Sony believed that they had so much market share that they could make a console that was leaps and bounds more complicated to code for, which would lock devs in and prevent them from going elsewhere, and they’d just have to suck it up because of said market share. Sony was wrong, and they lost out big time that generation (although they did manage to win the Blu-ray vs hd-dvd format wars).
Microsoft seems to believe they have so much market share that they can force people to upgrade to a privacy invading, ai infested piece of crap, and that everyone needs to suck it up because market share.
I’ve already started hearing wind that people, in statistically significant numbers, are finding alternatives… so is this the same situation as the ps3?
Just a passing musing without much to back up the gut feelings.
When recently onboarding for a new job I heard something I never thought I would hear in my life.
Everyone was given a Mac. Eng, design, finance, HR. Everyone. In my onboarding cohort, someone in finance asked if they could have a Windows PC, which has been the backbone of finance orgs for decades. IT said no. They just didn’t want to deal with Microsoft’s enterprise ecosystem.
As someone who went through this, I would honestly take Window 11’s bs over pos unusable mac.
First time ever I think I felt pain in my wrist from using a trackpad. Absolute clownshow of a UX
I’ll agree that Apple is the big red nose on a much larger clownshow, but… between Microsoft and Mac, I’ll just say that I’ve got a request in with IT for a MacBookPro when funding becomes available. Some of that is because our IT has crippled Windows beyond its usual hobbled state, which is bad enough, and they haven’t hit the OS-X image as hard. But, even so, bone stock Windows 11 on a modern desktop i7 still has HORRIBLE performance issues that OS-X generally doesn’t suffer from. Intrusive virus scanning, intrusive file indexing, intrusive cloud backup… Apple does these things, but generally does them a bit better (though the clowns do mess up plenty along the way.)
I’ve used Ubuntu as my desktop for the past 15 years, it’s a different kind of clownshow - one that I prefer to the other two choices, but it has definite flaws of its own.
Interesting. I’ve got of gripes with Apple hardware (price, upgradability, silly things like notches and Touch Bars,) but trackpads has never been one of them. I’ve always thought the’ve had some of the best trackpads.
What trackpad do you prefer and why?
When I started at my current job, every new hire was given the choice of a MacBook or Linux laptop. I only encountered one person who chose the former and he only chose that because he thought it’d be funny to use Windows on a MacBook in his professional environment. (We were allowed to do pretty much whatever with our laptops so long as we could fulfill our work duties. My then manager replaced Ubuntu, with which we were provided, with Arch on his laptop.)
Two or so years later, the IT department said that they didn’t really know how to maintain security compliance on Linux, but they did know JAMF. Thus, they took away our customizable Linux laptops and foisted MacBooks on all of us. I’m pretty sure even the Windows guy lost that, but he was an exec so it probably took longer.
I still remember when they announced that this would happen. They said it without a timeline in the company-wide group chat and someone I respected previously and respected more afterwards said “so when are you taking away our good laptops?”
My guess that they’re trying to standardize around a platform that has a) no Microsoft, b) won’t cause product / UX / marketing to totally revolt, c) is well supported as an engineering platform (in Silicon Valley)
I got the same treatment recently. All tech departments were issued M4 Mac Book Pros because that was more cost effective than than dealing with the non-compliant fuckery of W11. Unfortunately non-tech departments got the old inventory and are suffering the abhorrent instability of W11. It somehow refuses to play nice with just about everything in our corporate ecosystem.
This is definitely becoming more common. I’ve seen Macs steadily gain market share in my organization because the Windows machines are locked down in such draconian ways that they become unusable, but somehow they allow much better user experiences on Macs as an option, so most people go that direction.
That’s nice to see actually. Regular consumers like us don’t have any pull, but businesses do. So I hope more start seeing Microsoft problematic enough to start shifting away to MacOS to get Microsoft to reassess their decisions.
I don’t know if Apple’s shenanigans are much better with how they’re trying to lock it down
But macOS is even more locked down than windows?
IMHO, it depends on the company, their data retention and security policy, and what you mean by “locked down.”
I’ve had IT departments that are comfortable giving everyone admin accounts and full sharing access, and IT departments that control every little thing that goes in and out of your machine.
They specifically mentioned the enterprise ecosystem.
I would not be surprised at all if Apple’s MDM system is less painful to use for smaller businesses than Microsoft’s AD and everything attached to it. Hell it might even be nicer for big orgs, but I’ve never heard of one (apart from the likes of Google) not using AD
Also if you’re already dealing with one of those systems, an IT department is probably motivated to not run both and set up interop if they can avoid it
Used to work for Apple in B2B sales.
Granted, this was five years ago, but back then it was sort of the other way round. The deployment at SMB scale worked really well and was also free of charge.
AT enterprise you would need a third-party solution typically, something like JAMF.
Locked down would probably be a plus for enterprise.
But honestly I’ve never got that argument. In what way is macOS more locked down than Windows? In the hardware that it will run on yes. But for the average user it seems fairly similar on the being “locked down” front.
I mean the hardware thing is huge imo
Sure, but for say the average laptop buyer nowadays not really.
True, but enterprise hardware has never been something that IT departments really wanted to upgrade. Even back when everyone had upgradable towers under their desk, IT departments just wanted to kit you out with something that lasted 3 years, then was replaced.
Hell, in the before times, when I’ve even wanted more storage, all of my IT departments were more inclined to give me an external HD than open a computer case. They’re busy and they generally want to do whatever is fast.
Can you install linux on a mac?
If you can get an old final-intel-gen MBP in decent nick, they can make pretty decent Linux machines if you’re okay with not being able to do any internal hardware upgrades.
tiny-dfr is your friend if you happen to get one with that touchbar F-row, which is probably the only big downside compared to a conventional laptop.
Older Intel Macs are some of the best Linux machines. The newer ones with Apple CPUs are a compatibility nightmare.
There is a distro specifically made for Apple CPUs.
Yes, Asahi. It’s still a compatibility nightmare :(
Yes. And Windows too, on the x86 ones. Those are no different than a traditional laptop.
Yup
May I present Asahi Linux.
*At the moment, only M1 and M2 Macs are supported