I don’t think things are quite so dire for Windows. People (including me) have been predicting the end of Windows due to losing mindshare with builders since the turn of the century, and it still hasn’t happened.
The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. Businesses pick them for employee computers for the same reason.
And Windows Server more or less became a moot point when the cloud took over. They don’t want you hosting your own Exchange server anymore, they want you in Office 365. And they’ll just as happily sell you Linux compute instances on Azure because lower COGS means more profit.
> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs. Businesses pick them for employee computers for the same reason.
As a Microsoft sysadmin with a stable of homelab machines of all types and brands (and favorites that are definitely not Microsoft), enterprise mostly buys Microsoft because of the built in endpoint and end user management stacks.
Which is one reason it was great when I migrated to a Mac at work. Because there is less spyware and administrative software slowing down and making my computer buggy!
That just means your IT department isn't putting in the effort. Antivirus, remote management, MitM proxies, software permissions, macOS can do everything Windows can, it just takes three or four subscriptions and double the effort for the IT team.
macOS makes it kind of difficult to do these things, so when companies do deploy the same control they use on Windows, the problem actually becomes worse, because every management tool now needs to rely on hacks rather than officially supported APIs.
> That just means your IT department isn't putting in the effort.
Lazy IT departments are a blessing!
Agreed. It’s a mess of confusing configuration spaghetti, my comment was not meant to imply quality (and that’s leaving aside asinine corporate policy). They’re pretty much the only game in town though sadly.
> most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs
And that's why the MacBook Neo exists now. Apple is coming for the lower-end market.
At that point the only thing keeping people on Windows is software lock-in. Which Valve is in the process of working towards dismantling for gaming at least.
With the new Neo prices, they're more coming for the lower-end of the midrange market. The low-end market was half the price the Neo was before the price went up.
Google has gone after the low-end market through ChromeOS and has actually been very succesful at it. Sure, the $200 pieces of crap can't really do anything more than play a video and maybe type into a document at the same time, but that's better than what the Windows alternative offered for many years.
Consumers and businesses pick Windows because it’s difficult to buy a PC that doesn’t have Windows installed. At least in part.
The other important factor is that the share of PCs in general is a fraction of Android and iOS devices.
> The harsh truth is that most consumers pick Windows because PCs cost less than Macs.
Ever since the MacBook Neo, that's no longer the case. And frankly... Apple has now demonstrated that an old iPhone SoC is enough to drive macOS. I think that it should be feasible for them to run macOS on iDevices as a hypervisor-style guest, yielding you the full macOS experience when plugged into an USB-C dock.
Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has. They are okay for very simple office tasks. If you need something like Intel Core5 level performance though, PCs are still cheaper than equivalent M-series Apple chips. If they have both style users, it is cheaper to get a bulk discount from Lenovo/Dell/HP than splitting your users into camps. It is easier to administer too.
> Macbook Neos are limited by whatever extra A-chips Apple has.
Fair point. But they are also showing people that you can have decent Apple performance at a price point previously reserved for budget Windows laptops.
> It is easier to administer too.
Meh, that's... not as clear as it used to be. Yes, in a full on corporate world based on on-prem AD, GPO and the rest of the MS architecture that might be the case, but even there, IT already has to support Macs because marketing/PR and IT usually demand macOS. And with Windows, it has always been a huge effort to keep up with MS and patchdays randomly breaking stuff. Apple is far more stable.
Yeah, even before Neo, since M1, I've been urging people to buy a Macbook Air if they could afford to.. Or consider buying second hand if new is out of their price range.
Budget Windows hardware is trash and the OS is so full of bloat that within a couple of years a budget Windows laptop will be barely functional. For a long time now arguably the only reason to go Windows is if you're a gamer or a business user with very specific software requirements.
Yes. I use both at home because reasons, and despite the much lower per-computer price tag PCs cost me about twice as much money on an annualized basis because they need to be replaced so much more often.
But for a lot of people a Mac is still out of reach because they don’t actually have that much disposable cash on hand at any given moment. Which might not be how the situation has to be, strictly speaking, but I’m not here to bother them about their spending patterns.
Also for most people who don’t have the computing needs of your average Hacker News follower, Chromebooks might be the real elephant in the room. The Chromebook users in my life seem to have easily the fewest computer worries.