benkaiser 19 minutes ago

Am a software engineer at Microsoft using a M3 MBP, opinions are my own and all. Honestly one (of many) reasons I opted to go through the exception process to request a macbook was the screen brightness. The fact you can run software to boost the screen to HDR brightness levels for SDR content is insanely useful for working outside.

GaProgMan 11 hours ago

True story: a lot of the Microsoft engineers I interact with actually do use Apple hardware. Admittedly, I onto interact with the devs on the .NET (and related technologies) departments.

Specifically WHY they use Apple hardware is something I can only speculate on. Presumably it's easier to launch Windows on Mac than the other way around, and they would likely need to do that as .NET and its related technologies are cross platform as of 2016. But that's a complete guess on my part.

Am *NOT* a Microsoft employee, just an MVP for Developer Technnolgies.

  • arcologies1985 10 hours ago

    Probably because "Windows Modern Standby" makes laptops unusable by turning them on in your backpack and cooking them.

    https://youtu.be/OHKKcd3sx2c

    • m-schuetz 10 hours ago

      I still don't understand how Microsoft lets standby remain broken. I can never leave the PC in my bedroom ij standby because it will randomly wake up and blast the coolers.

      • cosmic_cheese 10 hours ago

        Probably because the quality of PC BIOS/firmware is generally abysmal and getting vendors to follow spec is like herding cats.

    • frozenlettuce 4 hours ago

      I remember having this issue back in 2014... maybe the tech is not there yet.

    • taude 10 hours ago

      Haa, amazing. I had this happen to TWO Dell XPS for me, before finally switching over to Mac.

    • kibwen 10 hours ago

      To be fair, this was also my experience with Macbooks. This "smart sleep" from modern OS manufacturers is the dumbest shit ever, please just give me a hibernate option.

      • einsteinx2 9 hours ago

        I had the issue with Intel MacBooks but never once with any M-series model.

      • cosmic_cheese 10 hours ago

        I used to have trouble with sleep on M-series macs on occasion, but after turning off wake on LAN they’ve all slept exactly as expected for the past several years.

  • khkjhkjiug 10 hours ago

    100% true story - until a couple of months ago, the best place to talk directly to Microsoft senior devs was on the macadmins slack. Loads of them there. They would regularly post updates, talk to people about issues, discuss solutions, even happy to engage in DMS. All posting using their real names.

    The accounts have now all gone quiet, guess they got told to quit it.

  • epolanski 10 hours ago

    One of my friends is a program manager in MS, I think he requested a Macbook but was denied, was given a Surface instead.

    He didn't dislike it, but got himself a Macbook nonetheless at his cost.

  • Nextgrid 9 hours ago

    > WHY they use Apple hardware

    Because Windows' UX is trash? Anyone with leverage over their employer can and should request a Mac. And in a hot market, developers/designers did have that leverage (maybe they still do) and so did get their Macs as requested.

    Only office drones who don't have the leverage to ask for anything better or don't know something better exists are stuck with Windows. Everyone else will go Mac or Linux.

    Which is why you see Windows becoming so shit, because none of the culprits actually use it day-to-day. Microsoft should've enforced a hard rule about dogfooding their own product back in the Windows 7 days when the OS was still usable. I'm not sure they could get away with it now without a massive revolt and/or productivity stopping dead in its tracks.