[eksemplar]

I’ve made the opposite switch this year, completely abandoning windows for my personal use. I still use it professionally, being in the European public sector you’re married to MS and it’s quite honestly a healthy relationship for a lot of reasons, but boy have I never grown used to Windows 10.

I really love unix, I probably should be using Linux instead of a Mac, and I did earlier in my life. But with age I’m growing fonder and fonder to things just working, like when my wife sends me an iMessage and I pops up on my Mac. We could probably get something similar working with some other setup, but as long as we stay working the Apple ecosystem, well, it just happens automatically. Just like popping a thunderbolt cable in hooks me up to my 4K monitor with no setup required and no problems when I swhixh between different modes. Something that took ages to get working in Linux and didn’t really work for all the apps that didn’t support the change of resolution.

It wasn’t always like this, I actually really liked windows especially 2000, XP and 7, but since then it’s been a struggle to stay with it. So my story is almost the polar opposite.

Like hardware, where do you find a decent high quality windows laptop with a trackpad that works for the price tag of a 13” MacBook Pro? Sure the surface book is a sexy machine, but it’s almost twice as expensive and it can’t connect to my 4K monitor or an external egpu? Sure the xps13 would make Linux easier, but it’s trackpad is worse and it’s build quality is risky (coil whine).

I’m not really a Apple fanboy. I hate the walled garden, as much as I love what it does, but everything else is just so much worse. What I really can’t imagine though, living within a windows 10 environment, even with git bash.

[konschubert]

Plus, most Apple products are actually great value if you factor in their lifetime cost. I bought a used iPad two years ago. It must be four or five years old now.

It just got iOS 12.

[omnimus]

Well it is not great at all considering how hard it is to repair current apple stuff. After 2 years of warranty you are just wishing it doesn't break. Don't get me wrong i have 6 year old macbook pro and its still a great machine. But i also know lot of my coworkers with new apple machines that break all the time. If you bring your machine 3times to repair shop in first year - well you can be pretty much sure something will happen very soon after machine is out of warranty period. And then you pay massive amounts.

Apple is basically trying to make subscription hardware with 2 year cycle. That's not nice value + it is also not ecological at all.

[dogma1138]

TBH Apple stuff is about the only thing you can repair as repair shops are nearly exclusively focused on Apple because of the large volume and long lifespan of their models.

Good luck getting a Samsung Note 2014 repaired (I tried) or a Lenovo laptop that needs say a mainboard or some BGA replacement.

While I don’t agree with how Apple restricts 3rd party repairs the reason they are the only one you hear about is because they are the only one with a 3rd party repair ecosystem to begin with.

[omnimus]

I guess it depends on country. Probably in US. There is only one authorized service dealer in my country. On the other hand most of the PC market brands has lots of repair shops. And lot of them will do even old machines, hunt parts on ebay or china and repair with that. It's actually not that hard (the parts nofficial apple repair shops use are from china anyway). There are so many eshops where you just put serial number and get what you need.

There is big reason for this though. I am from quite poor european country where hourly rate for technicians is much much lower than in US so repairing lot of things make economical sense. In us this might make sense only for high end premium machines.

[pingec]

What do you find so bad on windows 10?

What I dislike is the telemetry, the fact that they install so much garbage by default and even when I remove it they reinstall it with the next update and I fear they will start pushing ads in the future.

Other than that I'm pretty happy with Windows for desktop and Linux for server.

If you want a trackpad as good as the macbook one there is no alternative. I really like the Matebook X Pro, it is a beast.

[eksemplar]

You mention some of it, I genuinely don’t want my OS to install short cuts for candy crush and mind craft when I’m not looking, it’s more than that though, because I really don’t like my corporate windows 10 either and it’s free from all of that.

We don’t even suffer from the faulty updates because we don’t roll them out right away.

