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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307As 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.
The most hilariously ironic thing about this is Office for Mac is trash and has been always.
Office for Mac 2008, when they shifted to a new codebase, was pretty good for a while, just slooooow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!
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.
Is it a side effect of spiking ram prices and trying to meet their momentary price point?
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.
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.
programs that have no good Linux equivalent
There is WINE.
But it's not bad enough yet to have a New Coke type consumer rejection.
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.
Sometimes I forget there are people who love Windows and genuinely believe it's the best operating system.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
I will recommend Linux.
What's wrong with Windows?
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.
It’s funded by enterprises, OEMs (Dell, HP, etc) and advertisers. End users are way down Microsoft’s list of priorities.
Everything
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.
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.