Consumers do care about things like battery life. I imagine most consumers would prefer to stick with what they know (windows), but as the battery life/performance gap grows, people will be more likely to make the switch.

I agree about the CPU architecture, people don't give a shit.

However, I think MS/Intel will start losing also corporate space. With the staffing problems, companies are looking for ways to score cheap points, and I'm starting to see "free choice of a laptop, including MacBook" as one of the benefits even in some big corps.

Thankfully we don't need to trust in meaningless anecdotes about what those in the 'real world' do or don't know.

The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users.

So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for.

And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.

I’m working for a big bank. They now offer Mac workstations to be able to hire the best devs.

I would have never expected a Unix workstation in such a corporate setup when I started 15 years ago.

I agree that the world basically runs on excel, but given that, the world cares about excel’s performance. Especially as spreadsheets are only getting bigger.

And then there’s this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-ma...

My cut n' paste pet peeve example of why macOS seems like a "toy" and not for serious business use:

The file save dialog box has this unbelievable limit of 38 viewable characters! I regularly have to deal with 50+ character naming conventions where the first 38 characters are the same among many files. It is a huge hassle of cursor navigation that is so unnecessary as I am looking at all this unused real estate in the dialog box.

> If we could deploy Apple products in a business environment we would in a heartbeat.

I'm not gonna pretend to know about how IT works in business, but most employees at big tech companies do all their work on Macs, so it's certainly possible in some cases.

Is Active Directory still LDAP compliant? Embraced and extended or compliant?

Open-LDAP should be able to get you most of the way there. Stuff like CIFS allows for mountable shares, and roaming profiles is easily handled by LDAP login and a mounted /home

Oh wait, then you could use actual FOSS systems, Sorry I forgot that this was about Apple.. Ok so they can license AD, giving M$!a bone in the process

I have worked on big companies that do pretty much all of this on Mac. I agree that it might be harder to do than on Windows, because there is so much industry know-how on the MS side. But there is no real technical barrier for this to happen.

Provide a service similar to Active Directory? Absolutely, that's what is needed from Apple, Red Hat, Canonical, etc.

Depend in any way on a Google Account for anything critical? That's something I oppose with all my will.

Virtualizing macOS for enterprise is a good point. I wonder IBM/Apple want to do this.

I just had to hack/patch windows 11 in order to bring back "never combine taskbar windows" functionality which existed in windows 10. I am strongly considering switching over at this point. Removal of "never combine" is such a productivity kill that it baffles me how this thing rolled out at all. Who took over the wheel over at Microsoft and who left, that made this major breaking change take place?

And yet, I and many of my friends will keep using Windows because the third-party Windows screen readers are better than macOS's VoiceOver in many ways. I have no doubt that other users have their own favorite (edit: or essential) third-party tools that keep them on Windows.

It's a false dichotomy. You could say the same about either company. Those are the inevitable consequences of proprietary software and vendor lock-in

(my original comment was some rhetorical question, I edited it to be more direct and less passive-agressive)

Not to mention, up until a few years ago, most PCs did not come with TPMs, so they can't run Windows 11. And Windows 10 won't get security patches after 2025.

I built my computer in 2017, and it's still very capable of running modern games, and in three years it will still be perfectly fine. But I won't be able to run Windows 11 unless I do weird hacks and workarounds, or try to source a TPM that works with my motherboard.