I think for many it's not the frequency they must update as much as the features and flaws of the OS they must update to.
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Yeah macOS updates are incremental enough that it is usually a very small learning curve if any to using the new version. Whereas Microsoft has redesigned their start menu completely with each revision..
yeah. My wife uses Windows for gaming. Now and then she's had a tech problem she needed help with. I'd first try to help knowing how Windows was a few versions ago but nothing I expected to find was to be found (not easily anyway). Had to search the web to find the NEW way of doing things. A little of that is to be expected but it was the case for darn near anything.
I get people being upset with Microsoft, but Apple is no better. There are 2020 Macs that were just dropped. Yes, they’ll continue to receive a bit more in terms of security, but Apple is no better than MS.
I think those switching from Windows to Mac (not most but a noticeable number) are doing so more about Windows 11 specifically than the whims of the company.
If you're being told you'll no longer get security updates and have to get a new PC/laptop. Some people are going to get that Mac Pro or Air they were on the fence about. Especially if they have a iPhone, Apple Watch, Air Pods....
It's how many of us slowly got fully into the Apple ecosystem. It starts with one item.
Looks like many of you are forgetting that most people have been putting up with Microsoft's changes and intrusions for years, and for many of us the forced retirement of good hardware is just the last straw.
So many of us hated when Microsoft stopped a lot of their pre-release testing and made us all beta testers. Oops, data loss. Oops, drivers stopped working. Oops.
So many of us hated when they started taking "telemetry" and only let us reduce how much.
So many of us hated when they took away features during upgrades.
So many of us hated when they started sticking ads in every touch point (the widget panel, and inside all the system widgets like weather, and also random popups telling us we should subscribe to XBox Live, etc.) Ads are even on our lockscreens by default.
So many of us hated the forced install of gimmicky ad-filled games (including a new version of Microsoft's own solitaire they now want to sell an ad-removal subscription for) and other programs we didn't ask for, just because they got paid by different companies to do it - something PC vendors also do and we hate, but this is Microsoft itself doing it.
So many people hated getting operating system updates that then greeted us with popups telling us to change to the recommended settings of using Edge as a browser and Bing as the search engine so they could track where we go, and letting them import all of our data and keep it in the cloud. And the default was to let them do all that. And then getting the same popups the next time we had an update. And the next.
Many of us also hated that if we gave in and let Windows sign in with a Microsoft account (which, by the way, they're trying to force on new Windows 11 installs), our home directory is no longer where it used to be but is behind some stupid OneDrive free tier cloud bull. Some of us had to come to the rescue of other people to whom that had happened because they suddenly got messages saying they were out of room on their desktop and could no longer save data to their mostly-empty drives, because OneDrive had a 5GB limit and of course had just moved everything over the whole time.
Some of us have discovered (and a lot more are about to discover) that new Windows 11 installs now automatically enable Bitlocker even for Windows Home, without any warning or permission granted, and if your computer dies your drive may be useless for file recovery if you don't back up the key, etc.
Some of us are just sick of being seen as profit centers who will continue to roll over and accept more of all of this.
I suspect that between windows 10 losing support and the longer-term fallout related to the CrowdStrike / Microsoft outage fiasco, we will continue to see Macs gain more popularity in enterprise. I guess a budget Mac makes sense when viewed through this lens as well.
You make some fair points about Windows, but I think it's worth noting that a lot of those issues apply to macOS too.
You mentioned that we’re basically beta testing Windows. Honestly, with some of the issues I’ve run into myself, and from what I’ve read about macOS 26, it kind of feels like we’re beta testing for Apple as well.
Windows sometimes removes features, but Apple does the same with macOS. This article points out a few things that have gone missing or broken in macOS 26.
If You’ve Installed macOS 26, These Things Might Be Missing Or Broken
The upgrade to macOS 26 hasn't gone smoothly for some, with missing or broken features causing angst. Here's how to fix them.
www.forbes.com
Sure, Windows has its share of ads and pre-installed apps that not everyone wants. But macOS isn’t exactly innocent either. My MacBook came with Apple TV, Apple Music, the iWork suite, and even a chess game. I didn’t ask for any of that. You could argue those are just ads for Apple’s own services. I usually just ignore or delete them.
I use Windows Pro, so I don’t have to deal with the forced Microsoft account sign-in. But even if I did, I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal. You need to sign in with an Apple ID to get the full macOS experience too. And let’s be real, 5GB of free OneDrive storage is just as underwhelming as the 5GB you get with iCloud. When OneDrive fills up, it behaves pretty much the same way iCloud does. At least, that’s been my experience.
As for BitLocker, yeah, you need the recovery key to access encrypted drives, but you can retrieve it through your Microsoft account. Maybe that’s part of why they push people to sign in. Still, at least with Windows, I can pull the drive and recover files on another machine. With a Mac, if the device dies and the SSD is soldered in, how are you supposed to get your data back?
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More and more people are discovering the advantages to having an Apple computing ecosystem. Getting texts on your desktop, iCloud integration, now password synchronization... you simply don't get that natively with a PC.
