The Grass Is Always Greener (Premium)

Tech columnist Jerry Pournelle used to say that he made mistakes so that his readers didn’t have to. Well, in the wake of Apple’s blockbuster Mac revelations this past week, I’d like to riff on that line a bit to address some of the navel-gazing and bewilderment I’m seeing in the Windows community. Please, allow me to have self-doubt so you don’t have to. This is a burden with which I am all too familiar. And I can shoulder it.

So let’s step through this.

Yes, it’s depressing that Apple can swoop in and retool its entire Mac user experience in a single release. I’ve been harping at Microsoft about the lack of consistency in Windows and its inability to finish the job for so long that it’s almost a career.

Yes, it’s depressing that Apple is about to manage a complete platform shift from Intel x86-64 to its own ARM-based Apple silicon given the many fits and starts we’ve seen with Windows RT and Windows 10 on ARM, and given how terrible this platform still is.

And yes, it’s depressing that iOS is belatedly adding widgets to the iPhone home screen, replicating, and even surpassing in some ways, the capabilities that Windows phone users first enjoyed a decade earlier.

These things are like repeated kicks to the gut of any Windows or Microsoft fan or supporter. And when they’re combined with the seemingly never-ending tsunami of Microsoft defeats in the consumer market—Mixer and the Microsoft retail stores being only the most recent examples—it’s easy to get caught up in death spiral.

But it’s important to remember one salient fact: Switching platforms—from Windows to Mac, perhaps, or from Android to iPhone, won’t actually solve any problems. All you’d be doing is trading familiar and thus readily-solved problems for new and unfamiliar problems. It’s not like the Mac and iPhone are perfect, after all. If they were, we’d all be using those platforms already.

Put another way, I’m not going to switch to the Mac because the UI is suddenly beautiful and more consistent. The Mac UI has almost always been beautiful and consistent. What I want, what I have been calling for, for years—and what most of you want, I suspect—is for Windows to be beautiful and consistent. But I’m resigned to a fate in which that never happens. Whatever. I still very much prefer Windows.

The same can be said of the iPhone. I mean, hooray for Apple, it finally moved widgets out of a rarely-used feed and put them on the home screen. Android has a similar if less elegant feature already. And, heads-up, folks, Android actually lets me put icons anywhere that I want them. Not just for “looks.” But to make the platform more usable every single day. You might think that the iPhone is prettier or whatever. But Android is objectively better, even when held up to the improvements coming in iOS 14.

The ARM thing is perhaps the most troubling development, but it’s important to remember that microprocessor giants like Intel and AMD are finally racing forward to improve the energy efficiency of their chipsets—and AMD just announced a huge milestone in this area, too—and that their future chips will just run Windows (and Linux if that’s your thing) with no transitions, emulation, or rewriting of code required. We already have laptops that can run for 10-20+ hours on a single charge, for crying out loud, and no one is complaining about performance over here on the PC side of the fence. Apple’s transition to its own silicon seems impressive, but that’s all it is: Something to watch and wonder at while we just continue to get work down on a platform that just works already.

Look, I will continue to hold Microsoft accountable for the sins of Windows 10, and to press the firm to keep doing better. This isn’t just my job, as I see it, it’s my passion. I don’t want to use a Mac, I want Windows to be better. And I say that having literally just purchased another Mac. It’s a great reminder of how crappy some things are, from the lack of full keyboard shortcut support to the hilariously bad developer experience.

Put simply, the grass is always greener. Until you’re on the other side of the fence.

Buck up, everyone. We got this.