The web/webapps/mobile helped lead to this era of "desktop PCs" (to include laptops) where the browser mattered more than the OS. It allowed Apple to become resurgent in the desktop market because OS compatibility mattered less than ever.

It's not weird that it led to Apple regaining _some_ market share because clearly there was demand for the Apple/MacOS/OS X experience that may have been tempered by incompatibility in the pre-webapp days.

What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market. All the more weird for two reasons:

1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.

2. Apple isn't trying, either! They're seemingly doing their best to abandon and alienate their desktop OS users. A decade or more of stagnation or regression in features and usability, capped off by Tahoe this year.

It feels like Apple and Microsoft are just waiting for the desktop OS to die, waiting for mobile to take it over; so we can all just shut up and stop asking for filesystems and terminals so they can sell us iPads and Surfaces, and they can finally be free of this ancient burden of selling desktop computer OSes.

And the consumers keep buying the stupid things, demanding product in a market that the vendors don't want any part of.

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AnthonyMouse 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> What _is_ weird, and nonintuitive, is that the (by all accounts) higher-cost vendor would be seen as ascendent in this market.

It actually kind of makes sense. Apple has stopped caring but Microsoft is actively hostile. You then have people who can afford it switching to Apple, but the higher price deters everyone who can't, which in turn reduces the pressure on Microsoft to clean up their act.

The interesting thing is Linux. It's starting from a smaller base but in the last couple of years the growth rate is even higher than macOS.

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wongarsu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Apple is at least in part operating like they are a fashion brand. Functionality and usability are secondary to looks. Both in their devices and their software. It's hard to argue they aren't successful with that.

It probably helps that Microsoft has also abandoned usability, just for very different reasons

	▲	dawnerd 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I thought it was an Ive problem but once he left nothing really changed. Sure the Mac got some functionality back but that’s about it. They really need to just not do a redesign and flesh out their software.

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riversflow 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.

I see it the opposite. At least for iPhone owners Universal Clipboard and file sharing with Airdrop are killer apps.

	▲	bloaf 29 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		On android, KDE Connect felt great for basic copy/pasting/file transfer between devices. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/ On iOS, KDE Connect feels like its running a potato sack race with both arms tied behind its back.
	▲	Kye 12 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I didn't really get it until I Airdropped a shipping label PDF to the guy at the UPS store to print from his phone, which was already set up for the label printer.

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blitz_skull an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

As an Apple Stan, I don’t understand what you’re referring to. MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas, I’m not really sure what you could be referring to when you say “stagnation”. Every OS ever released has issues at launch, not sure if that’s what you mean by “regression”.

But man… windows has been garbage for the better part of 2 decades now.

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munificent 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The question is not whether MacOS is ahead of Windows. As an Apple user since the Apple IIe, I agree it's still the best OS by a mile.

But that has basically always been true, at least since Mac OS X. (I liked the earlier OSes too, but they really did crash all the time and have no memory protection, so arguably Windows had some compelling advantages.)

The interesting question is whether recent MacOS releases are ahead of their previous versions. Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. Maybe dark mode?

The hardware keeps better, and the experience of third-party apps I care about (VS Code and Ableton) is superior to Windows. But the OS and first-party apps seem completely stagnant.

Which, arguably, is OK. Maybe the OS should just be a commodity. But I have to imagine that there are user experience improvements they could make at the OS but I certainly haven't seen any.

	▲	tiltowait 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Of the top of my head, I can't think of a single feature that MacOS has shipped since 2020 that I care about. They all kind of blend together, so I asked Claude to give me a list of major features since 2020. Here are those that I've enjoyed: * Universal control * iPhone mirroring * Stage Manager * Container CLI Granted it's not a giant list, but each release does have little refinements here and there, and Claude may have missed some (it didn't mention container CLI, for instance; that was from my memory). I also omitted some features I don't care about (like Safari profiles and some other window management stuff). What features are you hoping for? Aside from a tiling WM, which won't happen, I'd be happy just with refinements and bug fixes.

