I’m not a dispassionate reviewer, poring over each feature checkbox and assessing its objective quality. So, last week, I bought a Surface Pro 4 from the local Microsoft Store and put it through its paces on my own terms and carrying my own biases. But I can’t test my bias without seeing Windows appraised by someone who, like me, is a genuine fan of Apple’s products… reluctantly, I figured I’d do it myself. Most of the people I know switching to Windows of-late are furious about Apple’s apparent product direction, and I’m biased to think their praise of Windows represents a sort of motivated reasoning. My suspicion at the outset of this experiment was that the recent, near-universal praise of Windows is, instead, mostly hype-fueled in large part by a general frustration that Apple has been the only serious contender for developer mindshare for over a decade. Hope tha t people have placed in Microsoft’s embrace of open source, its in-house hardware design, and its broadened cross-platform support. I embarked on a spiritual journey this week to answer these questions: do all the developers I see switching (or threatening to switch) to Windows see something that I don’t? Has Microsoft actually turned the Windows user experience around? Is the combination of Microsoft’s hardware & software superior to Apple’s on the Mac?Īt the heart of these questions: hope.
