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Microsoft Says More People Are Switching From Macs To Surface Than Ever Before (theverge.com)
Microsoft has been targeting Mac users with its Surface commercials recently, and it appears they might be paying off. From a report on The Verge: The software giant claims that November was the "best month ever for consumer Surface sales," following a number of Black Friday deals on the Surface Pro 4. Microsoft still isn't providing sales numbers, but the company claims "more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before." Microsoft cites "the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro" and its trade-in program for MacBooks for tempting people to switch to Surface. Again, Microsoft refuses to provide numbers but vaguely claims "our trade-in program for MacBooks was our best ever."
That would be "more than ever before"...
If true, it's because Macs are starting to suck for geeks who really just want a dependable Linux-like machine. That silly new "swipe bar", the loss of easy USB ports, and more.
However, I can't see myself ever going to a Surface. My main Windows laptop is a Dell Latitude that can double as a desktop and compiles quickly with a large screen. I also have a Windows tablet I use to surf the web, buy stuff and play Civ 5. But the Surfaces are just trash - hybrids for consumers, with no value for geeks.
So more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. It reminds me of an episode of the US version of The Office. This may not be word for word what happened, but it's close enough to make my point.
Pam: I doubled my sales from the previous month.
Andy (sarcastically) : Yeah, to 2 from 1.
Pam: Yep.
Okay, which one of you switched to Surface?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
i just went back to a desktop. except for my work laptop the Macbook and other laptops i've had rarely left the house and now i have a smartphone for that
the iMac or MBP, plus the applecare to pay for that hard drive or SSD that has a good chance of dying within three years plus tax and you're close to $3000 just to run the same Google Chrome as a Wintel machine for 1/3 the price or less runs
I got a surface at work to replace an aging laptop. I suspect a lot of surface purchases are of a similar nature. Microsoft may be cutting into Mac purchases, but I suspect they are cutting even more into OEM business.
With apologies to Mark Twain:
There are lies, damned lies, and marketing.
If the figures were really that great, why not provide them? Wouldn't that be a punch to the gut to Apple?
No facts. Typical PR spin. Do we really need this kind of fluff trotted our repeatedly?
Ask Bill Belichick just how great Surface tablets are.
Are you really comparing a MBP to a Chromebook like they serve the same roll? Really?
Maybe you're just an idiot for paying 3k for a web browser but there is no Chromebook that can do anything for me that my MBP does, other than browse the web.
If you don't do anything other than what a Chromebook does, then you're an idiot for buying anything OTHER than a Chromebook.
Your post illustrates your shortcomings and in ability to buy the right product, not any of the flaws on the current MBP
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Sorry, I disagree. I have a Surface Pro 4 (mid-line model provided by work) and it doubles just fine as a desktop for me. If you have the docking station and monitors it's a nice device. It runs visual studio pretty easily with solutions with 10-15 projects so it's no problem with other text editors or simpler tools. It may struggle with Photoshop or high end video editing, but for development - it's fine. I'm also running a VM with Linux Mint. I'm not a huge MS fan but this device has worked pretty well for me.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
Look around. Have you ever seen a Surface outside of the NFL sideline? And stop it with "well I have one and I love it, and so do all my friends". No you don't, you are a shill. The evidence is all around you. You don't see them on the streets, in coffeeshops, at places of business. They ship a lot to retailers for sure, but they don't sell any.
>> there is no Chromebook that can do anything for me that my MBP does,
Why did this get modded down? This guy's right on: if you're a developer and your company gives you a Chromebook, you're probably mostly going to use it to hit job boards.
>> open 6 or more solutions with 100+ projects
:)
It sounds like you need an architect more than a laptop.
I heard it about the Zune.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Cliche as it is to say, Apple has lost its way post-Jobs.
There. I said it.
effluent idiots
They are full of shit!
Surface Pro4's top CPU: i7-6650U
Average CPU Mark: 4889
Single Thread Rating: 1821
My laptop's CPU: i7 3940XM
Average CPU Mark: 9378
Single Thread Rating: 2025
My desktop's CPU: i7 4770K
Average CPU Mark: 10121
Single Thread Rating: 2255
[Side by side benchmarks of the above]
I have no idea what you're using your machine for but it certainly won't fit a lot of people's use cases.
