This can be seen by the fact that Microsoft has never shied away from improving their OS kernel. Recent stand-out improvements such as ASLR, UAC, TRIM support for SSDs, timer coalescing etc. These are all things that OSX took years to get after Windows got them.
The Darwin kernel is regularly updated; for example Apple replaced Unix init and cron with launchd in 2005, achieved full POSIX compliance in 2007, and went to full 64-bit in 2009.
I don't think this is true at all. Sure, there's always been a BSD-style environment for compatibility, but Apple has never been shy about ripping and replacing legacy Unix-y infrastructure (see: launchd) or about adding new, "deep" APIs close to the plumbing (see: libdispatch).
Meanwhile, you make woolly justifications of their slowness by making contradictions like this: "They're not slow to add features. Some may arrive after a competitor" Comments like these are not helpful and do not add anything to the conversation.
They're slow. The reasons why this is the case is still not entirely clear. But even OSX fans get frustrated sometimes at how slow they are to add features that other operating systems got years before. The most vocal recent one I can think of was probably the TRIM support for SSDs.
I always have a normal user account and an seperate admin account. The normal account does not have sudo permission. This setup on Ubuntu and what I can remember on OSX is not hassle free because a lot of installers and apps assumes normal user has some sort of sudo.
Unfortunately Windows 8.1 dumped UAC in the toilet when forcing the Windows 8.1 update to be downloaded from the store, which made your local admin account useless.
On OSX you get an elevated privileges login prompt for any installer needing to write to / and even for many write protected folders inside your own homedir. You can grant rights as any user you want simply by entering that username (it's automatically populated with the current user)
The only thing Windows does differently here is that it provides a silent, non-admin workaround (filesystem and registry virtualization) for buggy applications, which works, but which can be problematic in other ways. Most notably, while OS-level workarounds are a clear win for older and otherwise unsupported software, they reduce motivation for developers to fix bugs in current software papered over by Windows' workarounds.
Windows Phone 8 vs Android/iOS would be a fair comparison. Because WP8 has undergone the same treatment and has been optimised for high battery efficiencies whilst still retaining the Windows NT kernel at its core.
WP8 has always had support for high-resolution displays and Nokia et al have not had issues with it. WP7.x was a different story but that was a different OS kernel (WinCE not NT). During this time Microsoft was busy creating a minimised edition of the Win8 kernel that would be suitable for use on a smartphone, much like the work Apple did to OSX in order to create iOS.
Search in a page with plenty of marketing blurb for "mobile". Zero results.
So since they aren't marketing it as how you perceive perhaps you should cut them some slack.
ReFS would be a better example. And that's just another example of how Microsoft is keeping their core technology up to date. Apple meanwhile is still using HFS+ which even Linus Torvalds called out as being utterly crap.
From my perspective that shows that MS cares.
Programs written for the Mac can't run on iOS, I think.
The old Windows tablets had 4 main problems:
1) apps not optimized for touch
2) OS not optimized for touch
3) expensive hardware
4) inefficient hardware/small battery life
It seems to me that with devices like Surface Pro, the 1) and 3) problems are still ported to the new devices. I don't see legacy apps that aren't optimized for touch and on a 10" screen, as an "advantage" for Windows tablets. For all practical purposes, they are not.
Even if you want to do "work" with legacy apps when in "laptop mode" - are you sure you want to do that on a 10" screen? Because I'm telling you 10" is too small for productive work, and the keyboard is too crammed at that size.
Because the customers want it.
They're intelligent enough to know that a tablet isn't going to be as productive as a desktop/laptop.
But they still want it.
That's not the consumers' problem, is it?
> Because the customers want it.
That's not reflected in sales yet. If you're talking about the 100 Microsoft fans that upvote and comment all positive Microsoft stories on Reddit, HN and Verge - that doesn't count. We're talking about the market as a whole.
Also, even Microsoft themselves barely even promote the "legacy app" thing in their commercials. All they are showing is Metro. But if they think Metro is their tablets' competitive advantage, then why wouldn't the consumer just get an iPad or Android tablet instead - and for a lot less?
If they did then Surface Pro would be the number one seller.
Our's would be such an application but even as it is there are certain aspects of its typical daily use that might/would be best served by a tablet.
At those times it would be nice for a user to be able to switch from one device to the other and then back again.
In fact, requests like this are becoming more frequent.
It's the same reason Windows apps can't run on Surface RT.
Rosetta is neither included nor supported in Mac OS X v10.7 "Lion" or later. Therefore, with Lion and later releases, the current Macintosh platform does not support PowerPC applications.
Simply because it (Surface Pro) runs the same OS ie regular Windows.
Apple were able to rip the top layers off OSX and ship it as iOS without too much trouble, because it's unix. (They didn't start from scratch.)
Windows, not so much. MS have been trying to do it for a decade or more, and they've failed for the reasons outlined by optymizer.
In fact examples like Windows CE (Now WP8) prove you wrong.
[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Server_Core)
Please give server core on Windows Server 2012[0] a try. They could use your feedback.
[0] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh84...
> "Server Core is a minimal server installation option for computers running on the operating system. Server Core provides a low-maintenance server environment with limited functionality."
Limited functionality is the key. In order to administer windows server, one is expected to use remote desktop. This is in contrast to a unix machine, where everything can be controlled via command line and configuration scripts.
It is getting better, as Powershell exposes a lot of functionality. But it is still not there yet.
It's actually how Apple built iOS, too. But will they put WP8 on tablets? No of course not. Instead, they'll try and push Windows RT to phones, which is the totally wrong way to do it. But just watch it happen.
But probably the entire administration modules requires a GUI.
I think it's not about the OS, it's about the drivers. If you would trace the power consumption properly my guess would be that the WiFi module is the culprit. As the hardware is the same, the driver must be the place, where Apple has the edge.