Please talk to anyone outside of the start-up/tech world and ask them about the technology they use. A majority don't give a toss about M1 or M2 or ARM vs. x86 or anything else that seems to get so many in the tech world so excited. They care about Excel, they care about backwards compatibility, they care about centralized management.
Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.
Consumers do care about things like battery life. I imagine most consumers would prefer to stick with what they know (windows), but as the battery life/performance gap grows, people will be more likely to make the switch.
> Consumers do care about things like battery life.
For laptops, less than you'd think. A huge chunk of people buy laptops so they can work on the dinner table and then put their computer away easily when it's time for the family dinner.
Source: I spent about five years selling laptops to people. That was a while ago, but I don't think much changed here. If anything, things changed the other way (battery life is even less important for laptops than it was) since a lot of people also have a smartphone or tablet.
And as battery lives get longer, there are diminishing returns as well. The difference between 1 hour and 4 hours is huge. The difference between 4 and 8 hours pretty large. After that? Less so.
In my experience noise and heat (or rather, lack thereof) are more important, although also not hugely so for a lot of people, just more so than battery life.
I agree about the CPU architecture, people don't give a shit.
However, I think MS/Intel will start losing also corporate space. With the staffing problems, companies are looking for ways to score cheap points, and I'm starting to see "free choice of a laptop, including MacBook" as one of the benefits even in some big corps.
Thankfully we don't need to trust in meaningless anecdotes about what those in the 'real world' do or don't know.
The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users.
So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for.
And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.
It's a gimmick. Best devs dont us MacOS, lol. There's probably some cohort of frontend that try to look "cool." But any dev doesn't fall for that fluff. FFS, Apple just announced memory swapping as a feature on their iPad, a feature that's literally been around since 1970s. That's laughable and sad, any dev worth their salt would know this.
I agree that the world basically runs on excel, but given that, the world cares about excel’s performance. Especially as spreadsheets are only getting bigger.
Office for Mac is a non-starter for power users due to the lack of Alt-key accelerators. There are countless other missing features, but that alone is enough to never make the switch
Interesting that you state there are missing features.
I remember a speech given by one of the leaders of Mac development at Microsoft saying that new features are tested out on the Mac first, and if they work out, they're brought into the Windows version.
The problem is that Alt-key accelerators are encouraged by Windows across the entire OS and it has been the case since the very first version of Excel (it really predates Excel)
I love the approach of testing new features on the Mac first, but it isn't sufficient since the Mac version was never updated to be 100% parity with the Windows version, which means some of the preexisting features would forever be missing from the Mac
No chance unfortunately. Windows 11 has pop up "notifications" that are basically ads all over. Unnecessarily hard to cleanup / customize in a biz setting.
If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat. But Microsoft just is better here currently on a lot of fronts - the last time I chased my tail here it didn't pay off.
If Apple wants to compete for the business market I think they should! We need first class user account management that INTEGRATES with other stuff (ie, google email etc etc). Right now you can federate from active directory to almost anything (SonicWall/VPN for remote users, WiFi for onprem user devices, vSphere for VM management etc etc). If you sync to google you can then use google one click sign-ons everywhere on the web SAAS side.
We then need office running perfectly.
Then we'd probably do our legacy apps on some VMs and chrome for SAAS apps.
We also need to be able to run MacOS virtually. We have remote users who talk to an on-prem VMs, separates their personal and work stuff, we can lock down and monitor the on-prem VMs and they can watch netflix with no worries using home machine. How does this work with Apple? It's easy with Windows.
I think there would be some demand from smaller co's to make the switch if there was a solution which allowed what folks are looking for -> migration to cloud as offices go virtual with controlled "desktops" delivered to users while still allowing in office / warehouse / factory deployments.
My cut n' paste pet peeve example of why macOS seems like a "toy" and not for serious business use:
The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.
I agree that this particular aspect of the the dialog box is bad. But if something as minor as this keeps you off an entire platform, it sounds like making excuses.
I save ~50 - ~100 character filenames all the time. I even cut, copy, and paste bits of them in that little box. It doesn't feel like a big deal to me.
But yeah, it's the little things like this that belie Apple's reputation for attention to detail.
> If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat.
I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.
Is Active Directory still LDAP compliant?
Embraced and extended or compliant?
Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there.
Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home
Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems,
Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple..
Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process
I actually used to do this. Samba on Mac used to be great, so you could do a good hybrid setup. And once you had Samba working your linux users could jump in more or less if they could self support.
I think Samba went to GPLv3 and updates for it on mac seemed to stop entirely cold which killed this as the easy integration glue. Does anyone remember details? This great integration point went away and basically you end up tilting at windmills.