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smallmancontrov 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

After two decades of relentless effort, Apple has finally managed to make Spotlight as broken and useless as Windows Search where it doesn't find local files and just returns web results.

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rolisz 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I bought a MacBook last year. The amount of stupid bugs is insane. Safari eating text input, Safari simply not connecting to internet after several days (while chrome is working well). I have to restart my Mac more often than I had to restart my last Windows machine, because it simply grinds to a halt (with a frickin' M4 Max processor)

	▲	seam_carver 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yea, Safari 26.1 is really buggy for me on macOS 15. Google searching the issue, lots of my issues are fixed int he 26.2 beta, I had to download beta from apple developer website.

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frameset an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's telling that to defend Apple against the charge of stagnation you immediately attacked Windows.

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bestnameever an hour ago | parent [-]

They only attacked Windows at the very end of their statement.

	▲	Wololooo 37 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And I mean... They're not wrong. I use a Mac for work, but also use windows and Linux machines. The best experience hands down when it comes to specific things would be Linux, for very niche things because it's way less clunky than it used to and people have figured things out in the meantime. My mac is the only system that I can mount (without too much pain because people have figured it out) any filesystem, I can virtually open every document from Mac to Windows to Linux. I have something close to package control with homebrew. The M chips are ridiculously good at both being decently performant while low energy consumption. Sure it has its host of issues and I would be the first one in line to dunk on Apple for many many... many many, reasons, but there are things to like with their laptops... In comparison, recently, Windows has been more and more aggressive towards their users and their data, attempting to lock people in for some spreadsheet editor... Gone are the days of Lotus1-2-3...
	▲	Mountain_Skies 43 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And the second sentence.

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CharlieDigital 24 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

macOS daily driver for last 5 years because the hardware is better; I can stay unplugged for almost my entire workday.

Lots of things irk me about macOS UX. Finder's lack of tree view sidebar really irks me. Having to disable the silly animations and sounds when I get a new machine irks me. The absolutely terrible window tiling system irks me. When I minimize a window, I can no longer tab into it. The settings dialog's weird behavior with respect to resizing on both axes irks me. Can't use 3 monitors without an expensive DisplayLink dock and the secondary monitors end up with limited refresh rate options. Meanwhile, I can just plug just about any dock into my 5 year old Windows laptop and multiple monitors just work. Still can't find anything as good as IrfanView (as old and dated as it is, it made working with image libraries a breeze).

Finder and the poor external monitor support somehow irks me the most because now I end up typing into the CLI 90% of the time because the navigation experience is so bad and for me this is a work machine and the difficulty in using 3+ monitors is silly.

I get being an Apple Stan (love the hardware), but the software UX is 100% bottom of the barrel stuff. Basic OS stuff like Explorer is just light years ahead of Finder.

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liuliu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Windows 7 is the last good one. And that is only... Oh, almost 20 years ago. Never mind.

	▲	layer8 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Windows 7 was supported until 10 years ago.

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cocoa19 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If light years means not inundate the OS with ads, shove AI down our throats and redesign every app with regressed UX, then sure.

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candiddevmike 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Snapping and switching windows is light-years ahead of Windows? It only recently became a little more reasonable, and even then they still kept that idiotic full screen mechanic.

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sofixa 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> MacOS is light years ahead of Windows in so many arenas

At least Windows dignifies you with an error message (even if a hex code and badly tanslated text) when something is wrong. macOS mocks you with a dumb and utterly useless message like "Something went wrong, try again" or "A USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it". Or just flat out not showing the button for the thing you're looking for if prerequisites aren't filled (iPad screen extending, unless the iPad is on the same Apple ID, and has been restarted since, the button just isn't there and there is nothing you can do to debug it other than tryingn to guess what is missing).

Also, Windows allows you to install whatever with a clear UX (this might be dangerous for random crap from the internet vs having to jump through a weird non-existing UX to get it to open, or flat out being blocked from using downloaded libaries).

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dingnuts 8 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]