Also - Lenovo and most PC laptops are hot garbage. I just got a new Alienware for work and it's supposed to be the flagship computer from Dell, which I consider to be on the higher of the PC market (which isn't saying much). It runs so hot at idle that you can feel it get really warm on your lap through a pair of jeans. When dealing with electronics, heat is the product of inefficiency and its evident that PC makers don't put much time into making battery life count - processors and components are made cheaply and shoved into a cheap shell. One admirable thing about Apple is they focus on efficiency just as much or more than speed, while Intel is just trying to keep up in the benchmarks, their processors are blasting through mobile batteries. If you've ever built an Intel/AMD desktop, you know that the CPU cooler counts, if you don't get a proper cooler it will overheat. Said Alienware has a fraction of the battery life, I constantly have to check it after just an hour - meanwhile, with my five year old 14" MBP, I don't think about the battery for hours.
PCs also haven't nailed down two things, and it's mind boggling:
1. PC laptop touchpads suck. Why they haven't just reverse engineered Apple and duplicated it, I don't know.
2. When you put a PC laptop to sleep, it uses exponentially more battery. I can sleep my Mac for days and it goes down a few percentage points. When I sleep my PC for two days, it's usually at 50% battery or less.
Also - Lenovo and most PC laptops are hot garbage. I just got a new Alienware for work and it's supposed to be the flagship computer from Dell, which I consider to be on the higher of the PC market (which isn't saying much). It runs so hot at idle that you can feel it get really warm on your lap through a pair of jeans. When dealing with electronics, heat is the product of inefficiency and its evident that PC makers don't put much time into making battery life count - processors and components are made cheaply and shoved into a cheap shell. One admirable thing about Apple is they focus on efficiency just as much or more than speed, while Intel is just trying to keep up in the benchmarks, their processors are blasting through mobile batteries. If you've ever built an Intel/AMD desktop, you know that the CPU cooler counts, if you don't get a proper cooler it will overheat. Said Alienware has a fraction of the battery life, I constantly have to check it after just an hour - meanwhile, with my five year old 14" MBP, I don't think about the battery for hours.
PCs also haven't nailed down two things, and it's mind boggling:
1. PC laptop touchpads suck. Why they haven't just reverse engineered Apple and duplicated it, I don't know.
2. When you put a PC laptop to sleep, it uses exponentially more battery. I can sleep my Mac for days and it goes down a few percentage points. When I sleep my PC for two days, it's usually at 50% battery or less.
Zorin 18 had 100,000 downloads in two days. There is hope.
I work for a small business. My work laptop is a late 2021 Inspiron that was purchased from Costco. It has the nearly fatal flaw of being a Windows 11 machine shipped with a spinning hard drive instead of a proper SSD, a problem MSFT eventually fixed in future OS releases in terms of recommended spec. That hard drive makes me pay every work day. I consider it a badge of honor that I've been able to keep it running, because despite its published specs (16 GB RAM, 12th gen Intel processor), it stinks to high heaven. The screen hinge on it broke in the first three months. A co-worker that got the same laptop suffered the same problem. We don't have an IT staff, so some support is DIY. It doesn't matter because everything we do is in the cloud, which makes my machine a glorified Chromebook, nothing more. I know that there are good installations of Windows 11 all around. Mine is not one of them. When I play around with other newer Windows machines I am amazed at how slow they are, how bad their trackpads are, how terrible they are at resource management. People who are switching have plenty of reasons to do it. Microsoft is neglecting their product as they keep slinging CoPilot at everyone. I have mitigated it to the best of my ability until this thing can officially go on the trash heap.
You can do all that with a PC....chrome and Google drive works the same way... Even with an Android phone.
I think an important point to keep in mind is the difference between home/personal computing and enterprise usage. In the latter, macOS is rarely seen at all and there are reasons for that.
I probably wouldn't recommend Windows anymore if you just need a computer to browse the web and maybe pay your bills at home etc., unless you are a gamer. But in enterprise and corporate settings, things are different. Also Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise have features that Home doesn't have and that make it easier to get rid of some of the typical problems people have with Windows 11. For example you can delay updates much easier and longer.
CrowdStrike was mentioned. CrowdStrike actually had a similar issue with Red Hat Linux before, so this is not a pure Windows issue.
And before someone says macOS doesn't need solutions like CrowdStrike because it's more secure, not it isn't. It's just not as attractive to malware authors as Windows is because of where and how it is used. If you want to extort millions with ransomware, you don't target a flower shop or a 5-person graphics design boutique. You target big corporations with complex logistics and simply won't find macOS in these areas, unless maybe in some very niche cases.
In the areas where macOS and iOS are actually attractive to bad actors, for example iMessage, there are also as many vulnerability exploits as there are on other platforms.
Not hating on either platform, I'm just aware that operating systems are used in widely different ways in the world and not everything is the best fit for every use case.
