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I will leave this comment here by an ex Windows desktop experience team developer which says that designers have lots of control but don't even use Windows, they use Macs.

     > It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows 

      This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

      I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

     Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.

As a Mac user, ironically, it seems like the Mac design team only uses iPhones or worse, not Macs themselves. I think we are at a stage where the “design rules the world” dominate rather than the full product experience. And there seems to be zero vision left in these products as well.

> As a Mac user, ironically, it seems like the Mac design team only uses iPhones or worse, not Macs themselves.

It seems certain that they use iPhones for everything. They can’t even subject themselves to using an iPad. They just copy things from iOS straight into iPadOS and macOS and let others (end users) deal with the fallout. Craig Federighi doesn’t seem to pay any attention to software anymore.

Same how sex sells for humans, design and looks sell the same way for objects, from phones, to PCs, cars, washing machines, etc.

Consumers don't understand tech specs, so if you show them something that triggers their lizard brains because it genuinely looks really good, appealing, futuristic, trustworthy, etc, then they'll buy it for that.

The issue is that most designers are snake oil salesmen, so from the perspective of management and C-suite who approves designs, you can't objectively verify the claims and buzzwords of the design team. See the pepsi logo redesign fuckup.

The most hilariously ironic thing about this is Office for Mac is trash and has been always.

The weird thing is the way it’s trash. It breaks weird things no dev should ever have to touch. At one point Excel left horizontal lines on screen, when scrolling. Bullets and numbering just straight up refuses to restart numbering. It _worked_ why did you break it? Who gained what out of you breaking it?

> It _worked_ why did you break it? Who gained what out of you breaking it?

This applies to so much of modern software it's not even funny.

Because the one thing about bugs that is universally true is that developers intentionally create them?

where I work, we're not allowed to merge them. we test every change, and we review everything to make sure there are no regressions in all the obvious features. scrolling through our webpage will never break in production, because we use people with a full set of eyes to check before merge.

Office for Mac 2008, when they shifted to a new codebase, was pretty good for a while, just slooooow.

I used to manage NT-based infra back in the day, have been on a mac for 15 years now because of stuff like this. A few years ago I bought a Windows box for my daughter. Out of the box the clock was wrong and it would just hang on auto-update. No message, no logs anywhere, just hangs. A few years later the son comes of age and gets his own box. And it’s the same story, no automatic adjustment of the clock. I’m running a bog standard unifi network leading to fiber, nothing complicated, everything else works including all the windows laptops of my wife. But a basic standards-based library-supported Windows function.

Windows uses NTP by default with sane settings -- and it logs by default. So whatever issue you're experiencing is not a Microsoft problem, but a *you problem*. And the fact you state that there are no logs, which is false, kinda proves it.

A lot of comments saying that Windows is indestructable because it has no competition for a portion of the market due to:

- MacOS is too expensive

- Linux requires configuration and expertise

I'm not doubting those too, but like the article points out I would question if they're guaranteed to be true even in the short term. Chromebooks, Steamdecks and Android have all shown making a commercial requirement out of Linux is do-able, and the $600 Macbook Neo is due out any day.

I'm not predicting the death of Windows or anything, but I do think Microsoft's thrown is a lot less stable than they seem to realise.

Both Windows and Mac OS are going through a rough patch. I think these mature OSs have most things that users want, and since incremental polishes don't give people promotions, executives go for major changes that almost always degrade the product.

One way I phrased it to a friend was: "if you try to make a radical improvement to a spoon, chances are you'll make it worse".

I think there's plenty to do in both products, but they are not sexy things that drive upgrade conversations.

I am delaying it because iOS development is currently making me money but once that stops, I am so looking forward to moving back to Linux. Neither Windows or macOS are going in a good direction. The difference is only in the degree and speed of ensh*ttification. Ironically the only thing I might miss is the often criticized Xcode.

The main issue is games. Drivers and overall performance under Linux for win games run under Wine is pretty low. The good stuff they became runnable but framerate of 12 fps is nothing for my razor laptop with rtx in Cossacs 3.

Now my setup is MacBook for work, and special game laptop Razer Blade especially for games with win11 removed defender/firewall and tons on useless stuff. Personally for me win7 will be enough but I just cannot install it on my laptop due to lack to drivers.

I thought proton has largely solved this

yes, but it’s very hit and miss depending on your software, hardware and the humidity in the air.

