Did I really just switch from Mac to Windows?

Congrats on the switch! I’ve been there - Windows to Mac and back to Windows. It’s not the life changing, perspective altering, reality warping event the hardcore make it out to be… they’re just computers. Use whatever fits your budget, workflow, and style.

I highly suggest looking into a DIY build if a desktop is in your future. Lots of learning and it feels great to build a custom setup… provided it posts lol. There’s the added bonus of being my own hardware tech. No more “genius” or “nerd brigade” techs to deal with

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surprised nobody here mentions iPadOS and the opportunity Apple is taking to redefine what we think a “desktop” is.

It also sounds like y’all really love your desktops. Ive been on UN*X, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Palm, Linux over the years & iOS is the only operating system that has been fairly seamless. The only hiccup I have is my old HealthKit data is stuck in a 5s but this is my fault - I tried a refurbished 5s & they put a cheap battery in it that ended up bloating & damaging the screen. I never bothered to fix it & whatever path I took didn’t bring my HealthKit data into my iphone 8 and just let it go.

I bought an iPhone & MacBook the same year in 2007. I squeezed every ounce I could out of my MacBook running Linux until discovering an iPadPro is my replacement, not another MacBook! Super pleased my MacBook lasted 13 years. My brother donated his white 2007 MacBook which I triple-boot into 10.11.6, Win10, and Ubuntu. I find macOS Screen Sharing to access a remote mini server to be a really amazing experience as it preserves Command key bindings (even Command-H) and really makes using a remote desktop a breeze & quite transparent!

iOS made me realize I don’t want to be constantly tweaking my system - I just want it to work w/o having to performance tune the system. iOS also made me realize letting Apple handle backups (iCloud Backup) is the right way to go - rebuilding devices has been trivial all these years & Apple has been really good at keeping the backup footprint small by not including system and app binaries. I was happy to get out of the game of rebuilding desktops in general.

I got an iPadPro 5 months ago and it’s been amazing - I can’t see myself going back to the desktop as we know it today as my primary device (yes, my iPad has eclipsed my phone!). Sure, it took some work to remove my dependencies on Chrome and macOS apps that never went mobile - but I got there & the future looks promising with iOS apps running natively on future macs.

So I’m guessing Apple will nab me with one of the Apple Silicon macs in the next 2 years. I’m definitely not in a rush - the iPadPro really reminds me that a computer is supposed to be fun & joy to use - that built-in apps are not a joke (I love Mail.app more than I loved Outlook and, yes, I absolutely loved Outlook back in early 2000!)

If macOS 11 is anywhere near as stable & smooth as iPadOS, it will spin circles around Windows on the new hardware.

That said, I’m really eager to see what Microsoft’s response will be.

ps. really glad I wasn’t alone shocked he thought Win10 settings was a snap! Win10 updates are the biggest nightmares I’ve ever had!

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I’m old fashioned in that regard, I believe clouds are for rain. And maybe, just maybe, to share holiday photos, when you have express consent of every person in the image. The company I work for has spent many person years on setting up and maintaining a secure environment, and THOSE fine people “offer” to leech everything on a single button. It’s not only evil, it’s dangerous and stupid to a near unfathomable degree. At least to a software engineer, it’s obvious that the MBAs who call the shots at MS (and Google, Apple, etc.) love it.

business

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Windows Explorer has a built in preview pane. Single clicking a file shows an instant preview. Can’t remember if it’s active by default. Alt-P turns it on and off.

How To Enable Preview Pane in Windows 10

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I always prefer using a Mac but have managed both Mac and Windows computers for decades for classrooms and checkout. IMO, Windows has been just fine to use since version 7.

I personally don’t like the phone-like layout of the desktop in Windows 8 and 10 and try to minimize that as much as I can without hacking or loading third party software but perhaps people who grew up with mobile devices don’t mind that.

Other than that the user interface and performance works well for what the vast majority of people need to do.

My point was that storing passwords in the cloud doesn’t make MS more evil than the others, because they are actually late to that specific party. It makes them less evil.

As a software engineer I can see many exciting possibilities cloud computing brings, and also how people mess up by putting things into the cloud that shouldn’t be there.

