[wwweston]

The funny thing is that I'd been looking at switching to Windows from MacOS in the last 5 years -- main thing is Microsoft's tradition of backwards compatibility, which respects user investment in software, something that much of the industry is briming with contempt for, and the kindest thing I could say about Apple on this particular topic is that they're not the worst offender.

So, bought a Windows Laptop and a Surface Pro, explored that for a bit, and it was ... OK. I could see my hopes getting some kind of payoff with enough work, when I got around to the work. Until this OS-level surveillance stuff went down.

And that's it. I can't imagine investing in their platforms. I can't imagine trusting that the product stakeholders are even capable of learning to act with user interests in mind, or that executive management that created a team making decisions this bad is capable of learning either.

MacOS and Apple have their issues, but they haven't crossed that threshold yet and I can probably fix my backward compat issues with VMs.

(Some responsibility for trusting MS has to fall on me given the "fool me twice" principle, it was clear that they were fundamentally untrustworthy at least as far back as the 90s antitrust trials, now also seems clear that the recent image rehab was exactly that: image, nothing more.)

[queuebert]

Apple is pretty bad. They nuked all 32-bit support at some point, which made almost my entire Steam library unplayable until I cobbled together a Windows box. When coupled with the idiotic UI design direction they have taken the last 10 years, MacOS is no longer a contender for me.

[wwweston]

The 32 bit support nuking was in fact the source of my macOS concerns too, and why I was looking over the fence to see if Windows offered me some shelter from the tech treadmill.

Current plan is to see if I can run 10.14 in a VM for 32 bit apps and finally ditch the hardware I’m keeping for them.