After recent update fiascos I decided to install PopOS on a gaming rig that ran Windows 11 (as a pre-made set).

As they say, you can't see the light in the darkness and the difference between two is like between night and day.

Stable performance, consistent Remote Play to Steam Deck, quick bootup and no "hey want to play, that's a shame cause I got 20 minutes of patches to install".

Sure it's still a Linux with all consequences (had to switch from Wayland to Xorg for remote play and being returning user after couple years it wasn't straightforward) but it works much better.

I won't ever install Windows on my family computers. If I can afford to equip them with Macs I'll do so. If not - they'll get Linux instead.

"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

You have a point. They're not similar. OTOH, people do compare them. I think Apple realizes this and the Macbook Neo is a brilliant move.

It doesn't cost $1000 to get into the MacBook experience anymore, so drastically more people will be buying them for their kids and more families will have MacOS as their default.

It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't castrated with 8 GB, even my netbook from 2009 got upgraded to 16 GB during its lifetime, which ended in 2024.

A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!

But 8 GB on a Mac is way different (in a positive way) from 16 GB on a different OS. On Windows 11, I can’t even imagine anything lower than 32 GB being a decent experience.

And they needed it.

An 8gb macbook air is sufficient for browsing, writing, and viewing. These machines are aimed at low end users / high school / cheap college machines.

Outside US those demographics will be buying cheaper PC laptops under 500 euro, with higher RAM.

Open a couple of Electron crap apps, and the 8 GB are gone.

Is it a side effect of spiking ram prices and trying to meet their momentary price point?

the A18 has a hard limit of 8GB of addressable memory, iirc

It is a hard limit of using a phone SOC, it has what it has.

In the long run, I think we'll see more iPad-only families. The home computer is practically non-existent outside gaming niches or work-issued machines. We've had $700-800 Macbook Air models on sale for years now, same for the Mac Mini - little has changed. As cutesy as the shared computer ideal is, I see most people gravitating towards their phones and away from general purpose computing.

One reason I stopped buying a new iPad was because the hardware is great but the software prevents multiple users. Not all families can afford or would like to have one phone per person as well as one tablet per person. IMO, Apple is losing money by crippling the iPad.

The problem is work is done mostly on computers though. Will it evolve to be all on tablets? It's possible, but will make workers slower

I thought the tablet space is pretty much dead? I don't see many on the shelves at the local hardware store (which I walk by mostly of curiosity). It seems all laptops, with a sizeable share of foldable - and even these are way more present than tablets. So no, I think the tablet train has long left (exception being the standing workers in some areas).

I hate trying to teach my children how to use Windows these days. When I was young, it took some effort to get programs up and running, but once you cleared that hurdle, the computer worked the same, consistently, every single time you turned it on.

Now, most of the time they log in there's a new update to install; or a fresh and distracting dark pattern popup; or a service they need to re-enter credentials for; or, occasionally, a game I've previously installed for them either missing or no longer working properly. It's maddening and confusing even for experienced users.

Perhaps I do need to drop Windows. I'm not a huge fan of the obfuscaon and walled gardens on Macs, and Chromebooks and iPads are more geared towards consumption than creation.

My work keeps me on Windows (programs that have no good Linux equivalent, and a corporate environment that won't accept it for desktop users), but I'm seriously considering dual booting for my children's sake. It's a testament to how far Windows has fallen.

> I'm seriously considering dual booting

Dual booting is only really for Windows programs that don't run well enough in WINE or a VM, which historically was primarily games before Steam made that a lot less relevant.

Dual booting is pretty easy these days. The linux distribution installers help to resize partitions etc. The main inconvenience is accessing stuff off linux from windows. I used dropbox to do the sync in the past. Now I'm mainly on kubuntu and rarely use an old windows machine for some tasks.

programs that have no good Linux equivalent

There is WINE.

All fine and good, yet even me that used to have M$ on the email signature, and signed to Linux Journal during its whole print lifetime, starting around when it was still on early issues, now runs Windows/WSL.

I am not paying for Apple margin's, their lack of options in customising hardware, nor I want to spend evenings reconfiguring BSD/Linux installions.

If there is a good PC (laptop) at a consumer store pre-installed with GNU/Linux, 100% supported hardware, I will consider it, buying online isn't my thing.

Thus my house is full of Android and WebOS powered devices and none GNU/Linux one.

Can anyone please tell me how can i get my win11 to update to version 25H2?