They may have spent many years, but they appear to fail at basic Windows administration:

If your company’s IT considers syncing browser data a security risk, they could easily have disabled that for everyone with a policy (I guess SyncDisabled would do that trick, but maybe you need another policy on top of that).

They could also have prevented people from using Edge before they had thoroughly tested it and put all required policies in place.

I don’t see how anyone can blame Microsoft for providing a standard feature most users expect in a modern browser, especially when that feature can easily be disabled for everyone in the company.

And done right, syncing passwords between devices would actually increase security, because people then are more likely to use strong passwords instead of sharing the same password for everything.

On top of that, Edge would also alert you when one of your passwords shows up in a data breach. Not a bad thing to have, right?

Look, you made me defend Microsoft again. Are you happy now?

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There was a merger. I’ll leave it at that.

is it really? Maybe I’m getting old.

shoving them into a non transparent cloud service is far from what I would consider “done right”.

Would you hand your house keys to a company, that makes it a main point of sale for their service that they will alert you immediately when your house keys are stolen (from them, eventually)?

Not particularly, no :grimacing:

Yeah, and the AppleCare extended warranty works pretty well, too, so I don’t have to worry about hardware failure for the most part (with a few notable exceptions of some apple design failures like certain keyboards). I just had my screen replace for free because of lack of uniformity - slightly uneven brightness. It was subtle, and wasn’t an impingement on web browsing, but it was a problem for fine photo editing. And Apple replaced it no problem even though the warranty had almost expired.

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IRRC Chrome and Firefox had that even before the rise of mobile devices so that people could sync data between work and home. Apple introduced keychain sync in iOS 10 or so.

This makes things more secure, people with two devices resort to weaker passwords, because they can’t just reset their password without being logged out on the other device.

If you‘d rely on the security of the cloud storage for keeping your passwords secure you‘d be well and truly fucked. Nobody does that. Login data is encrypted before it is sent, and only decrypted on the target device.

Not quite, you give them an encrypted version of your keys, it doesn’t matter much if that is stolen.

Typical data breaches include plaintext usernames/emails and password hashes (or even plaintext passwords), exploiting that is often fairly simple.

And of course it is essential that you notice when one of your login is compromised as soon as possible. You can‘t do that manually in an efficient way. That‘s why this is a standard feature for a password manager, and I wouldn’t use one that doesn‘t have this.

I also don’t think that check necessarily happens in the cloud, since it just checks your email addresses with a few web services, so local storage of your login data is sufficient.

All that being said, I wouldn’t recommend Edge as a browser, and I‘d recommend a password manager that works on any OS and browser, and one that supports 2FA, so that you don’t need a separate app for that.

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The problem is the software eventually stops working or I can’t get updates. This isn’t an email-and-web machine. I use engineering packages, electronics netlist simulators, Xcode, and other things that have to be current, and are often cloud based (meaning I can’t just keeping using the old stuff). A lot of is also licensed and requires updating for the license. Keeping a computer frozen in time, yet still functional for real work is pretty much impossible, I think. I have a MAME machine and a media server that I never update and they’re still chugging along after 10 years or so, but my work computer can’t be that way.

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Your laptop company’s been dead for 20 years! Eeeeeeeee! (Let us know as Yitong Middlefi and Yeoh or other maker signs make themselves apparent so we can try and ID good Gateways in the wild.) Also I figure you should pick a VM and run Haiku or something…hm, that may or may not make USI styli work in cool new ways.

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It is funny how perspectives are different. I’m a primary windows user, mostly because of the applications and games that I use and because as a developer I want the same system most of my potential clients use. Also, like someone else pointed out, on the same machine OS X is the slowest of the three desktop systems (tested with a triple boot installation).But I don’t mind using it. I also love Android and Linux where appropriate (still don’t like Linux on the desktop that much). But iOS??? iOS is a pain that infuriates me every time I have to use it. Mainly because it unloads almost any app the second it is not visible.

Yeah, that’s a pain. I stick on El Capitan as it has the last usable version of iTunes. After that iTunes became a pile of crap as far as my usage was concerned. (I know, many will say it was a pile of crap before that!) Later OS X versions are also likely to break some other old stuff I have here, and I do not have anything installed where a newer version has any attractions for me. The applications I have, do what they need to, for me, and that’s that. Staying current for work does pose other challenges, I guess, but not a problem I face any more. A couple or three times I’ve wanted s/w that needed 10.12 or above but in one case it was a ‘nice to have’ only, so I left it, and in the other couple I was able to download back-level versions.

