It staggers me that this is still a problem, because *more than 20 years ago* I switched from Win98 on a ThinkPad to a G3 Powerbook partly because of sleep.
I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.
Then I noticed a colleague who'd come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.
And you're telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn't work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That's bananas.
There's probably so many of us, who have just quietly moved to macs out of frustration. Two Windows laptops in a row over several years, I suffered with this sleep bullshit. Never again!
I've had the opposite experience. Used Windows for 2 decades and rarely had problems. Switched to macs 4 years ago and all of them (4) crash a few times per week.
I was trained by MS that sleep mode functionally doesn't exist on Win PCs and that updates need to be installed eventually. So every day when I finish working I simply power off and optionally update laptop and PC and that plus morning boot wastes maybe a few minutes on a laptop, even less on faster PC. I honestly don't see why people are making such a big fuss about this, as to warrant wasting thousands of dollars and a lot of hours of time to switch operating systems. And MacOS by reviews is not without its quirks and issues, they are just different.
Ooh! Ooh! I managed to crash OSX! I kept my computer running for a week straight, no sleep, and had iTunes shuffle to a new song once every 10 seconds, and for each song scrobble to Last.fm and also download album art and lyrics. At some point it borked out.
I know Windows gets a bad rep for crashing—I use XP on my Macbook and I've had no crashes yet—but beyond crashing, I'm astonished at how grotesquely unstable it is. I use an app on it that takes up the full screen, where one window generates the full screen window, so Alt-F4 doesn't work, and I can't open a task manager because it just gets auto-hidden by the screen. That's incredibly bad practice, but I've seen it done by multiple Windows designers because it, unlike OS X, doesn't offer a rigid set of guidelines for its functions.
Beyond crashing and messing up, Windows is just incredibly un-smooth. Perhaps they fixed it with 7, I don't know yet, but when I use XP or Vista I'm struck by how hard it is for me to treat its window metaphor with any respect. I can't rely on windows to move when I click and drag them, they don't have any particularly good window hierarchy in place, and everything is so choppy and clunky, even with a good mouse, that I find myself resenting the system. That compared to OS X, which is the smoothest system I've ever used. Everything in it adds up brilliantly.
I still like XP—or, I do until there are more Mac emulators available—but I completely get axod's argument, and agree with it. Microsoft killed computers' reputation, and are primarily responsible for why people I know think computers are so impossible to deal with.
It seems to me that these complaints about MS and Windows have been more or less the same since Windows 95/NT4. Yet somehow most people keep using it because 'gaming' or because 'corporate'? Or because Mac or Linux are not good enough?
Reading all the comments in these discussions I consider myself lucky to never have made the switch 'to' Windows. After triple booting DOS/W98, OS/2 and Linux for a while in the nineties, it was just Linux after 2003 because it is easy and it just works.
Also used Macbooks several years at work and the OS never got in the way of productivity. To me at least MacOS appears to work fine.
Love this comment. Hilarious. I still have to use Windows at work. Windows 1.0 began in 1985, moving on to Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and a bunch of servers in there somewhere.
You would think that after all these years, they would have learned to make it faster. Have you used the Windows search feature? Insanely slow. Microsoft Outlook is notorious for crashing, which means the Windows operating system can barely handle its Windows applications.
In Windows defense, we could blame the server and all that, but with over 30 years of experience, I would have had hope that the word "crash" would have been a thing of the past for a Microsoft. Unfortunately, you and I both know this is still a common issue with Microsoft.
Malware? Viruses? Also somehow, that is still a thing. I get it: Microsoft Windows is easy for viruses to take over, but again: 30 years of experience, testing with sandboxes, etc., would make me think that they could quickly prevent viruses or at least stop them dead in their tracks to alert the user.
I know that I still have to train older people to do things on Windows. So despite the efforts of Microsoft, Windows is still not as user-friendly to everyone nor is it idiot-proof. I purposely bought my mom a Chromebook just because my mom would kept her credit card information stolen or viruses all the time. I think with the Chromebook, in the 4 years she has been using it, we had one issue in which she downloaded a toolbar extension that attempted to take over the browser.
I used to also be a Mac OS user and until recently, when I had needed it to run some servers via terminal, I realized why I stopped using it. It prevents you from wanting to use your own computer and I feel like I'm a prisoner in the Mac OS world. Everything I was doing, from having to download an app, to even saving a file on my computer was nearly impossible. Mac OS users, you try saving a file using TextEdit? Can't even do that anymore. Maybe you can.. I could not figure it out.
Downloading an app? Had to enter in my password, then I had to enter in the account's credit card holder information (my girlfriend), and then I had to enter in her credit card information, and then I had to enter in the security code on the back of her credit card, and then I had to verify it through her email address. I thought this was the computer for the professional developer.. apparently not.
I have since switched to using just a Chromebook because it requires the least amount of work: Put in my password for my Google account and I am in. I can download at will and without worry about viruses. Everything I need is pretty much online or "there's an extension for that."
While I have been using my Macbook again for server-related stuff, I was thinking about just using another Chromebook I had, or another computer I had for Linux, and doing the server-related things on there instead, just because it seems these two are the least intrusive, and not only that: they load faster than Windows and Mac!
I definitely don't miss having to use antivirus software... AVG or Avast is what I used to use. AVG got big and spammy and Avast... well, no complaints, but I haven't needed to use that software in years. Lets not even get into the time Norton Antivirus destroyed my computer and locked me out. At least on my work computer, the IT guy has preventative measures to keep the employees from downloading anything. It sucks, but I just make requests for software I need, and he downloads it all on to my computer.
I think a lot of Mac users are forgetting how awful the Windows ecosystem still is. One gets used to everything mostly working and think that that's how it is on the other side, too.