It has been months I am stuck at "Update and shut-down" but it never updates. Nothing works :((((((((((((

But it's not bad enough yet to have a New Coke type consumer rejection.

These boycotts dont't work anymore, there are way too many people that have no clue nowadays. The last time it worked was Windows 8 nearly 14 years ago.

The thing is, New Coke was at least an attempt (if failed attempt) to improve Coke for consumers.

I don’t get the impression Microsoft has any desire to improve Windows for the consumer — they’re trying to improve it for Microsoft.

While the demise of Windows is overblown, it has definitely started. With gaming on Linux slowly hitting mainstream - not as a serious solution yet but not a completely deranged idea either - I assume within a few years we'll see the first wave of casual gamers on Linux, and then after that those gamers will start recommending Linux to their families. It's really unfortunate that the second iteration of Steam Machines was to be released exactly during chip shortage, because looking at Steam Deck, the software side of things seems to be good enough.

Well on the plus side at least we’ll see how this story ends. Seems MS is going all in with win 12 on subscription and AI everything

Sometimes I forget there are people who love Windows and genuinely believe it's the best operating system.

The irony here is that Windows used to be a good shell on a truly terrible kernel around Windows 3.1/Windows 95. Now, it is a bad shell and UX on an actually really good kernel.

Obviously there are people who do genuinely prefer it having experience with a variety of platforms, but the ones who seem the most convinced of how superior Windows is always do seem to be the ones who’ve never actually spent time with anything else.

I’ll grant that a cheap Windows laptop was the right call up until recently if price—not ease of use and maintenance—was the overwhelmingly dominant factor and a laptop was absolutely necessary. But the answer for a cheap device for a non-technical person with aspecific needs (email, browsing, media consumption) has been an iPad for a long time at this point.

Once upon a time you could live in a world of Windows apps designed like Notepad++. Launchy or other apps gave you the spotlight style of opening apps fast from the keyboard, and the start menu was for edge cases... and life in windows was good!

Now... I'm glad I got a Mac.

I did --- closer to the turn of the century.

Asking most people to choose between Windows and MacOS is like asking if they prefer eating dirt or worms.

I grew up recommending windows to everybody I knew for most of my early life. I’ve had my boomer dad on Linux mint for almost a decade. Any time I am asked for a recommendation I cannot say to buy a Mac fast enough. Yes they are overpriced but the build quality to me is worth it. The windows 11 start menu is user hostile, I seriously can’t believe people use that day to day. I’m old enough to remember when they called it Micro$oft -unfortunately Microslop is going to stick (the author is right about the two settings apps). When was the last time you think an exec at MSFT played an Xbox or described using teams as “pleasant”?

“Adobe and Office run better on Mac, change my mind”

I use office on Mac and Windows. It works fine on Mac, but not better than Windows. OneNote, for instance, has serious delays and glitches when syncing notebooks changed on other machines or web. I lost work multiple times before stopping using it altogether on the Mac.

Apple doesn’t have a cloud business, and yet their OS hasn’t been a success story either recently.

No but Apple has been putting their weight behind services. Some of these services are platform agnostic but they do work best on a Mac. Their success story is the efficiency of the closed ecosystem, something that Android and Windows are converging to.

Apple's hardware is their killer business.

Not really anymore, their silicon is impressive but most users I would guess don't use it in any meaningful sense. If hardware is your main goal as a customer, you're building a machine with better hardware.

Wonderful writing. As someone who is in exactly the same boat (as I assume a lot of us here are), being called on for family tech support for around 30 years now, I too am starting to reconsider recommending windows.

My son is getting to the age where is taking an interest in computers(not just games) so I think I will be starting him off on a linux box.

Seconded. My 9 year old son has in his life worked with Android and Debian at home, and iPad at school. There is 1 game I could not get to run under wine (beltmatic), but apart from that everything works. I was a bit scared about his school stuff (from Die Keure) but it just does its thing. He recently installed Planet crafter, a game I had never heard of or checked out, and it was a non event. Lego, basic programming, ...

He went to a friend, doing networked minecraft on friends windows laptop. Son then took our laptop as he did not like Windows, and I think he accidentally convinced that whole family to migrate to KDE on Debian, just by showing them how reliably boring it is. I was smiling at that one, to be honest.

I get that it says something we like to hear, but it's a content-free post that's almost certainly LLM-generated to get clicks. Serious content mill vibes - here's their latest blog article:

https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/03/09/a-cluster-of-volcanic...