But my 2012 MBPro would run the latest OS X happily I’m sure, so buying an ‘insurance policy’ older piece of hardware that meets your needs and keeping it current with OS X updates might be a longer term solution than you think. I just choose to stay back-level.

In around 2016 I was lucky enough to get offered a fantastic deal on a ‘new’ MBAir from around 2015, (old stock at my partner’s employer) which was also the last one (I think) with proper USB ports (plus Ethernet and Thunderbolt).

So now, both machines are sync’d, on the same OS X and are mirrored to each other regularly. One of them, if not both, will surely keep me going for another 5-10 years. I hope.

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I am really hoping that the next iPadPro becomes the next MacBookPro. Same processors, same inputs, seamless running MacOS and iPad apps. I mean, why not? They cost about the same. Everybody wants a touchscreen Mac (or at least they say they do, they really don’t). But this convergence is the next level of computing. If anything, the next hackintosh is getting your iPad to run MacOS! If Apple can make this happen, they have all my monies. Tomorrow.

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Are they though? How so? I’m perhaps annoyed over the frequency i’ve been needing to do restarts for my personal computer but i’ve never found the process of the update to be a “nightmare”. On my work computer i dont have to worry about restarting for updates as much because IT likes to hold back the updates which i appreciate.

I got my first Mac in 1990, and have been using them pretty much exclusively ever since. There were a couple of jobs where I was forced to use Windows (NT4 at one, Win7 at another), and I simply prefer Apple hardware and OS. Muscle memory, I like the Apple extended keyboard best for typing, and the Magic Trackpad for mouselike stuff. I also like using my iPad for the sofa, and though I have an Android One phone at the moment I am considering getting the iPhone 12, simply because the camera on my current phone is crap. Oh, and because it lacks AirDrop, which I desperately needed last Tuesday in a seminar.

So yeah, my current ecosystem is:

  • 21.5" iMac, mid-2010 model: used for vintage gaming and occasional DVD/CD reading
  • 13" MacBook Pro Retina, 2013 model: my main home device
  • 15" MacBook Pro, late 2019 model: my business computer
  • iPad Air 2: casual browsing, games like the NYT Crossword
  • BONUS RETRO: my 2004 12" PowerBook G4 still is chugging along nicely, and every now and then I will do some Classic Mac gaming on it.

The thing is, even the 2010 computer still feels able to handle modern browsing and stuff, thanks to the SSD facelift it got in 2017. So it may be a while before I get a replacement for it.

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I’ve had two troublesome W10 updates.

The worst was doing an in-place upgrade from Windows 7 - the first set of drivers for the integrated video architecture (which I only used on the occasion of a discrete graphics card overheating) on my logic board would bluescreen within 30 seconds of booting, which required a bit of frantic clicking about to fix.

The other was some interim update which took all my desktop icons which were pointing to stuff on the E drive and made a copy of them pointing to the same location on the C drive - which in most cases didn’t exist. Weird.

Also I’ve managed to force it to do its updates at times of my choosing, rather than its, though I can’t really remember what incantation achieved that.

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Botched updates are a crapshoot. I’ve had previous computers where things went horribly wrong, but the last time that happened it was because the HDD was actually giving out. For the most part my updates have been painless, i have also set mine to happen when i want but that doesn’t stop Windows from popping up notifications reminding me there’s an update which drives me bonkers.

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Yes! And Turbosynth!

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Interesting perspective. That idea worries me a little, actually. This is what Microsoft tried to do Windows 8 and Metro. It was a nightmare, to be honest. Every so often you’d click the wrong place and up in this alternate universe UI where nothing made sense any more because it was supposed to be a tablet. Apps would mix and match, but some didn’t understand mice and some didn’t understand typing, and basic things like input focus were a mess because of the two completely different UI paradigms.

Apple may be able to pull that off, but it makes me nervous. What makes iPads and MacBooks great is that both stay focused on what is best for their job. Neither tries to do everything or be everything.