I have worked on big companies that do pretty much all of this on Mac. I agree that it might be harder to do than on Windows, because there is so much industry know-how on the MS side. But there is no real technical barrier for this to happen.
In a business context a google account requirement would be fine. Microsoft is basically going there to get folks to move AD into the Azure cloud. We're feeling a ton of a pressure towards that, and entitlements for Office etc are being delivered that way (so you end up with a mini AD instance in cloud already).
Microsoft cares about their B2B products. While end users complain about Windows being a bloated mess, corporations still see no better alternative platform for deploying and managing a fleet of thousands (or tens of thousands) of machines.
Just a few weeks ago I replaced my Surface Laptop 3 with a M1 MacBook and couldn't agree more regarding hardware. I can't speak for any xbox branded stuff, but any MS-branded computer I've ever owned has been trash. Microsoft might be terrible at this hardware business, but they do have a powerful presence in the developer & business community.
I still feel like Microsoft is the strongest software company on earth. Consider that not even the confines of this M1 MacBook prevent me from being able to compile & run my .NET apps without modification. Apple's hypothetical hegemony does not cross over in the same way.
Until Apple can get me to look at their Xcode offerings and think "wow fuck visual studio, GitHub, et. al.", I do not think their takeover of the computing world will begin.
I have to disagree on this. Microsoft has gone out of their way to support their legacy software on older systems, and it's a huge reason companies in the IT and IoT sector have stayed with them all these years.
It's worse than that. They're busy turning off their users with dark patterns, terrible UX, ads and spam in the OS, and endless amounts of unnecessary telemetry.
I just had to hack/patch windows 11 in order to bring back "never combine taskbar windows" functionality which existed in windows 10. I am strongly considering switching over at this point. Removal of "never combine" is such a productivity kill that it baffles me how this thing rolled out at all. Who took over the wheel over at Microsoft and who left, that made this major breaking change take place?
Oof - I understand your gripe completely, Win 11 is downright perplexing with some of this stuff, but if you're someone who wants the "Never combine..." option, you'll probably hate MacOS dock, the way window and app switching works, lack of any options there, and general "We know better than our users" mentality all over the place...
And yet, I and many of my friends will keep using Windows because the third-party Windows screen readers are better than macOS's VoiceOver in many ways. I have no doubt that other users have their own favorite (edit: or essential) third-party tools that keep them on Windows.
They had some promising years but I always sensed a struggle in the wheelhouse.
Now they are back to forcing Edge on people, ads on login screen and in the Start menu are their new inventions and their store is almost as broken as ever and most importantly hard earned trust flew out the window in the process.
Apple forces safari on users in iOS, has icloud ads and integrations built into the OS, and sells devices with locked down bootloaders/filesystems that don't let you sideload your own programs.
Who is the bigger threat here? The real threat to user freedom is the tribalism of picking the "lesser evil" when there are workable non-evil solutions like linux.
It doesn't force Safari. Chrome is absolutely allowed to create a browser and track users and monetize them on iOS. They just have to use the same rendering engine.
I'm not Apples greatest fan (see my latest comment), but there is a major difference between iCloud or OneDrive being pre-installed, both which is OK with me, and Candy Crush showing up in the start menu on my work laptop or some stupid game altering my login screen, again on my work laptop.
And yes, I too am a Linux user.
Why choose between various dumb and evil options if nice is available? (I know, some people get as mad at font problems and alignment on Linux as I get on microlagging on Windows and boneheaded CMD-TAB on Mac, but each to their own.)
No, you can't. There are no dark patterns, ads, or spam in macOS. The worst you could say is that it has "terrible UX." I would then respond: compared to what?
In my view, the only desktop-grade OS I prefer over the modern Mac is MacOS 9. It was much easier to use and understand from top to bottom. On the other hand, it lacked a lot of features I've come to take for granted (pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading, protected memory, support for modern hardware, gestures, etc).
There are plenty of dark patterns in macOS. For example, macOS will trick users into thinking that the apps they want to use are either broken or malicious if developers didn't pay Apple $100 a year and Notarize apps. macOS has increasingly become a platform to sell iCloud subscriptions, as well.
"iOS sends the MAC addresses of nearby devices, e.g. other handsets and
the home gateway, to Apple together with their GPS location.
Users have no opt out from this and currently there are few, if
any, realistic options for preventing this data sharing."
Power corrupts and when one company wields too much of it, shit will hit the fan.
Not to mention, up until a few years ago, most PCs did not come with TPMs, so they can't run Windows 11. And Windows 10 won't get security patches after 2025.
I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.
Yes, Apple would have a difficult job displacing MS, but it seems that MS is set on helping them. I mean, who doesn't want ads on their work computer? /s
Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.