I find it hard to believe that, outside of work computers, many people would be choosing Windows over Mac or Linux, especially is AI is their goal.
I’m also curious why the comments are turned off for this article unless it is a paid ad for Microsoft.
Apple hardware is overpriced and they go out of their way to make it unrepairable.
This is the reason I will never buy an apple device and go out of my way to (try and) convince people in my circle not to buy apple devices.
You are confusing ‘costs a lot of money’ with overpriced.
Yes, Apple hardware costs a lot of money, but you do get what you pay for.
My current MacBook Pro (M1 Max, 64GB RAM) is simply the best machine I’ve ever used. It’s a no-compromise laptop. It’s fast, chews through everything I throw at it (which is a lot, I use it as a development machine). It never slow down, it never gets hot, I haven’t heard the fan run ever (not sure if it is just that silent or it simply never needs to turn on). The screen is amazing. The trackpad is amazing. The sound is amazing. The build quality is rock solid. The battery life is insane. I plug in a single thunderbolt cable and it charges my machine, connects to gbit ethernet, my audio system and drives 2 high-res monitors (5k2k and 4k).
Every time PC people claim they can get a ‘better computer’ for less it’s always some compromise. “This one has a much faster GPU and is cheaper”, sure, it also weights 8 kilos and runs for 20 minute on a full charge, is made of cheap plastic, has a screen with terrible viewing angles a crappy trackpad and sounds like a fighter jet with full afterburners on every time you put a little load on the system.
This story is exclusively for subscribers of Notepad, our newsletter uncovering Microsoft’s era-defining bets in AI, gaming, and computing.
It’s worse than a paid ad. It’s an ad. You have to pay to see.
By Betteridge’s law of headlines: no. Also: this is an ad.
If you look at the price for a Mac versus a Windows computer, I think it’s pretty obvious why people might choose a Windows device. For Linux, you really have to know where to look to buy a laptop that is shipped or warrantied with Linux. People tend to buy Windows computers because that’s what’s advertised available, familiar and in their price bracket.
Disclaimer: my main laptop is Mac. I have a secondary one running Linux and although I have a work laptop running Windows, that wasn’t my choice and I don’t have Windows on any personal devices.
I will never use a Windows laptop because it wakes up in the middle of the night to apply some stupid update, then glitches out, and can’t go back to sleep. So every morning I find a laptop with a dead battery. Sometimes if I wake up early, it’ll still be hot from whatever it was doing.
Fixing that stupid bug should have been easier than porting the whole OS and app stack and emulator to a new CPU arch. And I have no faith they fixed the bug anyway, so it’ll probably still happen to ARM models. So no thank you.
SSDs boot fast enough that I just hard shut down windows at night whenever I have to boot into it – usually for games, since all my non-vr games run on Linux but I have a Quest 2, and Linux support for those is Incredibly sketchy.
It can’t wake from sleep/hibernation if it’s fully powered off and there’s no windows code running to wake it.
Yep, I find booting from off is as fast (and maybe faster) than coming out of hibernation these days. It’s definitely more fluid.
My SMB IT friends disable hibernation when they deploy laptops. Users don’t reboot enough as it is, hibernation can be problematic, and wastes hard drive space (at least 16 gig, because they don’t spec any less)
Disable auto updates.
Damn auto updates being on by default is a terrible design choice.
It’s actually astounding, how weirdly unmaintained Windows is in many areas. Just look at the settings chaos. There are three completely different settings trees, and at least for me, it’s impossible to know which one to choose for a given task.
There’s constantly stuff going on in the background for no reason and updates take forever and require 7 reboots. That’s not okay.
ShutUp10 helps a bit. It puts a ton of settings in one place for you.
I have felt this pain. You can fix it by putting it into hibernation instead of sleep. Still only one of many annoyances from Windows.
For anyone wondering what the issues with sleep in windows are, the problem is that instead of using traditional S3 sleep (suspend to RAM) Microsoft has been pushing hard for “Modern Standby” where insted of only the RAM being powered the whole system is powered on and kept in a low power mode.
In theory this can provide a shorted wake time (because apparently the approx 5 seconds provided by S3 sleep isn’t good enough). The problem is that Windows will sometimes wake up to do maintenance and drain your battery.
