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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft lacked taste and the ability to execute. With the Surface Book, they absolutely nailed taste. But they still have no ability to execute (the SB suffered at launch from firmware glitches that took months to iron out: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/new-firmware-finally-...).

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First, I want to state that I have a ton of respect for what Microsoft is doing. This is the Microsoft I've been waiting to see for over a decade.

That said, here's the truth. Just a week ago I tried out a Surface Book, and within the first few minutes I could immediately tell it was not as polished as a MacBook Pro.

The first thing that stood out is that the screen suffered from a considerable amount of ghosting. It looked great as long as I wasn't actually doing anything. Dragging a window around or even just moving the cursor though revealed clear visual defects.

I also immediately noticed that the trackpad, while high quality physically, struggled with gestures involving multiple fingers. Maybe this is configurable through software, but I just didn't find the trackpad's recognition of gestures to be nearly as good as that of a MacBook Pro.

On the same topic of gestures, doing a four-finger horizontal swipe in Windows 10 to switch between virtual desktops resulted in a very visually jarring animation. The experience just isn't polished like it is in macOS. This surprised me because I use Windows 10 extensively on my home desktop and generally find it very polished, but that's all using a normal mouse, not a trackpad with gestures.

Next I noticed that the laptop's screen was physically wobbling. I suspect this is because the screen is so much heavier than normal due to its unique detachable design. But I found this quite annoying. It was apparent that even just typing on the laptop with it on my actual lap would lead to screen wobble.

All this popped up within minutes before I even tried out any of the laptop's unique features. The version I was looking at had a price tag of $2800. At this price range, I think Microsoft still has work to do. None of this is to say it's a bad product. I was just expecting a bit more from something with such a premium price.

Ask them about their enterprise licensing and see if you still have the same opinion.

When Cortana was launched on Windows, I went to a Microsoft Store to try it out. I found a Surface and tapped the Cortana button, and it opened a "Microphone Calibration Setup Wizard" that looks like it was from Windows XP.

So yeah, taste is one thing, but execution is a different ball game.

Windows 10 still has two different control panels. Last year, a Microsoft PM tweeted he hadn't had to use the old control panel "in months": https://twitter.com/brandonleblanc/status/650519136196366338.... Microsoft had been shipping two control panels for three years at that point. People would be apoplectic if Apple did something like that.

This is kind of what I like about Windows 10; it can be a dumbed-down experience for people that don't care, but if you want, there are gradually escalating levels of configurability. Settings -> Control Panel -> fuck it, I'll edit the registry directly.

I would definitely not want to maintain this codebase, but as an end user, I'm happy.

macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

Windows used to have something like that too, I think it was called the Control Panel.

And per user vs. system overrides.

No, it doesn't. Preferences, but also 'defaults write ...', or just edit a plist...

Technically correct but very few people care about "defaults write". I can't remember the last time I used it, but I do use RegEdit often enough.

One place I've found it useful is for scripting the setup of a fresh machine, something like this:

https://blog.vandenbrand.org/2016/01/04/how-to-automate-your...

I agree it's likely very few people use it. It can be exactly the right tool for the job in some circumstances.

Yeah, that's a good reason to use it, and it makes sense that the tool is there. But there's a big difference between having a CLI tool for digging around when you need it, and having two separate GUI control panels with some settings in one, some in the other, and other settings in both.

Which is a thing of beauty compared to windows and linux. Fine grained control, yet all per-user file based and thus can easily be reset to factory.

> macOS has something better: all the settings in one place.

All twelve of them.

I know that's snark, but I just went and counted them anyway. There's at least 413 individual different settings in macOS Sierra's System Preferences, excluding Flash Player.

Any thoughts about Cisco?

We're literally trying to be the taste and execution. I work for Cisco. Curious about candid thoughts.

Of routers?

I'm seriously asking. Cisco either lives on the top of rack that like 10 people in a datacenter see, much less only touch once; or it lives as a home router, that most people want to hide but still need good wifi signal.