I probably wouldn't recommend Windows anymore if you just need a computer to browse the web and maybe pay your bills at home etc., unless you are a gamer. But in enterprise and corporate settings, things are different. Also Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise have features that Home doesn't have and that make it easier to get rid of some of the typical problems people have with Windows 11. For example you can delay updates much easier and longer.
CrowdStrike was mentioned. CrowdStrike actually had a similar issue with Red Hat Linux before, so this is not a pure Windows issue.
And before someone says macOS doesn't need solutions like CrowdStrike because it's more secure, not it isn't. It's just not as attractive to malware authors as Windows is because of where and how it is used. If you want to extort millions with ransomware, you don't target a flower shop or a 5-person graphics design boutique. You target big corporations with complex logistics and simply won't find macOS in these areas, unless maybe in some very niche cases.
In the areas where macOS and iOS are actually attractive to bad actors, for example iMessage, there are also as many vulnerability exploits as there are on other platforms.
Not hating on either platform, I'm just aware that operating systems are used in widely different ways in the world and not everything is the best fit for every use case.
I liked Windows 8, okay the start screen was not great, but use a third party app to get the start menu back, and it was fine, ran smoother on my AMD bulldozer based machine than 7, even when 10 came out, I still used it until I changed to a Ryzen based machine. My only problem with 8 was that is the time when Ms decided to try to force people to a online account, it did not work and they dropped it. Now they are doing the same thing with 11 and 10 to a certain degree.
One of the reason why I changed to Mac, I don't want my computer connected to an online account all the time, also, as strange as it seems, I have more freedom with MacOS
OS vendors (not only Microsoft, Apple and other developers also fit here) feel like they can tell users to upgrade and they’ll obey as slaves. There’s no technical reason why Microsoft can’t improve Win10, it’s just that they wish a complete adoption of Win11 so that they can push more people into OSs with no user control at all. It would be good for everybody if a big percentage of users don’t upgrade and Microsoft is forced to continue Win10 support. This would bring back a bit of hope in computers and software being enhanced from user needs, and the market being based in the demand rather than the vendors strategies.
But I have little hope: vendors feel like they can do whatever they want: a software changes from permanent licenses to subscriptions and people simply accept, the same they pay for TV subscriptions losing any rights to watch movies if the subscription ends.
If Microsoft fails to enforce the deadline I’ll be really happy. And no, I don’t care if Apple gets adopters, Apple itself has caused more harm in the Mac platform than if Microsoft had done it on purpose. Nowadays I see Apple more as my enemy than as a company that develops good technology.
But I have little hope: vendors feel like they can do whatever they want: a software changes from permanent licenses to subscriptions and people simply accept, the same they pay for TV subscriptions losing any rights to watch movies if the subscription ends.
If Microsoft fails to enforce the deadline I’ll be really happy. And no, I don’t care if Apple gets adopters, Apple itself has caused more harm in the Mac platform than if Microsoft had done it on purpose. Nowadays I see Apple more as my enemy than as a company that develops good technology.
We all have a part to play in destroying the malware that is Windows 11.
I've just convinced a life-long Windows user to switch to MacBook Air.
I've just convinced a life-long Windows user to switch to MacBook Air.
The 3 people I helped to go with a MacBook Air M4 did so for the following reasons: -
Yes, their PC was declared incapable of running W11, even with bios updates
The Air was replacing a bulky desktop computer
They were less confident users who subscribed to things like Norton Antivirus instead of sticking with Windows' own security elements
With a Mac they could use Pages and Numbers to replace their 365 subscription as they were not heavy users of Word and Excel
The cost of the Air surprised them and it turned into a no-brainer when they saw the quality of the hardware.
I actually did try out some distributions. Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and another buntu when I was in school.
I wasn’t too open minded using them, as I was still in school and the Office alternatives were headache inducing. Especially since it ran on my schools PC‘s (because we couldn’t afford Windows at that time).
I know that some people swear on Linux, but for me, an iPhone user, macOS has faaar too many features I take advantage of frequently, like AirDrop and iCloud.
I also love new MacBook Pro‘s too much. Superior screen, incredibly battery life (picking it up after a week and not having to wait a single second for it to return to what I did previously with plenty battery left), great speakers, more performance I could ever need, first class trackpad, thunderbolt ports, incredibly fast SSD‘s, etc.
Too much to give up.
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Where did I claim that companies upgrade their hardware?
Please read carefully.
Apple is unpopular with businesses because every system upgrade forces users to change their workflow.
A feature is removed here, an entire program is no longer supported there, then the feature is moved somewhere else...
This is poison for businesses.
That's why companies prefer to use Windows. Understandably so.
Please record the video when you have to tell them in about five years that they need two Macs to make full use of the documents.
Because you'll know: Apple “updates” its Office programs at regular intervals and isn't interested in compatibility.
This means that new documents can only be displayed with new versions and old documents only with old versions.
Unless you're one of those people who spends thousands of dollars on a new Mac every few years anyway.
If you try to convince your people of this, I'd like a video of that too.
Either way, I guarantee your people will feel like you're messing with them.