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Microsoft is an underdog in mobile devices. Google is an underdog in tablets/desktop devices. Apple is an underdog when it comes to services. It's like rock/paper/scissors :)

I don't know where Chromebooks fit in that list, but they're very popular.

Ask a kid who's been issued a Chromebook for school. Everyone I've talked to complains about it being heaving, having a short battery life compared to their other electronics, and being very limited. I know "Chromebook" encompasses a wide array of devices, some with better and worse performance, but they're not a panacea for computing. Most are low performance devices.

There are good ones and crappy ones, yeah. But they sell very well, especially because they're so affordable, so saying Apple owns mobile and Microsoft owns desktops isn't a complete picture.

It's really not. Google has 7 billion in cash. Every one of the big 5 could spend a couple billion to win a market. They can't. They are incapable of risking losing billions on an idea. They're not startups anymore.

I made a peer comment about google vs Tesla self driving cars that captures the essence. The point is, Google won't sacrifice ad sales to win at tablets. Apple won't sacrifice consumer electronics to win services. None of them are in a do or die situation that startups are in. The big five might see the problem, but they can't make the move. They're structurally incapable of taking the risk.

Windows Mobile, Bing, Google+, Allo etc. show companies are willing to invest billions to win a market. But Google+, Bing and WM shows spending multi billions don't win you the market.

This is the first comment I've ever favorited on here. Not just because of how true it is, but mostly because it applies to so many startups I've seen that have taken a little risk, gotten a little reward, and totally locked up with risk aversion and failed.

> Every one of the big 5 could spend a couple billion to win a market.

I promise you that Microsoft would happily dump a couple billion into the phone market to own it. Microsoft paid 7.2 billion just for Nokia, not counting the likely billions poured into the Windows Phone OS itself.

Disclosure: Microsoft employee

I'm not explaining myself well.

Consider fencing vs. sword fighting. In fencing, my goal is to turn on a little light when i touch your body with my epee. In sword fighting, my goal is to kill you. it's a gruesome analogy, and hard to really crystalize. The big 5 have something to lose. They fence. The little guy is sword fighting. Did you ever really feel like Microsoft would go out of business because they lost the phone market?

There is an umami to sword fighting. There's this whole other flavor that's hard to describe, unless you've tasted it. I know, it's kind of a bullshit argument. There's this visceral sense of impending doom that leads to brilliant or lucky moves. I don't believe a large, successful organization can really get that flavor. you can take fencing seriously, but it's still different than sword fighting.

I dunno. the best idea i have is to try playing poker. You have to face this horrible, awful feeling. You know the right thing to do, but it's so hard to do it. A good fencer will do the right thing. A sword fighter will do the right thing out of desperation.

I don't doubt Microsoft's commitment. I think they were committed at the wrong layer. Furthermore, i think their income level makes it impossible to see the layer to commit at.

My apologies if this seems crazy. It's hard to articulate.

> The big 5 have something to lose. They fence. The little guy is sword fighting.

This isn't just you not explaining yourself well. This is an entirely different claim. Your first claim was that the big companies "are incapable of risking losing billions on an idea" which is patently untrue.

This claim isn't as clearly untrue. It's just not meaningful. If you need billions to win, then the "little guy" need not apply. If only big players can afford to compete, then that's who will compete.

For the record, Nokia and BlackBerry and a number of other phone companies got to the point that they had nothing to lose, dumped in billions, and still lost the market. I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of taking a major market from an established player.

> There is an umami to sword fighting. There's this whole other flavor that's hard to describe, unless you've tasted it. I know, it's kind of a bullshit argument.

Yes, that is a bullshit argument, partly because it's the whole "you couldn't possibly understand" thing that is in general a bad argument, but mostly because this claim means that you've been in a sword fight and literally hacked someone to death. I find this hard to believe.

Oh... BeOS. Too bad I was born in mid 90s so I didn't get the chance to play with those systems properly. I read about them, a lot, and it seems amazing what does guys achieved with their system. They were really ahead of the curve in some aspects, but in the others... Oh well, it was OS for nerds and enthusiasts mostly.

Here you go, nerd. https://www.haiku-os.org/

I know about this, tried it few years ago, will do it again when I find enough free time to play with it in VM.

>No, none of the big 5 are capable anymore.

I mostly agree, but seen some of Google's acquisitions and what they're doing now? Boston Dynamics are making some huge strides in robotic motion.

Google are selling Boston Dynamics.

