Interestingly, I was having this same conversation with my daughter yesterday as her Windows laptop needs replacement. She loves some of the things Windows allows her to do. At the same time she hates its unreliability and crashes.
It's the opposite with her school provided macbook... reliable and easy to use but not flexible.
Your points are right. I have done upgrades, parts replacements, etc., in the past but not in recent years. The strategy in the past is buy the cheapest I could find and upgrade as I go.
I am looking at the other way now. Buy the best I can today and forget it for years. Any decent brand today provides this reliability now in Windows PCs.
That's an interesting take/viewpoint. I never considered it that way.
I agree with compatibility issues, from lack of USB-A type connectors to older display ports and more. I also agree with higher cost. The Apple connectors perform well and are reliable, but we do have other gadgets with other connectors.
I understand. I have similar background. I felt more comfortable building, upgrading from DOS to Windows machines. I was more comfortable with older Windows versions.
I have become less hands on in recent years and feel less comfortable going under the hood of newer Windows versions. Another member said above that PCs will go the way of Apple machines. I am not sure of that on hardware side but feel that Windows is going the way of MacOS with more restrictions in each new major version.
Another reason is that I do not have the same reasons to upgrade in recent years because I bought the best machine I could 8 years ago.
All that said, I have become a more hands-off user in recent years. When I feel inclined, I recycle old laptops with a new version of Linux and try to learn something new. What was once a necessity is now just a hobby.
The reason I am considering all options is some obvious advantages Macs provide, as others have pointed out in this thread.
Where I work, we use mostly PCs for all employees, a handful of MacBooks (not sure if they are company provided) and a variety of servers in the network. I don't know what tools our infrastructure team has implemented but in recent years interoperability has not been an issue with any of these systems. Several years ago it was a problem.
Part of the reason is that in recent years we are doing away with in-house custom-built applications and adopting lot of cloud based applications.
For personal use, both my kids use Windows laptop (personal) and MacBook (for school). My wife uses exclusively a MacBook (provided by her school) and I use exclusively two Windows machines and two Linux laptops. We are all over the place. The only complaint I often hear is about their MacBook not having a USB-A port. They never connect to an external monitor or TV because they cannot without an adapter.
No, it's not. I've seen them fail to connect to projectors and printers (no Microsoft there). I have no end of trouble with iPhone pictures sent to me (don't work on my Samsung phone). Macs have trouble with some of our web software (running on Linix, ironically) because Safari doesn't work with it. Shares are a big problem too. Some people install Windows on their Macs to get them to work with enterprise software.
All of those are most likely to the closed nature of Windows software. I have a printer also which uses a closed Windows interface rather than the standards. We'd need to have a look at your web SW to see what the compatibility issues are, but it's a common Web problem, catering for all browsers. There were compatibility problems between IE and Edge, so it's a bit strange to blame Mac as a system for a particular browser issue. After all, you can just change the browser. I don't use Safari on the Mac, and Microsoft browsers have had loads of incompatibilities, often deliberate, to confound standards. As for shares, macs use SMB perfectly well out of the box, and unlike Windows support the Unix standard sharing mechanisms. The reason that your enterprise software doesn't work well with macs is because it's based around proprietary MS protocols rather than open standards, It's a bit rich saying Macs are not open (of course they aren't) when MS is less open.
One thing (among many) that ticks me off about Windows is when people write documents in Word, then post them on the web with non-standard characters that don't look right in standard Unicode. Offending characters would be quote marks and other glyphs in Microsoft's non-standard ISO 8859 upper half.
I've been using PCs since 1983, and I've never had one fail. I've had two hard drive failures and a couple accessory failures (laptop power supply and such), but that's it. Not bad for 40 years of use, and I've had at least 2 at a time since about 1995 or so (at first a desktop and a laptop, eventually two laptops).
We have 3,000 employees, and 5x for Mac support is what I was told by the IT department.
Don't you agree that 'interoperability problems' usually involve at least two parties, both at fault?
Often the fault is simply "we don't care about other parties" - can be seen everywhere.
Apple: Use our devices everywhere, we don't care about others. PC users are stupid.
Linux: We support only standards, we don't care about your non-standard things. You don't need this or that propieritary functionality anyway.
Microsoft: We need this and this functionality, we don't care about some arcane standards. Anyway, there is nothing else besides the Windows.
[Cheap] hardware manufacturers: Microsoft/Windows has largest market share. Who cares about Apple? What is Linux, BTW?
I do agree, in fact. It's wrong to call either an 'open system' or, for that matter a 'closed system'. Both have their proprietary systems, and both use them to try to keep users from straying to other brands. But so far as intersystem interoperability goes:
File sharing - both base their systems around proprietary protocols, Windows uses SMB, Apple uses AFP. Both support 'standard ' protocols such as NFS, FTP out of the box. Apple gives SMB out of the box, MS doesn't give you AFP. So Apple is showing more willing there.
Web protocols - in their battle for web control both MS and Netscape developed proprietary HTML dialects, whilst Apple stuck to the standards. They were part of the standards body (WHATWG) that developed HTML5 with the clear goal of getting rid of proprietary dialects which had made web interoperability so poor. Apple seems to have stuck to it, so it's harsh to blame them for not being 'open' on that front.
Printing - the main problem is with printers that have developed proprietary MS-only drivers which use dll's. dll's are a horrific excrescence anyway, and no sensible OS would have such a thing. Thus, it's hard to develop drivers for these printers on non MS OS, and the vendors tend not to. Luckily for photography that's not a problem, because a photo printer manufacturer that freezes itself out of the Apple OS is committing commercial suicide. It's really only a problem with low-end office printers, and one that can often be solved using Wine (and Apple's Unix is standard enough to run Wine)
As a company, these days I prefer MS to Apple - but as a vendor of OS apple clearly has a better product.