The new MBP has a lot of people looking at going to Windows 10 - those I know that are heavy users of Wacom tablets are definitely considering Surface but it has a lot of the same downfalls as the new Macbook "pro" - 16gb ram, poor port choice, not the greatest keyboard, etc.
When I point out to the Mac users in my universe that I could get them a Dell or Lenovo with 32 or even 64GB ram and a better CPU, more storage and better I/O port selection for a few hundred less than a new MBP, they tend to start thinking about how they could move their workflows to Windows or Linux. For the people I am thinking of, they would rather have a laptop weigh a couple more pounds if it means getting more work done faster.
MS isnt really winning any business here, Apple is throwing the business away!
Isn't if funny how similar that word is to affluent. To be fair of my mistake, they both carry many similarities.
Are you really comparing a MBP to a Chromebook
Maybe you're just an idiot for paying 3k for a web browser but there is no Chromebook
If you don't do anything other than what a Chromebook does, then you're an idiot for buying anything OTHER than a Chromebook.
Mentions of "chromebook" in the post you are replying to: 0.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
If everyone is so disappointed then why are the new Macbooks selling so well?
I saw a story on slashdot a while ago claiming Mac users were switching to Linux as well.
It just sounds like hardware manufacturers are trying to cause doubt to get more sales, because the reality doesn't seem to show that people are switching away from Macs given they are selling so fast.
Twinstiq, game news
Except that affluent idiots (unless you really did mean effluent) arn't the only target market. A huge portion of the market goes to sysadmins, developers, etc, who use the machines for real work.
Those people consider the latest MBP to be a ridiculous pile of horse shit. I mean, Apple's lineup has been becoming more and more of a joke as the years go on, but they seem to be now at the 'lets just take as much piss as we can". I use a mac, and know a number of others who use Macs, because they provide the best of both worlds between windows and linux for the work that we do. The slight price premium was worth it for the dramatically lower number of headaches and bullshit one had to deal with.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. It's bad enough that the feature/price ratio has gotten significantly worse than it used to be. But now the products are just a fucking joke. Before they oh so generously cut the price on their dongles, you could easily spend $400-$500 in dongles just to reach parity with what you could do before. And of course, you are now required to carry around a dead octopus worth of cables to cover all the possible situations you may need.
This was fine when it was just the Air. That's what the Air was designed for. But pulling this idiocy on a laptop that is specifically meant for professionals? Someone needs to dig up Steve Job's coffin and repeatedly hit Tim Cook with it.
> You mean the same chance as the HD or SSD in your linux/bsd/windows machine?
Yep, the same chance as the one in your Linux/BSD/Windows machine.
But the drive in the Linux/BSD/Windows machine isn't hard soldered in. Replacing it doesn't involve buying a whole new computer.
Just bought a 2015 15 inch MBP - figured I have one more round before I give up on Apple entirely. It's a nice machine, nothing as good as it could be for a pro level tool, but functional.
But increasingly Apple is deciding that the 'pro' line is for people to hang out in Starbucks and do whatever it is they do intently peering at Facebook.
It was a nice ride, perhaps in 4 or 5 years when this laptop gets old and flaky Windows 11 will be pretty good. And Bernie Sanders cyborg will be president. And the USA will be great again.
I think I'm just going to get depressed. That usually works.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
For me the great use of these tablets is keeping notes with my experiments. You can design experiments with drawings quickly. You can keep a dated log of experiments. You can paste graphs in result files etc. Everything without typing. I love it, it works for me better than anything else. My major reason not to buy a surface tablet though is that they are absolutely not repairable. I'm using a Samsung tablet at the moment that I can peel apart. Looking at HP for a new tablet that you can take apart and fix. And I'm still waiting for a good open source replacement for MS onenote that I can use on linux...
Yeah, and soon it might even be the fastest-growing computing platform! https://xkcd.com/1102/
It's also buying.
I am mostly MAC here and I bought a Surface pro to add to the tools available. It is not replacing my laptop, in fact my 2012 Mac Book pro is screaming fast with an SSD and no need to buy a new device that is only 15% faster and uselessly thinner.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apple is losing it, stupid hardware decisions solder in the ram, solder in the ssd getting rid of the escape key. They do good things too but seriously they are making things worse not better and picking the right mac even used is pretty tricky after the gpu problems they have had over the years. They need to make them repairable and serviceable. At least some of them.