There is no question that every one of the big five will advance the state of the art. IMHO, google will create amazing technology around self driving cars, and likely a bunch of other stuff. They don't have the need, the urgency, or the hunger that Tesla has.

Ask a google engineer. they'll tell you Tesla is screwing up the market. Tesla is risking the existence of self driving cars ever happening. One big failure means massive lawsuits and regulation. That may be true. But it's clear, Google does not need the win. Google is unwilling to take the risks to make it happen. They're going the Xerox route.

And that's completely fine. Google has a lot to lose. They could easily be put in a situation where they have to pay billions, for years. They will get there eventually, they might even win. They're just structurally incapable of risking what Tesla can risk.

Google's entire talent pool for self-driving cars has left. They had basically the original CMU group from the DARPA challenges, but they've since gone.

Where/why did they go?

Sebastian Thrun went to Udacity, where he's started development on an open source self-driving car project (unlike Google's proprietary system), and Chris Urmson seems to have not announced any new projects at this point. I haven't followed details on some of the lesser known entities, but I wouldn't be shocked if they eventually gravitated towards Thrun's project.

I don't think big, radical, change the world tech ideas are going to come from the same type of technology startups they have come from in the past. It seems like the next generation of big ideas will come from infrastructure-heavy startups like Space X, Tesla/SolarCity, and Bezos' Blue Origin. There will probably be some potential Hyperloop opportunities as well.

All of these are huge, expensive undertakings. Making humanity distributed will be expensive and costly, but also transformative. Solving global environmental sustainability with solar power and energy storage, and revolutionizing planetary transport with hyperloop technology will also be hugely transformative. I don't see that happening without spending tons of money on infrastructure.

I've been reading all these Mac-related posts lately because I'm very seriously considering getting one. Why, you ask? Precisely because this:

> A linux laptop with flawless hardware support.

is hardly cutting it for me anymore, and I've used Linux for a very long time (basically, since Be Inc. was still around and BeOS was still being sold, since we're dabbling in nostalgia).

You can get a Linux laptop with flawless hardware support right now, really. In fact, I haven't looked over HCLs when buying a Linux laptop for more than five years now. Hardware support is realistically not a problem with Linux anymore.

What is a problem is the fact that, once again, we're going through one of those Let's Rewrite Everything phases and nothing works, for any serious, productive, professional definition of "works", not in Gnome land, not in KDE land, and thanks to the ever-encroaching XDG & friends land, not in fuck-it-i've-done-this-throughout-my-teenage-years-so-blackbox-and-a-bunch-of-xterms-it-is land.

It's great, it's the system that gives you the most control over your system, it's the one that doesn't spy on you and doesn't force you to buy overpriced hardware (look, I'm all for good design and thinness and whatnot but Powerbook G4s were a good bang for the buck, despite the funky hinges, not today's MacBook Pros), and I've grown so accustomed to it and so fond of it on a personal level that the thought of leaving it behind is unpleasant, and compensated only by the fact that I'll still be using it at work.

But I'm sick of nursing my system back to health after every other dnf update. Gnome 3 looks good and it's great to use, but it's a maintenance nightmare, since virtually everything breaks from one minor version to another. Plasma 5 is a step forward from KDE 4 but it still crashes and Kmail2 is still a nightmare. Mind-boggling bugs pop into existence with each new release.

Whenever I show the latest and greatest to someone (this week it was my screen going blank when switching virtual consoles, and if your next question is "why would you switch virtual consoles in 2016", the reason is that gdm was freezing and I wanted to restart it), they shrug and swear they've never seen it before on their system. Unfortunately, this type of thinking is so ingrained in our community (by "our community" I mean "Linux programmers") that I doubt we'll ever devise anything that will stay usable for more than six months.

This was all very fun many, many years ago, when I was in high school and I had a lot of free evenings and when, if something suddenly stopped working after an update or crashed or whatnot, my reaction was "whoa, cool, what's causing this" rather than "well, I'll think about how to fix this while I'm making dinner so that I can still have an hour of two to hack on something". This is not only no longer fun, it's not understandable. Fifteen years is a long time.

I've been messing around with Windows on an old laptop I have around. Windows 10 is pretty slick (maybe it doesn't seem so impressive to you, but please realize that the last time I used Windows routinely, it was Windows 2000) but the *nix-style usage is too ingrained in my brain by now. However, I'm not really looking forward to having to wrestle with my OS for privacy, nor do I trust Microsoft with my computer-related well-being on a ten-year period -- and, being a programmer, I guess it's understandable that "computer-related well-being" is a pretty big deal to me.