Ha, well put. I wonder about the cheap hardware makers and Linux and other alternate OSs, though. Not a lot of desktop Linux out there, perhaps, but I'd guess there are quite a few small business servers, etc. The cheap hardware makers are letting us turn off things like Secure Boot in their motherboards; I suspect that if they were obedient Microsoft slaves we'd not have that option.
I came into the computer game c.1985 with a CP/M Kaypro II, which I modified extensively and used highly productively. Then I got a NeXT and an Acorn RPM (for Sibelius). It was only when Sibelius moved to Windows that I built a PC (Windows NT) c1995. In the past 25 years I have selected parts and assembled my own PCs. In that time I have used three different motherboards and have never had a hardware failure. (I am sure that luck plays a part in this!) My experience with laptops has been different. The first was an HP whose screen failed two days before the warranty expired. To their credit, they fixed it within three days -- time saved largely because their factory was close by the Fedex hub at Mephis TN! The machine that replaced it (only because the HP was too heavy to carry on aeroplanes) is an Asus and within three years of buying it, M$ declared that it was ineligible to run Windows 11. Apart from that, and the fact that the too frequent Windows updates reset some of my settings, I have no complaints about M$, though for my sanity I avoid Office, Explorer, Outlook and Edge as much as possible.
In my opinion, Apple makes excellent hardware, but the software does not come up to the same level. My iPad and iPhone are pretty limited in what they can do sensibly for me. I avoid Safari when ever possible and dont use the Apple Mail program.
DLL's are similar to dynamic libraries on other OS's, not that big difference. Sure there are some historical shortcomingis with them, called shortly 'dll hell' - newer versions of windows can actually manage different versions of same dll's pretty well; we have had very few problems for last years (and those mostly with incorrectly versioned free libraries, which break installers logic).
About printers (or more like about winprinters, winmodems and such stuff) - they are/were very cheap to produce - they needed almost no processing power, only a little memory. Winprinter does not need to know almost anything from printer control language or characters or anything - it just prints out already rendered data. Same for winmodems - they send and receive serial data without any logical processing. There were times when hardware was more expensive than software to create...
I actually meant cheap hardware and desktop linux computers 'market share' - on server space things stand different (although cheap hardware should not make it into server room anyway). Cheap hardware can be blamed for big part of Windows desktop problems either (besides ignorant users of course :)).
Absolutely. I bought various bits of cheap hardware in my early PC building days, especially ram, and it bit me on the ar*e. I've long since learnt that top quality kit, right down to a £200 BeQuiet case, pays you back in spades with rock-solid stability and easy long-term upgradability. My current build has been left on 24 hours a day for 18 months and never, ever (touch wood!) crashes. It's very fast, it's silent, and has potential to easily further upgrade cpu, ram, graphics card, etc if I wish.
Fanboy-ism aside, I really struggle to see a better option than a properly planned and built PC.
Time marches on as so does computer technology. At one time guys were soldering on a board to build their own computer. Today the PC is a bit more integrated but still consist of components that are interconnect by runs. That limits the performance since it limits the speeds. The revolution in the mobile processor market has changed all that. By putting a "system on a chip," electrical path lengths are reduced. Of course that means one cannot all memory - but the buss bandwidth is much greater which corresponds to faster performance at lower power. We are all benefiting with the development of mobile processors which had to be power efficient since they were not plugged into a wall and could not have fans.
Then there was the ARM revolution. Actually not a revolution since the ARM architecture has always been around, the Motorola 68000 was an RIS architecture. With today's 5 nanometer processes which will soon be replace at a 3.5 nanometer process that the Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Apple Silicon are built around, it is pretty clear to keep up in performance more and more of the system is going to have to be baked into the chip. The Apple M processors are ARM based processors. The MicroSoft Surface is an ARM based processor.
In 1970, electronics were spared to components, with technicians replacing components. By 1990, most sophisticated electronic processing systems were spared to functional unit. That is if a receiver or subbed tuner broke, the unit was replace and the broken unit sent back to the vendor to see if it could be repaired. With more and more integration - even that paradigm is rapidly changing.
A good friend of mine, John Pinkston spend much of his career in the development of quantum based super computers. John's description of the fastest computer was the smoking fuzzy golf ball. It had to be small to reduce the path lengths so the data would get from point A to B fast. It had to be fuzzy to get data in and out rapidly and it would be smoking as it was clocked fast. The first real super computer I worked on was a special CDC device developed in the mid 1970 which was water cooled. Then the Cray 1 came along which used super cooled embalming fluid pumping through its veins to keep it cool. Today my iPhone smokes all those and it doesn't even have a fan. 🤪 At some point the necessary performance will require integration to the point that the system will be on a chip which will limit the follow on flexibility. Moore's low shows no sigh of being obsolete.
Most of that is indeed true, but the introduction of Apple's M chip has in no way killed the PC. Head to head AMD's Ryzen more than holds it's own, and neither they nor Intel are standing still. Yes, of course architecture will continue changing, but that's always been the way; look, for example at the first multi-core chips, or the first integrated graphics. I can think of several times over the years when it looked like Intel had buried AMD, or that AMD had taken the game totally away from Intel, but ultimately it's generally a matter of leap-frog as new, breakthrough ideas are implemented by one company then another.