Software wise they made that disaster of a program ibooks, that rips your books and pdf's out of itunes and buries them in a useless format in a hidden directory.
On a plus side you can get rid of it use app cleaner to remove ibooks and itunes use pacifist to reinstall itunes 11.4 then upgrade to itunes 12.5.3 then its nearly back to being good again. True to actually read an ebook on the mac you need to use drag and drop but i've still been able to make a central collection on my Nas that I can pull what I want when I want it and happily delete it from phones laptops ect when I don't.
Apple refuses to play nice with machines that are not made by apple android phone no way apple will sync with that. and why icloud for syncing why not let me do it on my lan
i'd love iTunes to handle my docs but so far I have only found iDocument for doing that. when you get used to filing by database and associations its a much cleaner way of doing things and gets rid of clutter and old dead files.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It hasn't just lost it's way it so bad you have to wonder if it is using it's own Apple Maps to navigate.
But that's the thing... a Wintel laptop *can* suffice, but you have to set it up before it is. For example, cygwin is great and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to an honest-to-god bash prompt.
Using a Mac is basically what I believe using Linux *should* be like. It (for the most part) just works. The OS balances a perfect line between being drop-dead easy for people who arn't technically inclined, while being just a couple settings away from giving you all the power and control you could want. (And by control, I don't mean being able to customize the OS to whatever suits your fancy at the time. Being able to change your mouse cursor doesn't make you more productive).
They are, quite plainly, more reliable, and more predictable to use than any Windows machine ever. I moved my parents to Macs, my support calls went from almost nightly, to monthly.
Which is why I'm absolutely, utterly, livid that Apple is pulling these shenanigans. They had a platform that I *enjoyed* using, and they are doing their damndest to sabotage all that in an effort to maximize their already ludicrous profits.
How many people are "switching" from Windows to Mac, though?
Yes, but you aren't the target market for Apple, effluent idiots are. They just use creative types for their marketing to make the effluent idiots feel cool.
Interesting. Nearly ALL of my Mac-owning friends are engineers (mostly EEs), and I am an embedded developer myself. The other two that aren't engineers are an Ophthalmologist (who is also a software dev.) and a friend that is a CPA, JD and CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner). Only one other acquaintance is a "creative" type; but since he is a "signed" musician that makes his living with his Mac, I'm not sure he counts as an "idiot".
Oh, and I don't know if you were trying to make a pun with "effluent" (sewage) rather than "affluent" (rich); but if not, you're the idiot...
Which is why I'm absolutely, utterly, livid that Apple is pulling these shenanigans. They had a platform that I *enjoyed* using, and they are doing their damndest to sabotage all that in an effort to maximize their already ludicrous profits.
Have you used one in a real-world application yet?
Try it before you dismiss it.
And "Adapter world" is only temporary, until the world catches up to USB-C, which is already well-underway.
Uh huh. Sure. Please post a picture of you (or your "friend") actually using a Surface. No one would switch from a Mac to a Surface. They aren't even in the same space.
Remember the last time MS tried this fake "Switcher" bs? Turned out they were using paid shills and Getty Images for their "real" people...
macs are also becoming not very enterprise friendly.
With the soldered in storage being a big turn off for some usages.
The lack of server hardware / the min being a poor fit for the roll. Also apple does not let run mac os in a VM on non apple hardware. (it can be done but apple's license says no)
Apples lack of OS downgrade rights
Apples tendency to drop ports and more on the fly.
None of your examples are relevant to a laptop.
And "Adapter world" is only temporary, until the world catches up to USB-C, which is already well-underway.
The only reason Apple has to "design for the future" is because they don't refresh their hardware at reasonable intervals. When was the last time the Mac Pro was updated? But if you need high-end mac machines, that's your only option right now. It's a joke.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
No I haven't, because it's not designed for the real world. You know, the one where Ethernet cables, and USB 2/3.0 devices, HDMI, and SD Cards still exist and won't be going away for at least a decade.
This isn't like parallel, serial or SCSI ports whose days were very clearly numbered when Apple cut them off. Losing access to floppies was annoying but still grudgingly inevitable. But USB? There is no excuse for removing those. HDMI? It's still being actively developed! Their new MBP will be obsolete long before HDMI is.
