I would love to hear Steve Jobs' thoughts on this if he were still alive. He famously was quoted as saying Microsoft has "no taste", and I can't help but think this commercialization of the core OS interface is the epitome of tasteless and cheap.
It's hard to imagine a company like Microsoft with so many billions in the bank is so hard up for cash that they're effectively putting billboards up for sale on their primary product. I'm sure Jobs would have had some colorful things to say, if not outright gloating at the vindication.
I don't like it any more than you, but my biggest beef is iOS nagging me all the time with modal dialog boxes to sell me apple paid services. It won't be Apple lecturing Microsoft on this topic.
My beef is that something about taking my Samsung Bluetooth earphones out of my ears launches Apple's Music/iTunes app, and only that, and after a cursory search, this apparently can't be turned off. Aside from the annoyance itself, pushing a particular app/service is also not what I want an OS to do.
It's a bit of both. The intention is probably to start the app when you "plug in" earphones. But something about putting the Galaxy Buds back into their charging case, or sometimes just taking them out, causes a state change (reconnect?) that triggers it.
On my Apple Watch 3, when on a run, I would look at my watch for heart rate and pace, but Apple would always show Music first, even though i don’t listen to music when running.
It's a pain in Apple Photos that continually nags you about running out of space or buying more. They also have persistent notification badges for settings if you don't turn on iCloud.
If you are backing your photos up to iCloud and you're running out of space, of course you will get a notification. Just disable Photos sync to iCloud if you rely on another cloud like Google Photos
I cannot even use Google Photos in the same way that I use iCloud.
With iCloud I can set the system up to only retain low-resolution versions and only fetch high-quality when needed.
I can't do that with Google Photos. ANY app that requires me to open a photo opens up with the standard iOS photo viewer which does not allow anything. I can't even write an integration for iOS photos so I can browse my NAS, or Google Photos or DropBox or whatever.
But doesn’t the nagging make sense if you’re already using iCloud sync for Photos (so you’re obviously interested in the functionality) but running out of the free (trial basically) space? The badges are crap, yes.
I’m especially easily irritated by this kind of thing and I cannot recall a single example of that in iOS. are you using your device for an unusual case?
Pretty much after every system update I get nagged for using iCloud, apple wallet, the defaults redirects you randomly to apple music when you are trying to play your own music, etc. Perhaps you have given up to all those demands and you don't see them. Otherwise you can't really miss them. To the point that I am deferring system updates as long as I can.
For almost every one of those pop ups, you can click on it, step through the dialog, then cancel the setup and it will clear the badge and not nag you anymore.
I agree it is getting irritating on IOS, but on Windows they’re now using things like alert badges on the battery charging status icon, the security status icon, etc. for stuff like “alerting” that you haven’t signed up for cloud backups and somehow this is an urgent security concern.
> For almost every one of those pop ups, you can click on it, step through the dialog, then cancel the setup and it will clear the badge and not nag you anymore.
Where and how often? I get a notice every time I update my OS for things I don't care about. But imagining every time I opened my main search interface that I saw an ad... no thanks.
Finder doesn’t show ads, right? System Preferences doesn’t show iCloud ads, right? You don’t keep urging me to make Safari the default browser, right? Strictly speaking, macOS has an iCloud item in the Finder sidebar, but you can hide it, and you have to go through several layers of account settings to get to the iCloud settings in System Preferences. Safari only notifies you that Safari is recommended as the default browser when you first set up Chrome, but nothing after that. At least for macOS, they don’t display ads in prominent places over and over again like Microsoft does.
After years of Windows, I just recently set up a new Mac. It was a breath of fresh air!
Windows has onedrive im the sidebar of the explorer, macos has icloud. On macos it's one toggle I'm settings, and it's gone. In windows, it's an undocumented registry setting, and an msconfig setting, and several nag screens, and it comes back after some OS upgrades.
Changing the default browser to Firefox, Windows still opens some links in Edge, with no way to change that. In macos, browser choice is a setting, and it is honored by the OS.
In general, there are tons of things that annoy me in both OSes, but in macos it's usually a simple preference toggle, where in windows it's some complicated, undocumented hack.
