Sunday, October 5, 2014

Apple : MacFormat: I'm finding it hard to care about Windows 10

Apple : MacFormat: I'm finding it hard to care about Windows 10

MacFormat: I'm finding it hard to care about Windows 10

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MacFormat: I'm finding it hard to care about Windows 10

I haven't always been this jaded. I remember well my parents' look of benign confusion when I would point excitedly at the family Mac and direct their attention to how in Mac OS 8.5 the names of files and folders on the desktop were now on a semi-transparent background instead of being on a solid white rectangle. I think they were pleased I was excited about something, and that the thing I was excited about was legal and didn't hurt anything besides my chances with the cool kids, but they clearly didn't ascribe the same importance to these nuances as I did.

And now, that's me. The problem, as far as OS X is concerned, is that the OS as it stands has been pretty much finished for five years. Don't get me wrong; the annual revision of OS X has added new features and improved the core OS in lots of useful ways. But only a fool would argue that the rate with which major new features are added hasn't slowed since OS X was introduced, as Apple fills in the holes to make it a rich and robust modern operating system.

I'm not saying there isn't room for innovation: Handoff in Yosemite and iOS 8 is a hugely clever feature that both merges and keeps completely distinct Apple's desktop and mobile operating systems. But such big jumps seem to be getting rarer.

So that's why I'm not hanging on every nuance and feature bullet point of OS X. But Windows? Oh, Windows!

There was 95, which everyone loved. There was XP, which everyone loved. Then there was Vista, which everyone hated. (Actually, I quite liked it. At least, I thought Aero was shiny and impressive.) Then Windows 7 which everyone said fixed Vista. Then 8 which couldn't decide if it was for tablets or laptops, and whatever you say you can't have both.

8.1 was a bit more Windows 7-y, and then 9. No, wait, not nine. Windows 10. And 10 is basically 8.1 with Metro bolted to the Start Menu. I refuse to stop calling it Metro, not unlike a dreadful old racist who insists they can't remember what you're supposed to call Rhodesia these days.

The recent history of Windows seems to be to innovate away from XP (which everyone loved) and then try to fix the result next time around by making it work a bit more like XP again after people tell them their innovation is less welcome than Ballmer in a Trappist monastery.

And I'm just bored of it.

There are, I know, people who use Windows by choice. And I mean real people when I say that, not IT procurement executives. Actual, real people who look carefully at OS X, the various Linux distros, even Chrome OS (on which I'm typing this, incidentally) and say no, for me, Windows is the thing. Some of them even don't say "Well I really want a Mac but my work/school uses PCs so I'd better buy one of those." They chose it because they like it.

But to me Windows just seems so wildly irrelevant to life these days. I mean the front end of modern life - I'm well aware that lots of infrastructure depends on it (ATMs still predominantly run Windows XP, for example), which is as precious as it is bloody terrifying. But when it comes to the laptop you type on or the console you game on, Windows just seems more tired, old, confused and irrelevant than me at a One Direction concert.
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