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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?
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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.
Ask Bill Belichick just how great Surface tablets are.
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.
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.
Isn't if funny how similar that word is to affluent. To be fair of my mistake, they both carry many similarities.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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...
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".