IMO these are two different use cases. Cisco could execute almost a million times better in the datacenter by embracing better standards and making first boot and reconfiguration easier (I could write a book on this). Otherwise read as, stop pushing people to use your proprietary management systems for your gear, make those tools generally applicable then maybe people would use them.

On the consumer side, I have less experience with Cisco, but making it dead simple to deal with things like multiple wifi access points would be big, with as little setup involvement as necessary. Apple had a really simple to setup router, though it's generally been underpowered and didn't allow for more advanced configurations.

Cisco Anyconnect and the ASA web interface reeks of an outsourced enterprise developed massive legacy code base haunted by developers pissed all over by meddling middle managers. If you were going for the opposite of taste and execution you knocked it out of the park.

ISP Owner here. I wouldn't call their hardware visually appealing. In UI, we mostly use CLI - so not sure what more can be done in that regard. A visual way to looking at live traffic info similar to iftop/htop would be nice.

I want to add the cisco-IOS is an absolute clusterfuck. There is so much room for improvement I wouldn't know where to start. Please have a loot at Mikrotik, they are doing a pretty decent job for a small company. If their devices were powerful enough to handle our edge router traffic, I would drop cisco like a brick. I am not kidding.

Someone really needs to fund Mikrotik big time.

Personally, I say ditch IOS completely and give me a flat ecosystem of Linux or BSD well tuned to the hardware and completely open sourced. Allow interesting features like SNABB-switch type userspace packet management. Throw in some (k)ASLR and other such security mechanisms. Perhaps most important: make an ecosystem that can compete with Ubiquiti for both "average" consumers and developers in terms of hardware but especially software.

Ironically (because of the Macbook announcement) if Microsoft had chosen to go with previous generation Intel processors, they probably could have avoided those firmware issues. Those are mostly ironed out now, no thanks to Intel.

Do they still have tons of high-DPI bugs where some apps work with it and some get all garbled?

Well to be fair HiDPI issues are application issues as opposed to core Windows issues.

Why was the transition to HiDPI so much less painful on macOS, then?

Because Apple designed the core OS to handle it much better, and make it easier to support for developers. (which was years in the making, far before the launch of rMBP.)

How many apps from the 90s do you know that still work on macOS?

Yes, backwards compatibility is great. But it does not come without a cost.

Sure, but their hi-DPI approach was much more backwards compatible capable than Microsoft's. Having apps still work, but be tiny and unreadable or haveing their UI exploded all over the place isn't a great exampe of backwards compatibility.

While I agree that the OS X APIs were superior at the time, it is important to remember that Windows was and still is an enterprise OS, first and foremost, and this is a big mess. So this slowed progress a lot. Modern Windows UI frameworks are good too, but they are used very seldom, or if used, often used incorrectly. Since high DPI displays have been rare and expensive, I think also developers have very little awareness of the problems, and much less will to work on it. Linux is in the same boat.

Not it was easier because they also control the hardware and defined HiDPI to be always exactly 200%, compared to various scaling factors that windows needs to support.

It's first and foremost a bad DPI independence API design, largely due to a terrible backwards compatibility of an even more terrible legacy stack. It is fixed somewhat in their modern stacks, such as WPF and UWP, but the vast majority of Windows software is not written with these frameworks.

While it is understandable why the legacy baggage is there and cannot be removed, the end result is a big mess, still to this day. Most (but still not all) first party software is OK to good. Third party software (not apps from the store) is a mess, usually either blurry, tiny or downright broken. Windows ecosystem being Windows ecosystem, there are many alternative to almost everything, and some software is improving. But it is still a big mess.

Apple's transition was a lot smoother due to vertical integration, a much smaller software library, more dedicated software developer base (or rather, much more willing to be early adopters of new APIs) and most importantly, a much better designed API without a 20-30 year old baggage.

It should be interesting to see people's reaction to the software, after jumping ship for macOS to Windows on these fantastic displays. I couldn't stand the mess after a week with Windows 10 on my MBP. (But I do use Windows 10 regularly on my desktop, on a "normal" display.)