The kinds of things that I configure/fix after the install are different, too. In Windows, it's disabling junk that windows comes with, such as ads, nags, intrusive dumb defaults, etc. In macos it's generally adding things the OS doesn't come with, such as NTFS support, triple-tap/middle-click, window snapping.
As I said, macos is a breath of fresh air compared to the shitshow that is windows 11 (in this regard).
Yeah, heard this before, most all learn to hate Macs after a little bit of time. A fresh of breath air is when you have a ton of control, MacOS is not really good at that. You have to do things a certain way and in particular purchase the right type of stuff and it's doesn't always work.
Comparing those to having tiktok on your start menu without being able to remove it (like an Apple News notification, for example) is completely asinine. I use windows everyday and coming from LTSC, the ads on 11 have been very surprisingly gross. Which is a shame since I actually really like win11 a part from that. But I would take apple ads all day if I had a choice between the two.
I truthfully find them all a sickening distraction that attempts to steal my current context and thus, I really don’t distinguish between candy crush ads vs the apple ads as I find them all sickening.
I find the inability to distinguish from services like iCloud and one drive, services that supplement the os, to apps and adware like tiktok and candy crush, lacking of thought.
I'm so glad I got comfortable using Linux early on. It just keeps getting easier to use and more powerful. Even gaming on Linux is pretty much tolerable these days thanks in part to Valve / Steam and their Proton fork of WINE.
It's funny, I spent the time to get a windows app launching in proton as I was having some issues with the Linux version that I didn't have the time/patience to diagnose and fix myself.
The launcher is called proton-call ... I changed Steam to use the version of proton to match what the app expected, and it worked pretty cleanly. All said, I do wish it were easier for a separate launcher or third party to include proton as a separate package.
You might also want to look into "Heroic" (an open source implementation of a GOG and Epic games launcher), and "Lutris", and "Bottles"; all of which can use Proton (and WINE) to launch Windows games and apps on Linux rather easily.
Gaming on Linux for me started getting easy for me around WINE 3.0-ish, when EverQuest (and other MMOs of that time period) started running pretty near flawlessly for me. That's when my Windows XP/7 partition finally died for the last time on my system. Ain't been back to Windows since (other than trying out Windows 10 on a friend's system and instantly remembering why I had learned to hate Windows). Since Steam came to Linux and Valve released Proton, it's all only gotten better by leaps and bounds.
> considering how user hostile Mac OS interface is
I can’t say that this is wrong, because user hostility is 100 % subjective by definition, but it’s as close you can get to “wrong” in some general knowledge, large numbers, empirical sense. macOS has always been the “user friendly” one.
Yet trying to get my keyboard to be properly configured on Mac OS is next to impossible. The time I spent trying to get it configured is comical, I just decided to get used that a couple of keys are switched around.
Doing the same on Windows or Linux was pleasantly easy.
Mac OS sacrifices usability in the name of having a "sexy" interface. There's nothing user friendly about it.
I think it's more that certain hotkeys are different, and that comes from history... even if you switch ctrl/alt/super around, you still have to have something off. It used to be far worse if you were around for real unix hardware and other systems like Comodore, Atari etc.
> Ironic, considering how user hostile Mac OS interface is.
You might not like it, doesn't make it user hostile. At least not without further expanding, because it's definitely not just a fact as you seem to state.
There are places in macOS where Apple really makes sure that you do know about iCloud and do consider subscribing, but it’s still nowhere near what Microsoft does, and it feels more like someone offering you an optional dessert after lunch instead of extended car warranty.
I use the Apple Music app constantly and never get nagged to buy the service. On macOS, I just unchecked the "Apple Music" checkbox under "Show" in the Music Preferences, and on iOS turned off the "Show Apple Music" toggle in Settings > Music. Boom, no nagging.
oh give me a break! They are promoting OneDrive. I use Macs and an iPhone, I definitely get pestered to use iCloud, news or apple music all the time! The music app alone is mostly screens pushing Apple Music. The headline makes it sound like they're selling general ad space.
Forced Candy Crush, Facebook and other installs, MSN tabloid news articles, etc. are all over Windows start menu too. It's extremely tasteless and looks like a grocery store checkout aisle.
I think I've seen the apple news widget helpfully installed on my iPad before. The candy crush thing is true, but I haven't really noticed it until I just checked.
