Microsoft vs Apple: The Empire strikes back

Apple an empire? No way, evil YES! but they have to defend their propriety for their fanbois sake!
 
It is interesting to see that Microsoft has also decided to start marketing their new touchscreen products more aggressively. IMO Microsoft is not so relatively new to this market, because touchscreen Windows mobile OS has been used by cellular manufacturers before, but with Nokia's newer flagship phones the latest Windows OS would provide further competition to the likes of Apple who has been sitting on the same price brackets for years on their products. :p

Consumers will benefit from the current competition against staunchly priced Apple products (well at least those who still want to buy Apple's products).

“Microsoft can write software which is as good as Apple’s but it has to be free of the constraints,” Kay said.
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Microsoft has always been the preferred choice of variety of users (programmer, home user, business, etc.) so they are actually providing much better software than Apple who might be popular in the DTP market with Mac OS, but it is like a scared kitten who does not want to venture outside it's own comfort zone by providing both hardware and software that will of course integrate better with each other.

Microsoft has nothing to fear from overpriced Apple though.:whistle:
 
Ryansr said:
Microsoft has nothing to fear from overpriced Apple though.:whistle:
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MS was worse. You couldn't buy a generic computer without having to purchase a Win license or demonstrate that you already owned a retail copy. Apple on the other hand sells a package = hardware and software and they even helped you run Windows on your Mac if you wanted to, with Bootcamp. MS still got paid when you had to buy a Windows license.
 
Microsoft started off as good, became evil and now seems good again and will turn evil again once their back on their feet. Apple was always evil
 
mmmig said:
Microsoft started off as good, became evil and now seems good again and will turn evil again once their back on their feet. Apple was always evil
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Apple was one of the first to force music publishers to get rid of DRM in their store. Apple sold lots of expensive apps (Final Cut Pro, Aparture, etc) at cheap prices. iWorks is still cheaper than Office. QuickTime outperformed even Windows Video under Windows in the 90s. Etc. Why is that evil? I don't know. OSX version updates are significantly cheaper and do not require product activation and you can use the same copy across all your Macs, as OSX does not check. Try that with Windows.
 
Ryansr said:
Microsoft has always been the preferred choice of variety of users (programmer, home user, business, etc.) so they are actually providing much better software than Apple who might be popular in the DTP market with Mac OS, but it is like a scared kitten who does not want to venture outside it's own comfort zone by providing both hardware and software that will of course integrate better with each other.
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I don't know that Apple has been the preferred option for desktop publishing for a long time. But the preference for Microsoft can just as easily be simply about price. You have the option of truly budget hardware. One thing Apple will hopefully never do though is deviate from selling a packaged product. Yes, those who want to can hack their OS to work on alternative hardware, and I think that's fine, but the reason people who buy Macs like them is that they get a tightly integrated package. And the OS frankly feels less hacky, although Microsoft has been steadily making progress in getting Windows to the point where it feels like it has been carefully designed rather than slapped together.

Space_Chief said:
Apple was one of the first to force music publishers to get rid of DRM in their store. Apple sold lots of expensive apps (Final Cut Pro, Aparture, etc) at cheap prices. iWorks is still cheaper than Office. QuickTime outperformed even Windows Video under Windows in the 90s. Etc. Why is that evil? I don't know. OSX version updates are significantly cheaper and do not require product activation and you can use the same copy across all your Macs, as OSX does not check. Try that with Windows.
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QuickTime Player must be one the most awful video players out there. I've yet to find a video player for the Mac that doesn't suck compared to my options on Windows. But there are those other positives like cheap software and the advantages of tightly coupled hardware and operating system.
 
noxibox said:
QuickTime Player must be one the most awful video players out there. I've yet to find a video player for the Mac that doesn't suck compared to my options on Windows. But there are those other positives like cheap software and the advantages of tightly coupled hardware and operating system.
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Note what I said earlier. When QuickTime came out and appeared on the Windows platform, it provided superior performance to Video for Windows under the 386/486/Pentium CPU. I'm not speaking about the GUI here, but about the decoder/codec performance/quality. QuickTime outperformed VfW and MS even ripped off some of QT code to jack up VfW's performance, something which they were caught out over and had to settle with Apple in a lawsuit.
 
Space_Chief said:
Apple was one of the first to force music publishers to get rid of DRM in their store. Apple sold lots of expensive apps (Final Cut Pro, Aparture, etc) at cheap prices. iWorks is still cheaper than Office. QuickTime outperformed even Windows Video under Windows in the 90s. Etc. Why is that evil? I don't know. OSX version updates are significantly cheaper and do not require product activation and you can use the same copy across all your Macs, as OSX does not check. Try that with Windows.
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Your Apple hardware is still much more expensive and buying another copy of Windows is still cheaper in many cases.

Also, Apple created the iTunes client. Pure evil.
 
Hamster said:
Your Apple hardware is still much more expensive and buying another copy of Windows is still cheaper in many cases.
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No so sure. Apple makes premium computers, hence you should compare them to premium computers from the likes of Sony and high end Lenovos/Asus/Dell/Alienware/HP/Toshiba. In that comparison you'll find Apple hardware to be competitively priced, plus your OS updates are significantly cheaper and there's no activation nonsense. The combo of software and hardware works well in Macs because Apple can control both, while even a leading company like Sony or Dell has little say over Windows and can only supply drivers.

Also, Apple created the iTunes client. Pure evil.
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True, but it is possible to free your DRM-free music from iTunes app and use your own player, such as WinAMP or VLC.

It's true however that non-removable battery and problems with repair of Retina Mac computers are important issues. Whether however these are significant problems is another question. Will a Mac require repair before it reaches obsolescence (and I mean real obsolescence and not just the inability to play the latest 3D games)? A computer which is not very repair friendly but which lasts 5+ years is better than one which is easy to fix but requires fixing after 2y.
 
Space_Chief said:
Will a Mac require repair before it reaches obsolescence (and I mean real obsolescence and not just the inability to play the latest 3D games)? A computer which is not very repair friendly but which lasts 5+ years is better than one which is easy to fix but requires fixing after 2y.
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Tell that to the guy who got quoted 15k for a new screen after he dropped his retina macbook.
 
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