Different byline, but somehow essentially the same as this story that appeared several days ago elsewhere on the internet:

https://newatlas.com/architecture/volcano-in-hotel-of-arriva...

I'm fairly sure this was human written.

Probably a bit of both.

The overuse of "genuine" and "genuinely" in some sections screams LLM text to me.

> Different byline, but somehow essentially the same as this story...

Have you considered the possibility that more than one website picked up the volcanic cabins story because it's interesting?

Both articles mention the source: https://plat.asia which is clearly a genuine architecture site.

If you hosted a blog with architecture category, you might also write a post about the volcanic cabins. If the source allows publishing those high-res photos, why wouldn't you?

Satya Nadal will go down in history as the guy that killed Microsoft. The insane push to AI and copilot jammed in every app plus ads has done exactly what the OP states…

I will recommend that $599 MacBook every time now and power users invest in a MacBook Pro.

I was a loyal Windows user and now my own Surface Laptop 5 sits dark while I work on a Mac-Mini that was meant to be a side app dev machine.

I will recommend Linux.

Read the article. Satya brought the share price from $35 to $400, that wont kill Microsoft.

I guess what you’re trying to say is that it will kill Windows. But that wont happen since enormous percentage of businesses run Windows ecosystem.

Lets face it, Windows is in maintenance mode, pointless for MS to invest heavily in it since there is no threat for businesses switching to Linux or something else. MS devs primary maintenance job these days should just be scrabling MS Office API every 6 months or so to break Wine and other Linux non-emulators. Wine devs in constand rearrange deck chairs mode, while Win32+Office devs just add a new parameter to an API interface in their 6 month cyclic undocumented API breaking scheme.

You need a better Office than MS Office to break the cycle, and this will be a Web based office / collaboration tool. And guess where MS Azure and Web services fit in this brand new world.

Microsoft dominance aint going away in our lifetimes. Only non US government pressure may force other countries to switch to a flavour of Linux due to US sanctions. Only then can you see a visible migration from Windows. This is a decades long process.

He is definitely killing Windows though. Lack of quality of foundational products do not affect share prices until several years are gone. You will only see an effect in 2029-30, users slowly migrate away and license contracts are slowly dropped. I guess blame will fall on the next CEO and Nadella will be lionized as most successful CEO of Microsoft.

Satya Nadella doesn’t care in the slightest. Windows is of no interest to him.

And the Microsoft management layer has no clue at all.

So that’s the end of it.

What's wrong with Windows?

It’s funded by enterprises, OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) and advertisers. End users are way down Microsoft’s list of priorities.

Nothing is inherently “wrong” with Windows. When practiced with informed consent, technical knowledge, and safety awareness, it is considered by many communities to be a legitimate form of intimate expression between a company and its employees.

Everything

[dead]

At this point, Windows just needs to die

Please don't post low-substance comments to HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And what is there to replace it? macOS Tahoe?

People keep acting like normal people can't use Linux, but that hasn't been true in more than ten years. Just have them start with something like Debian or Mint rather than something like Arch or Gentoo.

Hopefully Tim’s exit soon will bring some fresh perspective at Apple where designers and engineers are given a driving seat and not the shareholders.

Apple can do a 180 here and completely take over windows market share. They just need to stop making useless changes and stop with planned obsolescence when people literally are looking to switch.

Could be Cook leaving, or could be even sooner:

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/03/apple-alan-dye-joining-...

OpenSUSE works great for me. Lots of other people swear by Mint, Fedora, etc.

Fedora Atomics

I recently understood why so many people are anti-AI and think AI is a scam.

It's because they are Windows users and being shoved piss poor Copilot implementations down their throats by Microsoft.

I have no doubt that Microsoft is using the cheapest(worst) cloud model possible for free Copilot users or they're running a tiny local model on the NPU when available.

These people aren't running Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4. No wonder they're so anti-AI and can't see the why there is AI hype.

People aren't anti-AI because of model performance. They're anti-AI because LLMs are being shoved into absolutely everything.

So yes, this is also about Copilot, but not in the way you think it is.

I live in the Mac world. LLMs aren't shoved into absolutely everything. I do not have experience with Windows.

There's multiple reasons. An older family member told me she dislikes AI because she's worried it will give her wrong information or make stuff up.

The hallucination issue put a big dent in AI's reputation for non-technical older people who do not take kindly to being lied to by a machine.