Windows needs to stop showing tabloid news

The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently (I haven't tried it, because of the vendor lock). Linux on the other hand is great, but has abysmal quality check due to wide variety of everything. Windows is just works (until Win11, which was a marketing pushed bullshit, without half of the featured from the Win10 branch).

> The problem is that Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently

I would argue against that. Just the fact alone that you can’t use Windows 11 Home without your machine being connected to a Microsoft account is proof enough that Windows is more anti consumer than macOS.

Isn't there some kind of physics law that says every 2nd Windows version sucks?

I think it fits quite well, XP was good, Vista sucked, Win 7 was good, 8 sucked, 10 was good, 11 sucks. Windows 12 is going to be the next version to try I guess.

Apple provides a clear and beneficial point of difference. They are vertically integrated and now with Apple silicon, have arguably the best productivity laptops on the market. My M2 Air, lets me do all the personal dev and admin work my XPS 17 does, but I can easily go several days without a charge. My work provided MBP will easily go all day on a single charge and have plenty of charge left.

Linux provides easily the best dev environment, is free, gives you all the control you could possible want, runs on lots of hardware and is speedy even on old hardware. Most of the internet is probably hosted on some flavour of linux, and open source frameworks so it's easy for you to do the same.

Windows is good for games and if you need to use Excel? It also has the best drivers for my printer. Am I being unfair here?

As a ~95% Mac user, the only thing that I keep a Windows partition around for is games. If Apple could just give up that Steve Jobs-era bias against games and make their platform great for gaming, I could get rid of Windows altogether.

Also, game companies share the blame. Even now in 2023, they're still not writing their games portably enough so that the macOS version is a recompile.

> Mac is equally anti-consumer, just differently

I've never seen anything as abhorrent as the stuff this article is reporting on, in macOS. A lot of Apple's hardware policies and anti-consumer, I'll give you that — is there anything in macOS that you're aware of, that's in a similar ballpark?

As I said, I haven't actually used macOS because I can't without significant money investment for unclear reason. But just from the random mentions here and on Reddit over the years I've created a picture that there are issues with that OS too. Like for example there was a gigantic article a few years ago linked here by a windows switcher and pro user, who listed multiple complaints about window handling in the macOS DE. Like happens when use maximize/minimize windows, alt-tab through them, interaction with a taskbar etc. I wouldn't be able to recount all of it, but I got an idea that Win10 was miles ahead in this area (Win11 is trash though).

There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.

I guess vendor lock is the key problem. As long as everything is nailed down without options, any defect or even design choice can be effective anti-consumer. All hardware issues become a whole product issues, because OS and hardware are inseparable.

Some day maybe I'll try it, even just to see what's all the fuss is about, but vendor lock makes is just hard enough that I simply upgrade my Windows box every time.

> multiple complaints about window handling

Gotcha. macOS has its own paradigm and does certain things differently, that's for sure, but I don't think it's anything a reasonably experienced user couldn't get used to. It's added things like full-screen in recent years — not as good as a maximised window, IMO, but there are utilities that can handle that.

> There were articled about upgrade issues, and of course a lot of hardware issues.

I've never run into an upgrade issue, and the fact that they're free is a big bonus. I've had one or two issues with my macbook pro, hardware-wise, but the general quality of the hardware is second-to-none, as far as I'm aware.

> everything is nailed down without options

This is typically why I, and many others, prefer macOS. I actually don't want to be endlessly tinkering with my OS — I quite enjoyed doing that in the early days, but now I just want to get my work done in the most pleasant environment possible. However, I haven't used any recent Windows versions, so I can't really compare.