> 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.
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.
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.
Consumer buy laptops and smartphones, not operating systems. As long as there is no competing consumer product, Microsoft is not losing any meaningful share anytime soon. imo smartglasses might be more of a real threat to windows than copilot.
Here in the Netherlands, Macbook Neo is €700. That is by no measure a cheap laptop. Also at this price range there is plenty of competition from companies like Asus.
Recently I built a gaming PC, and I ended up installing Windows. Disabling windows AI features is significantly easier than dealing with small but frequent annoyance of linux distros.
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.
Many ISPs (e.g. AT&T Fiber) block UDP traffic with source port 123 to mitigate NTP amplification attacks.
Most people won't notice that problem since low-end consumer routers tend to mangle the source port when they perform outbound NAT. The ISP-provided router will generally do this itself until you enable "DMZ+" or "IP Passthrough" or some similarly-named mode, as home networking experts will typically do so they can manage NAT and firewalling on their own devices.
If a Windows laptop can sync and the wired Windows desktops can't, your wi-fi AP might be doing the necessary source port mangling.
If you add a NAT rule to your router to change the source port for NTP traffic, you should get time sync working.
1. The time, and critically date, is wrong (not syncing with the NTP servers, potentially due to ISP filtering, as the sibling comment implies)...
2. Which is causing SSL errors because the wrong date causes the expiry date on the SSL certificates to appear nonsensical...
3. Which causes connection failures to pretty much any HTTPS endpoint...
3. Which is preventing updates because no sane OS would download updates over an insecure connection.
- 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.
Android is for phones, and tablets.
Steamdecks only matters thanks to Windows games, developed on Windows, with developers using Visual Studio.
A lot of people herald Windows XP as the best Windows, but I question if they ever used Windows 2000.
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.
Now... I'm glad I got a Mac.
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.
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.
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.
Pardon?
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.
A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!
I don’t get the impression Microsoft has any desire to improve Windows for the consumer — they’re trying to improve it for Microsoft.
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.
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.
And sharing between the operating systems is also not difficult, you just keep your files on a NAS :-)
There is WINE.
I have been using and supporting Windows users for 25+ years. Not a single time that has happened by itself.
That said, Microsoft's trade offs re quality of their software are rather different and their solution is even weirder: high-quality user-facing software is not in competition with their b2b sales, so ok, no reason to spend too many resources on it, but absolutely no evident reason to make it noticeably worse either.
As a result, Microsoft's approach of regressive evolution probably lets Apple get away with almost not caring or even going the path of slower regressive evolution.
“Adobe and Office run better on Mac, change my mind”
And the Microsoft management layer has no clue at all.
So that’s the end of it.
It has been months I am stuck at "Update and shut-down" but it never updates. Nothing works :((((((((((((
If your hardware isn't officially supported by Windows 11, create a USB stick from the ISO using Rufus[2] and run setup from there.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
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 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 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.
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...
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?
The overuse of "genuine" and "genuinely" in some sections screams LLM text to me.
Ui sucks, it is not reliable (on my corporate laptop I lost sound suddently in the middle of our daily today and had to reboot it to get it back, the fotos app on the cloud desktop I use randomly stopped loading images last week when double-clicked from explorer, saying the file doesn't exist while paint could still open them), it is sluggish as hell...I don't see anything for it really.
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.
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.
So yes, this is also about Copilot, but not in the way you think it is.
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.