You might be able to fix it by disabling Modern Standby (also called S0ix, Connected Standby and S2Idle)in your BIOS. Unfortunetly a lot of modern BIOSes no longer offer the option to disable it and even sometimes lack support for traditional S3 sleep.
For those who unfortunately have to use Windows laptops for work, there is a workaround. Unplug the laptop before putting it to sleep/hibernate. That’s it. Super irritating they won’t fix it, but not surprising, too busy trying to shove (more) ads into the start menu.
There was a video on LTT about this. From what I remember the conclusion was that if you shut down the laptop while connected to power, it remembers the fact and wakes up in the middle of the night to apply updates and shut down again, assuming the power cable will remain connected so there wouldn’t be an impact on the battery. But of course, most people (I think) disconnect the power cable once the laptop is shut down. Windows still wakes up, sees the power cable disconnected, and goes ‘oh well’ and proceeds to update anyway.
It’s also that “Shutdown” doesn’t shut the computer down. It puts it into a sleep mode so it will “boot” faster next time
The hibernation mode has more wake up sources than if it was actually off
Is that actually a windows thing though? I know i can set up that shit in the mobo’s bios, from turning on the computer at specific times to keeping the peripherals on when shutdown.
It depends on the wake up source you’re talking about, but, yes
Your BIOS can configure the hardware, then Windows gets to modify parts of the configuration through ACPI
Windows beats Mac on price.
Windows beats Linux on compatability.Really all there is to it.
If you want to spend 3x the money, get a Mac.
If you’re comfortable dealing with software incompatibility, install Linux.
Unless your laptop isn’t brand new, at which point Linux absolutely beats Windows on compatibility.
Or, you know, want to visit a website:
https://www.linux.org/threads/solved-some-websites-not-loading-in-linux.39289/
… Thats someone having a problem with being given an incorrect certificate for a website because their ISP was blocking the website they were trying to access. Even though its on a linux support forum its neither a linux nor firefox issue.
Worked under Windows, not an ISP problem.
These are the sorts of things you have to accept as a Linux user and figure out workarounds.
It happens all the time with job search sites and government sites. Happens to Safari users on Mac as well.
My MacBook Air is 9 years old and still running strong. I’ve more than gotten my moneys worth out of it.
I find it hard to believe that, outside of work computers, many people would be choosing Windows over Mac or Linux, especially is AI is their goal.
I’m sorry, why? Microsoft basically owns OpenAI and has begun integrating it into their products. Apple doesn’t have any AI capabilities beyond Siri.
I have a 3 year old MacBook that runs my local LLM and Image Generator. I read this article from the perspective that the new PC chips would be for people who want to run their AI locally, but I suppose you’re right, Microsoft is going to push their Copilot as hard as possible.
I find it really frustrating to not have a touchscreen on a laptop (e.g. scrolling and zooming Google maps).
I don’t understand what I’m getting for the price difference compared to a similar windows laptop.
I don’t like how the Ctrl/Fn/Alt/Cmd keys are used, but that’s just because I’m used to Windows. (Remapping then doesn’t help because commands are divided differently been those modifiers).
I do like that it has a native bash shell instead of having WSL with its separate filesystem. But I doubt that that is a common reason people choose macs.
For me, my cad software was always windows specific. I think they have Linux versions now though.
Gaming is the other reason.
Gaming is no longer a reason, really. 99% of the time it works out of the box.
I think (although I’ve never tried to verify) Steam is making progress to make most games playable on Linux.
At his point for me it’s only CAD and Lightroom that keeps a Windows install in my machine
All the games I like run fine on Linux nowadays
F’ing Lightroom, man.
I haven’t used Lightroom or this, but there’s apparently an open-source software package named Darktable that’s similar.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft isn’t launching a new version of Windows next week, but what it’s about to unveil could be just as significant.
After nearly four years of falling behind Apple’s MacBooks, sources inside Microsoft tell me that the company is confident it can finally beat Apple’s own chips that power the MacBook Air.
On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will detail the company’s “AI vision across hardware and software” at an event hosted at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
It’s a pivotal moment for Microsoft and Windows because it won’t involve the typical chip partnership with Intel that we’ve seen for decades.
Instead, Microsoft will set the stage for a summer of Arm-powered laptops thanks to a close collaboration with Qualcomm.
I’m told Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will begin a new era for Windows laptops…
The original article contains 141 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 0%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No.