The pinned apps thing is sorta annoying but generally I just hit windows + type whatever I'm looking for. Like spotlight on mac.
I recall seeing an ad from a start menu search... admittedly, an insiders build and likely a test feature... but they're definitely at least considering it... I don't use many apple apps on my m1 laptop, so can't say much there. All said, my desktop has been in Linux 99.9% of the time since first seeing that. Though Win11 had already been pissing me off a lot well before then.
Apple definitely pushes apple music a lot. I use spotify and when I hit play on my headphones half the time it somehow thinks that I want it to fire up apple music instead of unpausing spotify.
On iPhone if it doesn't auto sync your photos it definitely encourages you to on.. yep, iCloud!
I just don't understand all this hate for microsoft in this particular case. To me this is not really that different from what Apple does, yet I don't see articles roasting apple about it.
Yeah when I buy a hammer I always buy the one that has no labels on it of any kind. Just plain hammer and no signage on it whatsoever. Thats super important because what if I stop hammering and start reading the sign, could be a serious distraction. None of that, I am all about work and hammering.
That’s why you probably don’t use many Apple devices, which is totally cool. I on the other hand, expect something that I look at, touch and use literally for half of my waking hours to be as “tasty” as possible. It’s actually one of the most important factors, if not the most important.
Microsoft has no taste, no taste for charging you a ton of money for nothing tangible, but a green bubble and not being able to talk to your poor friends.
> A “small” number of Windows 11 users will now see “notifications” encouraging them to use other Microsoft products when clicking on the Windows Start Menu
Is the red dot on System Preferences a software update, or is it "Update Apple ID Settings" which wants me to sign in to iCloud everywhere just because I use Apple Music.
Apple even goes so far as to change the behaviour of the notification 'X' so that instead of dismissing the notification it opens System Preferences to iCloud for me. The only way to dismiss it is to swipe it off screen (not what you usually do), and it returns each time I wake my computer and periodically through the day.
well, to be fair, the app store has ads in search. When you search for app X, you're likely to see its competitor Y as the first result. (Though this is obviously not Jobs' doing.)
This isn't a new idea whatsoever. Even going back to the '90s, Windows had ads, but people have a very selective memory. This is likely where the anecdote came from in first place.
Microsoft Network/MSN on 95/98, anyone? Office? Internet Explorer?
Windows Welcome Experience on XP? Media Guide tab on Windows Media Player on XP? I could go on for hours.
No where close as aggressive. Windows 98 never interrupted your boot a few days after install "to complete the setup experience" asking you to subscribe to MSN or order a copy of Office 97.
The aggressivity isn't the topic of discussion, the topic of discussion is what Steve Jobs would have thought about ads in an OS, but we already know what he thought about Microsoft ("no taste" anecdote) and MS were already pushing things in Windows prior to Jobs' passing, ergo he almost certainly would have found it tasteless.
If the goal of a tool is to provide an efficient means to tackling a task, Windows is becoming further and further removed from its ability to effectively do that with layers of cruft, up-sell and dark patterns. It's not been great since the '90s.
With that said, I'm sure Jobs would find plenty to dislike in modern macOS and iOS too with all the crap bolted on top of them. Apple TV UI is a good example too. I'm sure he would have had some strong opinions on the Apple Pencil as well.
Yeah... that too. I came here to point out the contrast between the technical marvel that is Windows, and the sheer obscenity of the tracking hell it enables.
Microsoft is a public company, so they always need to grow their business. That’s why they do anything that seems to make money. Even if it’s a software that costs 200 dollars, they show ads in the software.
People need to stop representing Steve Jobs like some kind of visionary. He was an asshole who stole Wozniaks talents and money. Pretty sure once he saw the money coming in from ads, he'd be the first one to do it (in fact iCloud came around when he was around so likely he signed off on it). With our without Steve Apple is already doing this, many things Apple did that are shitty are being copied in the industry, including this ad; a direct borrow of the "buy iCloud ad" "buy AppleTV" "buy Apple Fitness" (etc) we've all seen.
It's hard to imagine a company like Microsoft with so many billions in the bank is so hard up for cash that they're effectively putting billboards up for sale on their primary product. I'm sure Jobs would have had some colorful things to say, if not outright gloating at the vindication.