I hear you. I used not to mind spending hours looking into issues in my Linux when something broke. Not anymore. I just want to actually spend my computer time doing stuff that I want to do (i.e. programming) and not messing with the system. I still love my Linux dearly but I'm just not willing to put infinite amount of time into it. My new laptop runs Win7 Professional out of the box and I'm not even sure if I'll actually replace this with Linux since generally speaking everything just works and setting up the Linux and getting all hibernation/suspends, keyboard lights etc. to work is just painful.

The part that I find increasingly unpleasant (and unsettling) is that, overall, the quality of the entire experience has been declining.

Four years ago, suspend/resume was pretty much a solved problem on regular, run-of-the mill hardware. It worked out of the box, hardly needed any tuning, hardly had any performance problems. It was messy when it was introduced but by 2011 or so, we pretty much took it for granted.

Nowadays, it feels like the year is 2003 again (only I have a lot less hair so it's a weird kind of 2003). I bring my system out of suspend and the text on my desktop icons is corrupted (!?) and some network connections are mysteriously failing (this one is particularly nasty, and I have no idea what to trace it to; ICMP works fine, but TCP connections to some systems just don't work anymore because the SYN/ACK never gets to me. I initially thought this was my ISP doing something funky with their routing, but alas, my Windows laptop doesn't have this problem).

And this isn't really new and shiny hardware that would sort of understandably have these problems, it's a five year-old desktop.

Yikes. I'm sad to see that stuff backsliding.

Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely. I used i3 with Debian. That kept things simple enough so I could understand them. That meant no niceties like a display manager. Back then I could explain the differences between startx and xinit, and I could compile kernels. The desktops were way too complicated to fix if they broke.

I tired of the whole thing after doing my USA income taxes through fill in PDFs because there is no commercial Linux software. I didn't want a browser based solution. I bit the bullet and bought a Mac.

It is the best computing decision I ever made. Proprietary software is readily available and works. Free software is available through Macports. It's Unix when I need it, but when I want a GUI it always works. I spend much less time fixing broken stuff.

I miss my Thinkpad keyboard. Also, since Mac is an expensive proprietary platform, bugs in free software take longer to fix. For instance the GHC Haskell compiler currently has issues on Mac OS Sierra and it will take awhile until they fix that.

However there are many things on Mac that I could never get in Linux, such as the awsome trackpad and Duet, which gives me a cheap second monitor via an iPad.

My days running Linux on hardware are over. If I really want Linux I will get a Mac or even a Windows machine and then run Linux in a VM.

> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely

I used to do that for a very long time, too, but it's getting unpleasant. A lot of things get upset if you don't have a "proper" session running behind the scenes. It requires me to learn more about xdg and systemd than I can learn without giving in to existential dread about my profession, and frankly, it's a shame to see decades of progress in the GUI go wasted on me just because the Linux community won't get its act together.

In some ways, I think I'm more or less like the proverbial dinosaur in this regard. Virtually no one developing for Linux cares about the desktop anymore. The Linux "community" is, increasingly, a bunch of huge hardware manufacturers, automotive consortiums and a few companies with large datacenters to run. This is where the money -- and most of the development effort -- is. Most of the people who were interested in, and could meaningfully contribute to usability-related efforts and desktops have long gone to web or Apple land.

Edit: in fact, I think virtually everyone I know has moved to macOS, OpenBSD or Windows. Can't blame them.

>> Back when I used Linux, my solution was to avoid the desktops entirely.

My experience is that Linux works better on the desktop in general. Laptop's on the other hand have always given me trouble.

Overall it's sad to see that the "year of the Linux desktop" is always 10 years from now and it's realistically speaking never going to happen.

So, if you're willing to drop 2k on an experiment, i'd say go for it. I'm leery of the new models because i use vim, and my fingers get cold and sweaty. Touch devices don't respond perfectly and i have fear about `esc` working reliably.

I've gone through my own versions of your frustrations, but i'll spare you the war stories.

my 2 cents. macos is bsd, hacked up in odd ways. if you want to edit something in /etc, you're doing something wrong. It's a little off putting figuring out where stuff is. /Library/Frameworks is common. There's no C compiler, without installing (part of) xcode.

You've got 2 choices for package management. macports is a shared nothing approach, everything is compiled against libraries compiled to /opt/local/. Or homebrew. brew tries to share everything with the built in libraries. Just be consistent, i lost some time to libiconv, postgress and haskell the other day. If i'd been consistent i'd have avoided the problem entirely. I've never used brew seriously, but lots of people like it. I swear fealty to macports.

