Comment by JumpCrisscross 3 days ago
“Microsoft president Pavan Davulur tweeted on Nov. 10 that ‘Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere”
Apple could probably run a Mac vs PC billboard on this tweet alone.
In case English isn't your primary language, "more or less" means "approximately", not "exactly". Sorry about that.
Microsoft's tagline is "Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere"
If you visit https://www.apple.com/os/macos/ , Apple touts Apple Intelligence (AI), connecting devices, cloud to increase productivity and, this time a direct quote, "accelerate your workflows". This is more or less the same tagline as Microsoft is pitching.
Somewhat humorously, Apple doesn't seem to mention their agent, Siri on the page at all, but it's being reported a revamped Siri is coming in 2026.
English is my first language. I didn't see anything on the page I thought was equivalent to the MS copy. Looking specifically at the 'accelerate your workflows' part it's immediately explained as a way to use AI via the Shortcuts automation app. I think the problem with the MS copy is they're not tying it to real world examples.
And I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis. I switched back to Linux after a few decades on Windows for work. Been back on Linux for a few months now, and haven't had any problems. My computer doesn't randomly restart (most updates don't require restart at all). No one is trying to push telemetry, half-assed AI, or OS ads on me either. So much better now on Linux.
> I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis
Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
My personal solution for my Macbook, which hasn't failed yet, is to simply wait a year or two to apply OS updates. In this case, I'm extending that to "never". I'll take my chances with the script kiddies, who have way fewer resources to infect my machine with malware than my OS vendor apparently does.
I'm sure a lot of people are waiting for peak AI fatigue to jump in with a simple OS that is actually user-friendly and doesn't try to cram an "agentic AI" into your computer with you.
Apple is only bottlenecked from doing the same by their AI products not working.
I’m currently evaluating a move to Linux from macOS for this reason. Unless they speed up a major internal shakeup they don’t seem to be in a position where their products will be interesting. Amazing hardware though.
That's the thing: amazing hardware. I want two things: good hardware and software I trust. It's going to be hard to trust a for-profit company selling a closed source OS, but Apple is doing a much better job of consistently talking and walking respect for user privacy for many years. There may be another reason beyond incompetence that they're not rushing out half-baked chatbots wrapped in privacy disasters.
Many content rights contracts I see instruct the streaming platforms that they must detect Linux and either give low quality or deny the playback entirely.
It's because, rightly or not, they don't trust Linux in comparison to MacOS and view it as a piracy vector.
> AI products not working
Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?
It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
Microsoft has the copilot brand which includes relatively well valued products, apple does not have anything that could potentially work if only it was integrated well.
I’m not saying that to defend Microsoft, but at least they have _some_ measure of product success leading them to push further. With apple the leadership push for ai seems an entirely divorced from the current reality of the company.
You can disable these if you don't want them, and if you do, then "Come to Linux, we're missing important features" is not going to be a winning pitch.
Apple could, but this is more or less their tagline[1], as well.
Granted, I think Apple has slightly better execution, but that's pretty subjective, I suppose.
1. https://www.apple.com/os/macos/