Apple wants to make "Adapter world" the new normal cause they know they can make a fortune on the things. Just look at their long history of mangled DVI adapters. Micro DVI, Mini DVI, mini HDMI, mini DP... Apple has a dongle addiction something fierce, and now they've gone too far.
No, I have *every* right to dismiss it, just as the overwhelming majority of tech people are dismissing it. Whoever signed off on the design of the latest MBP is either a moron, or a money-grubbing MBA looking to capitalize on accessory profits, or both.
You know what? You're a classic abusive boyfriend that can't handle being wrong, so you prefer to gaslight people instead of accepting that maybe a mistake was made somewhere.
I've already left a more technical comment elsewhere so I'm not going to re-iterate, but I felt compelled to comment on this because I was just so awe-struck by your breathtaking arrogance.
Just because I don't deep throat Apple's reality distortion field doesn't mean "I don't get it". I've been using Apple products for a long time now, for the simple fact that for me, they do the job better than any competing product. But circumstances have changed.
But the raw facts are that Apple have all but abandoned their desktop lines, and have put out a laptop that is so myopically designed that they've all but given the middle finger to a significant portion of their customer base.
If you just skim through the various comments, you will see countless pissed off people who are either sticking with what they have, or are preferentially buying previous gen hardware when they have to. I have colleagues who have been utter die-hard apple fans for years, and they are saying the same thing I am.
If you really think that this many people "Don't get it", maybe you need to take a step back and ask yourself if maybe YOU'RE the one who "Doesn't get it".
Why did this get modded down?
Because the parent is a troll (and hypocrite) that constantly lashes out at anyone as he feels - just look at all his posts.
Basically, he's Slashdot's answer to Donald Trump.
You can stamp your feet and accuse people of being retarded idiots as much as you want. But that doesn't change the reality of the situation, which is that a large portion of Apple customers feel like they were just slapped in the face. Customer devotion is Apple's primary currency, and that currency just took a dump so hard you'd think Tim Cook deep throated a dozen Taco Bell chalupas.
I love how you're accusing people of being "idiots" and "retarded" when you're the one who sees invisible ports that don't exist.
FireWire 800 - Not there
Gigabit Ethernet - Not there
mini DisplayPort - Where?
SD Card reader - Nada
5 USB 3.1 gen 1 ports? - Nope
So I have to ask... what crack are you smoking, because there most certainly isn't *anything* other than a bunch of external bus ports that are otherwise useless without having to spend hundreds of dollars on adapters.
And then... and then... Okay, I'm laughing now... you actually point out a $300 port replicator, just to regain the ports that Apple took away? A Three. Hundred. Dollar. Port Replicator. Because dropping $3000 on a grossly under-equipped laptop wasn't enough of an insult?
Apparently *you* don't get it, let this idiot spell it out for you: I don't give a flying fuck if a single I/O port can let me transfer all the data generated by the Large Hadron Collider in under a minute. I DO care that I'm at someone's house, and they give me something on a USB key but I can't access it without pulling out my Sports Billy bag of dongles. I DO care that I can't connect to a presentation TV or projector without pulling out my Sports Billy bag of dongles. Or transfer photos from my camera. Or connect to a LAN via hardwire because wifi is (for whatever reason) unavailable/unusable (because that does actually happen, irregardless of the dream world you seem to live in). And heaven forbid I forget said Sports Billy bag, cause now I'm using a $3000 chromebook.
Almost *every* *single* real-world use-case has suddenly because an unnecessary hassle when before there was no issue. This is the hardware equivalent of when they switched from PowerPC to Intel, but *without* including Rosetta.
If Apple had left the HDMI port and just one lousy USB 3.1 port, there wouldn't be this uproar. If they had thrown some dongles into the box so people could hit the ground running with their existing stuff, people would eyeroll but there wouldn't be this uproar. But no, they had to take away ALL previous ports with no alternative, forcing people to jump through hoops and spend even more money to regain the shortfall. And now a supposed "portable" computer requires you to carry around a small bundle of adapters, like a new mother carrying a backpack of sundries for her baby. I was more than a little pissed off when they removed
I mean, when they released the iPhone 7, they were at least considerate enough to throw in a lightning to headphone adapter.