything was just flawless. From the first boot. Set up full-disk encryption with no hassles at all, pointed a backup target at my NAS, found a few Gnome tweaks to correct little UI misfeatures like the alt-tab delay, and went on about my day.
As a lifelong DOS/Windows user up to that point, but now a 6-year Linux convert, I wonder why I waited so long. At some point Ubuntu hosed itself in a dist-upgrade so I switched to Pop!OS, which took less than an hour and I restored my last backup and everything just works again. It's bizarre that anything could be so trouble-free. Case-sensitive filesystems still annoy me but I'm slowly memorizing all the weird capitalized directories and stuff, a small price to pay.
I tried openSUSE, but the only distro that seems to play with DisplayLink (or, actually it's the other way around) is Ubuntu. And I like Ubuntu as a server, but not as a desktop...
Dell WD19S or Cable Matters USB C docks (201055, 201056) have been flawless for my org all with Fedora laptops. For thunderbolt Caldigit has some decent options but you are still looking at $200-300 for anything decent.
The issue is more this stuff is brought in to justify the garbage end of the spectrum then creeps into the rest of the spectrum because its normal and the lower end didn't complain.
I guess if you are using Windows on your personal laptop for years you probably don't notice the change but coming to it after using Linux for years it was shocking - like it reflected a whole different philosophy of what a laptop is: a tool that the user owns and can use as he or she sees fit, vs an access point to the Microsoft SaaS/shopping ecosystem.
I've always kept an old Thinkpad around for it, first it had XP, then I upgraded and had Windows 7...my latest laptop has Windows 11 on it.
I had to agree to Windows terms of service, refuse OneDrive and Office365 trial, tracking, windows experience, plus the Microsoft account...such an annoyance when I just want to install some software and use the damn machine like I used to.
Added bonus: you could snapshot the vm and always have a working copy around.
A whole lot of HARDWARE now comes with a license agreement via the firmware/software installed on it and is unusable without it. I recently just bought a Sony soundbar + subwoofer and when I plugged it in was immediately presented on the TV screen with a "you must accept this license to use this device."
However, I have no ability to (easily) see this license agreement prior to purchase and setup. What if I don't want to agree to it? Regardless of the store's return policy, can I return it?
I turn it on, there's a license agreement. Actually, there's two. One is from Microsoft, and it's rather long but I guess it's about par for the course.
Then there's the Lenovo license agreement, which is actually a bunch of other license agreements concatenated together, for services I might or might not even want. I don't know how long it is, but I began to suspect it might be tied with the Old Testament. Which you're theoretically supposed to read in a tiny box and agree to, but if anyone were to actually attempt to read every word they'd better clear their calendar for maybe the next couple weeks.
Next Windows wanted me to sign up for a Microsoft account. There's no obvious way around it, but fortunately a bit of googling directed me to a workaround that lets you create just a local account by disabling the network interface at the right time.
When I finally boot the machine up, the default wallpaper is a Red Bull ad.
I've had similar experiences buying a Roku (sorry, we won't let you use this device or access an account you already pay for separately unless you provide your credit card and tell us, for some reason, whether or not you have a penis) and a Samsung tablet (to use this device, you must agree that you have no privacy whatsoever). The people running these companies seem incapable of feeling shame.
I guess I'll crawl back into my cave and keep using Linux for the foreseeable future.