I can’t put my finger on it, I wish I could, because it’s not terrible constructive to say that it just doesn’t feel nice to use. But that’s how it feels. It certainly also lacks the unix command tools. Git bash was a nice addition, though it’s hardly the same as a real unix terminal, but mostly it’s just that using windows 10 feels wrong to me.

[tonyedgecombe]

I worried about the walled garden but to be honest it's been pretty benign since it was introduced. If I look at the software I've bought in recent years its nearly all been outside the store.

The only downside for me is the cost although you can mitigate that by avoiding new and selling on carefully when you have finished with it.

I did try quite hard to switch to Linux but it lacks the polish of macOS. It was better than Windows in most respects though.

[FabHK]

> walled garden

In particular, it seems to me you can get all your data out if desired. Contacts are .vcf; Calendar is .ics or whatever; pictures in Photo are good old jpeg (and explicit exporting is supported); Music is mostly pretty standard formats and not DRM'd anymore IIUC (videos - don't know, never used); documents, ok, Pages/Numbers/Keynote you'd have to export into some other format, while MarkDown and LaTeX etc. of course are ok. Getting passwords out of Keychain Access might be a bit tricky?

[saagarjha]

You lose things associated with your Apple ID. This includes things like purchased content and other nontransferable items.

[tonyedgecombe]

I only ever stream things now, I'm not interested in the hassle of owning, storing and backing up a load of films and music.

[extra88]

I don’t listen to a lot of music since I listen to podcasts while in transit and at the gym. I augment my music collection with free Spotify a little but would feel locked in to one provider if I didn’t own anything. The prospect of finding and rating what I like again would keep me with one provider, even if another’s price, content, or features were enticing.

[extra88]

I worry about that so I never buy anything that’s not transferable in the first place. I can count on one hand the number of paid apps I’ve bought in the Mac and iOS app stores combined.

[bufferoverflow]

> like when my wife sends me an iMessage and I pops up on my Mac.

Works the same on Windows. For Android Hangouts you just have to allow desktop notifications in GMail. But it's actually better, if you enable Google Voice, you can make phone calls from your computer, and you can receive phone calls on your computer.

[saagarjha]

> But it's actually better, if you enable Google Voice, you can make phone calls from your computer, and you can receive phone calls on your computer.

You can do this on macOS as well, via FaceTime.

[threatofrain]

Google Voice has the distinction that you can call any US line for free, and that you have a real phone number (which you can transfer out) that you can receive calls with on pretty much any device.

It's what truly allowed the iPad to be a big iPhone.

[bufferoverflow]

No, you can't. Can you call any number in the US/Canada for free? No limits.

[saagarjha]

My cell phone plan lets me do this, so yes? And I can of course call any other iPhone or Mac, no matter where it is in the world.

[bufferoverflow]

I doubt your cell plan works from any point on the planet with WiFi access.

[saagarjha]

I have Wi-Fi calling, so it kind of does.

[zerr]

Still on Win7 and no plans to switch to 10.

[yawgmoth]

Pulse SMS is cross platform - it syncs SMS on your phone to a myriad of other clients in various operating systems.

https://messenger.klinkerapps.com/overview/

[scoot_718]

It's a bit weird to hear this when Apple have stopped doing anything interesting in the laptop space for nearly a decade.

[saagarjha]

A decade? Off the top of my head, in the last decade Apple has pushed high-density and color accurate displays, fast SSDs, dropped the DVD drive, adopted three revisions of the Thunderbolt standard, and set the standard for most other laptop manufacturers.

[cannonedhamster]

Samsung launched the first mass market laptops with SSDs. I'll absolutely agree on their monitors, DVDs were already on the way out but it was a smart move for their target market. Claiming thunderbolt as a win seems a bit will since they are known for ditching their own standards often.

I can't say I'm seeing much innovation that isn't design related specific to form factor. Their software has stagnated, iTunes and Apple music are a hot mess of garbage. Aside from removing the headphone jack to force people into higher priced headphones, I'm having a hard time finding the value and the market seems to be agreeing.