The biggest loss for me was no tiling window manager (although i think some hacks exist to get the same effect).

osx is different. it will trip you up from time to time. a whole bunch of stuff is reliable in ways that were not reliable for me in linux. (take that with some salt, i haven't used linux as my desktop in quite a few years, and i think things have come a long, long way).

If it sucks, you can always go back to linux. That touchbar support might take a while to work right though, and no esc key till it does. ctrl-] will probably be your friend.

You're looking at a different set of tradeoffs. you're a programmer, odds are very good everything you want is there. You can always run a VM if you get stuck. But it's not all sunshine and rainbows. I do think rainbow free days are a little less frequent than either windows or linux, so it has generally been a win for me.

I had (well, I still have it) a Mac Mini and used it between 2007 and 2009. I was pretty dissatisfied with its performance (then again, that was around the time when Tiger got obsolete and the Leopard moved in, and the Mini was already slow and old by that time) but, overall, I think it's the most productive platform I used, short of my old WindowMaker setup which has aged too much to be useful by now.

So I know what to expect right now. Frankly, what I'm afraid of is that I don't know what to expect next year. 2K for an experiment is ok if I could run it for three or four years. Right now, it looks like if Apple has a document called "Roadmap for Mac Computers, 2016-2020", there's a good chance that it's a four-page summary of another document called "How to convince all our customers to just get an iPad already for fun and profit".

The hardware is solid. I have zero complaints about build quality. You are not obligated to upgrade to the latest OS (but you probably should...). I feel really comfortable saying you can get 4 years out of a mbp. If you really need the out, just in case you need to install windows or linux, wait 2-3 months, just to make sure other people have done it reliably.

There is always risk it's not the "optimal" choice, but it's certainly not the "wrong" choice. MacOS is fine. If you hate it just install something else. (but the brand new stuff might be flakey under windows/linux for a while)

Thanks! It's reassuring to hear this sort of things in the middle of the current zomg MPB bad rage.

Just read this thread and I'm also comfortable recommending the hardware for three or four years easily. Also, the top level comment describes a small amount of what I went through about 10 years ago that made me switch back to Apple, though I built a hackintosh instead of a laptop.

JWZ's comments about "cascade of attention-deficit teenagers development" look very apposite here, sadly. The "Linux desktop" that's succeeded is Android, which is also a mess in different ways. Everything other than bunch-of-xterms-and-a-browser will ultimately be updated into nonfunctionality.

It's completely spot-on; I remember the Gnome 1-to-2 transition and it was exactly like what we have today. Except that Gnome 2 was not as big as Gnome 3, so the transition took a little less time, and its interface wasn't so radically different from Gnome 1, so it didn't generate as much rage (it also helped that uttering the words "brand presence" on the mailing lists would usually get you flamed, but I digress).

Gnome 2 actually turned out to be a lot better than Gnome 1, but it took a long time, and the unpleasant thing is that when it finally became polished enough not to be annoying on a daily basis, it enjoyed about two years of quality life before the CADT wheel started spinning again. I'm sure Gnome 3 will eventually be a lot better than Gnome 2 (it already is, in a lot of ways, but it's hard to enjoy it when it keeps crashing and when you have to tweak it for days after every update).

At least on the GTK side, things are actually starting to look a little better (the GTK team has a long-term roadmap, for instance).

Tried using ubuntu xenial directly from Windows 10? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui...

The betaness there is problematic :-). The whole thing still has trouble with X11 applications, for example, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

The nice part about OS X is (or, at least back when I last used it, was) that it's a convincing enough Unix underneath. As far as I can tell, there is no direct equivalent for e.g. launchd, the *nix-ish frontend isn't really integrated, it's more like an additional layer.

This is ok for what I guess is 99.99% of the people who use Windows and need to use the occasional Linux program/bash script/whatever. I'm in the other category :-).

imho there's stagnation in hardware computing as well as mobile phones. It seems the fastest innovation is either in electric cars (both USA/China) or in machine learning.

I would agree with that. A lot of these big companies have been around for a while and rose to power as PCs became prevalent in the average household, or when internet access proliferated and became part of everyday life.

The idea that small startups will usurp large companies in nature industries is folly. Examples like Uber aren't valid because fundamentally it's a different kind of company based on technology. A better comparison would be what are the chances that a small startup, competing in the same market as Uber, will take over that industry or change the landscape dramatically?

For PCs what we have is what we see right now in terms of companies and choices.