I find these articles and the recent trend of "Macs used to be cool" kind of strange.<p>Macs have terminal.app, bash, a handful of proprietary command-line tools (hdiutil) and that's about it.<p>Never had inherent package management, we have homebrew and macports to thank for that. App Store isn't quite the same and doesn't fulfill the same needs.<p>You can <i>still</i> run Linux on your MacBook, if that's what you want.<p>macOS is fine and it's not Windows, that's what this is about right?<p>Apple makes some pretty decent hardware when it comes to build quality, appearance, and battery life, if it's not your cup of tea maybe look into ThinkPads, they're great machines too!
author here - not just email, it's plugging a projector into a linux box (I'm a trainer) and praying it might work. There are a dozen small things like that making linux great for dev, not so great for everything else.
I have to agree, microsoft is on their game. The surface book and surface studio are the sexiest pieces of hardware that have come along in a LONG time.<p>Just look at the microsoft surface product family photo <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface</a>?<p>This is a clear and concise vision for a computing family reminiscent of Steve Jobs' apple. Three form factors, all unique and with their own purpose, all with touch input and pen input. Their operating systems are now all united under the universal windows platform (which means that software is compatible across ALL their platforms, not just their pc platforms). As someone who's been anti m$ with a vengence for the past 13 years or so, I'm astounded at the progress they've made, and I for one betting on them continually making waves for the next few years while everyone else just iterates on the same old crap.
Email is the hold up? I must be missing something because that's never been the "must have" app situation to prevent a user from going linux in my experience.
> The OS itself is still visually superior to anything else, but it’s been showing the signs of neglect for a few years now.<p>Can you elaborate on this? Without going into any detail your post reads a bit like a paid promotion. Probably not but you gotta be careful because of stuff like this:<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth-marketing-microsoft-paying-youtubers-for-xbox-one-mentions/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/01/stealth-marketing-micr...</a><p><a href="https://uncrunched.com/2014/06/17/microsoft-paying-bloggers-to-write-about-internet-explorer/" rel="nofollow">https://uncrunched.com/2014/06/17/microsoft-paying-bloggers-...</a>
Why not just switch all the way to Linux? It runs Chrome (and Firefox!) just as well as Windows, and with a browser it has the email and calendaring apps folks are using these days anyway.