Meanwhile, one guy I know bought a new Windows laptop to replace his flaky older one. On the new computer, audio doesn't work. Programs load slowly (~10 minutes to start up software that takes 10 seconds for me). It turned out the flakiness of the old laptop wasn't its age or power, it was the software. Lots of folks have stories like this. There's still a huge amount of uncertainty in that world.
What an absurd overreaction. Hackernews is such a weak overly hypersensitive community. Yes I'm fully aware that instability was common between Mac and Windows at that time. I sincerely apologize for the irreparable emotional harm from my cruel vicious hateful comment about Windows 95 BSOD. Yes I know that Mac and Windows were both notoriously unstable back then. I wasted many hours of youth dealing with Win95 bullshit, and I know that it was nearly as bad with Mac. We were forced to deal with a lot of crap in the 90s.
If you are a Mac power-user and have gotten used to all the conventions (e.g. window behavior, shortcuts, UI interactions), you won't be able to last 5 minutes on Windows. Every once in a while I have to logon to a Windows computer for work and just fiddling with the Start Menu frustrates me. To me, the Windows UX experience is horrible enough to keep me on Mac despite all the growing issues with Macbook hardware.
As another macOS user, it's absolutely insane how much worse Windows has been allowed to get over the years, and I sincerely wish that my mid-2015 MBP had never broken, because this is still absolutely awful even after almost 2 years of getting re-acquainted with an OS that I had already used for 7 years before my first Mac.
I used Windows 95. It didn't crash as often as people said it would. Why would I bought Mac OS back then? Any reason other than it doesn't crash as often as Windows?
I also used Windows 98, and 98SE. It rarely crashed unless when I did not reboot it more than 2 days. Who left their desktop on for 48 hours (except me for my own reason and probably people who leeched pirated illegal stuff)
Ditto with Windows 2000.
For desktop, Windows is okay. Yeah so there are viruses due to popularity (or being targeted). If Mac OS 7-9 were more popular back then, it'll suffer the same fate (virus wise).
People were always afraid of anything that they don't know how to operate. My parents used OSX once in a while lately. But they're still afraid to click on certain things. They said "If I messed up, I don't know how to get it back to the previous state".
Last week I came to my Windows PC to see it was completely locked up. Until that I haven't noticed it, but at some point in my history with Windows boxes, crashes and issues became a rare notable event. I started relying on them. I was surprised.
Alas, it turns out my OS drive was busted. Not Windows' fault. Before that, more than a year ago I had some crashes with Windows, by then it was my GPU dying out. It's all anecdata, and it still doesn't feel right to praise Windows for its stability (guess everyome from earlier days would feel the same), but hey, in last few years my Windows OSes outlasted the hardware they worked on.
In the meantime I can't count how many times I had to reboot my Macs (two of them) for one reason or another. Crashes after wakeups, permanent visual bugs that only get solved after reboots, weird slowndowns, Mac's disdain for external monitors and adaptors, etc etc. Back then Mac was the it-just-works machine, nowadays I would attribute that to nothing but Windows.
We, the old Windows developers, welcome you, the current Apple developers, to the 90's, when Windows was shittier and shittier with each version. Get ready for the next decade when workarounds and basically underground techniques will be your only survivability.
As MacOS becomes more popular, it seems it has to go to this shitty phase, as Windows did back in the day. We got rid of this phase with Windows XP release, so around 7 years. For you, who knows, hopefully shorter.
What I really don't get was how even Windows 3.1 had better multitasking than MacOS. Really.
I get the multiple issues with MS and Windows, but at that time, they had the better system for Home/SME users. Ok maybe not for Graphical Designers, but still.
Which leaves us in a spot where MacOS seems forward-looking, whereas Windows seems to be grasping onto its legacy. How wise is it for any professional to invest their time into Windows if it seems to be headed towards inevitable decline?
This is a question I ask myself as somebody who has used Windows continuously since Win95. If it was just the x86 aspect I might be able to shrug it off as unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but when I see stories like this it really wears down my confidence in Windows.
Yeah and they have doubled down on things like the command key that inhibit adoption by wannabe former Windows users. NIH, or just plain cultural stubbornness prevents them from allowing the system to welcome new users. The Mac differences are not superior and it feels crusty and sub-par to me. However, the Mac doesn't track...so it wins. I bounce back and forth between Mac and Windows daily. I hate them both really.
This is the actual feature that drove my family to the mac.
We just felt like windows was going in the wrong direction — that generally the convenience of the customer came after the profits of the company and to this day we still feel that way about Windows.
The windows activation failed (and it failed not infrequently) to customer service, which meant talking to a customer service agent which was not a particularly pleasant experience, and also made us feel like we were guilty until proven innocent.
The overall experience was reason enough for my family and my company to abandon Microsoft for apple and Linux, and I’m glad we did. Our support costs dropped from almost 3 days of downtime a year per developer to less than 1 by switching to Apple on the desktop and Linux in the datacenter, and we’ve never looked back.
I was working almost exclusively in Office docs back then, and the Mac and Win suites were (then as now) file-format compatible. What coding I did was on *nix servers I could SSH to. And I got real, real tired of often-crashing, slow-booting, sleep-sucks Win98 on a laptop.
Then I noticed a colleague who'd come into the consulting group from the design side, and kept his Mac. He could just open it, do something, and close it. And then open it again, and have it wake up normally. It crashed marginally less often than Win98 (this is pre-OS X), but the boot time was MUCH faster, so the crashes were less annoying. I bought a Mac and have been here ever since.
And you're telling me that even today, in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Three, that sleep still doesn't work for shit on big-name Windows laptops? That's bananas.
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