As most new apps start to be built on UWP that issue will go away.

Also, I am not sure what DPI issues you're facing but I have run W10 on my rMBP for quite some time and it's been thoroughly pleasant. Perhaps your issues are fuzzy text due to mixed DPI, multi monitor setup?

I am not using UWP apps. Most of the software I use on Windows are either MFC or Windows Forms. These can also be DPI aware and render correctly, but they require proactive developer support, which is not something that is happening in the Windows developer world right now. Either software is abandonware (but still works), or issues are open and remain open or are simply closed with "won't fix" status. Most developers see this as a non-issue or very low priority. I mean, even Chrome does not support high DPI from what I remember. It looked terrible.

Linux world is in the same boat. It's even worse there, because a lot of the toolkits don't support high DPI modes or are buggy, and developers there are even less interested or have the know-how to fix issues.

With the emergence of cheaper 4K monitors, perhaps we'll see a change to the better, who knows.

Multi-monitor support is another issue entirely.

What's funny is that supporting high DPI on a winforms app isn't even hard. Even if you size all your widgets in pixels, if you just do a little playing with the scaling options and just try out the ui on high DPI, it seems to work pretty well except for the old icons. I forgot what the setting is called, but theres a (non-defaukt) scaling option or two that seemed to "just work" as it were.

The harder part is to consistently fix everything that uses the old win2000 8pt default font instead of a modern one.

Also, it's not just scaling. Often even if an application scales somewhat correctly, often some elements don't, because it's using some open source that draws something in a terrible manner. Or, assets look blurry because of "16x16 is all you really need" mentality. This used to happen on OS X in the first months, but very quickly and uniformly, developers just fixed their custom code and assets. Not so with Windows developers, sadly.

UWP is dead imo. Microsoft is ignoring the signs that can tell it to accept it gracefully. There is not one uwp app that I use. They are just not reliable. A splash screen will show up, and then disappear. The app won't launch. You open the fb messenger app and then switch desktops to work. 2 hours later the messenger is nowhere to be found. It just disappears. No error no notification. Nothing. First I thought it's fb incompetence. But this happens with the built in photos app. The built in mail app. Even shell elements (start menu, notification shade) are buggy. Windows 10 is a great os as long as you avoid any interaction with uwp stuff.

UWP apps have a lot of limitations compared to WPF/Win32 apps. As I understand it, UWP apps can't record audio in the background or act as a Bluetooth accessory, to give two examples.

So, even if a developer is willing to invest the time to rewrite an app to use UWP, the app will lose a lot of functionality. Microsoft has again poorly architected their APIs.

Unlike macOS, where there's no penalty to adopting the latest APIs. It's not as if, to use the Touch Bar, you have to give up access to other capabilities, like recording audio in the background.

More information: https://kartick-log.blogspot.in/2016/08/how-powerful-is-uwp-...

I mean, you can just use WPF + the desktop bridge in these cases. There's still some work for the desktop bridge to catch up, but it's perfectly feasible (aside from, you know, feeling like a traditional Windows desktop app vs a "Modern" one without a lot of work styling WPF controls).

> a much better designed API without a 20-30 year old baggage.

Apple's API dates back to the 1980s, just like Windows'. If you want to nitpick, Windows was developed in the early-mid 1980s while Next was developed in the mid-late 1980s.

I mostly meant the software support baggage, but yes, indeed, so many of the Next concepts are still true today in Cocoa API design.

I have a number of mac apps that don't scale. Biggest offender, although also on windows, is steam. I don't know what it is about game developers but they just can't seem to manage ui scaling.

Microsoft took ages to fix first-party applications that shipped with the OS: https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/83964/microsoft-....

Microsoft's inability to execute is mind-boggling.

It's not. Win10 doesn't even have a proper HiDPI installation dialog.

I think people don't remember some of the first gen issues Apple products have gone through over the years.

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