[OT] Windows dying

[Joakim]

On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 06:37:52 UTC, Tony wrote:
> On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:12:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I don't know why you're so obsessed with storage when even 
>> midrange smartphones come with 32 GBs nowadays, expandable to 
>> much more with an SD card.  My tablet has only 16 GBs of 
>> storage, with only 10-12 actually accessible, but I've never 
>> had a problem building codebases that take up GBs of space 
>> with all the object files, alongside a 64 GB microSD card for 
>> many, mostly HD TV shows and movies.
>
> The smallest storage Windows 10/Linux laptops have is a 128GB 
> SSD. Even with a faster 128GB SSD being around the price of a 
> 1TB hard drive, I still see 1TB being the dominant low-end 
> storage. So I am going by what I see being offered as a 
> minimum. It may be that most or even 99% of people can get by 
> with 32GB flash memory, but it isn't being offered (except on 
> Chromebooks which have traditionally only been web browsers, 
> and on Windows 10S machines which can only run Windows Store 
> apps).

The vast majority of users would be covered by 5-10 GBs of 
available storage, which is why the lowest tier of even the 
luxury iPhone was 16 GBs until last year.  Every time I talk to 
normal people, ie non-techies unlike us, and ask them how much 
storage they have in their device, whether smartphone, tablet, or 
laptop, they have no idea.  If I look in the device, I inevitably 
find they're only using something like 3-5 GBs max, out of the 
20-100+ GBs they have available.

You only need 32 GBs or more if you're downloading a bunch of HD 
videos like I do, playing giant AAA games, or setting up a bunch 
of VMs, like some devs do.  These are all niche uses, that 99% of 
users don't partake in, which is why 32 GBs is plenty for them.

>>> Are you suggesting they are developing their games for iOS 
>>> and Android devices ON those devices? Apple has XCode for 
>>> developing iOS apps and it runs on macOS machines only. There 
>>> is also the Xamarin IDE or IDE plug-in from Microsoft that 
>>> allows C# on iOS, but it runs on macOS or WIndows. For 
>>> Android, there is Android Studio - "The Official IDE of 
>>> Android" - which runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. There is 
>>> no Android version.
>>
>> Yes, of course they're still largely developing mobile games 
>> on PCs, though I'm not sure why you think that matters.  But 
>> your original claim was that they're still using PC-focused 
>> IDEs, as opposed to new mobile-focused IDEs like XCode or 
>> Android Studio, which you now highlight.
>
> I never made any previous claim about what IDEs are being used. 
> The only time I previously mentioned an IDE was with regard to 
> RemObjects and Embarcadero offering cross-compilation to 
> Android/iOS with their products.
>
> "There is a case to be made for supporting  Android/iOS 
> cross-compilation. But it doesn't have to come at the expense 
> of Windows 64-bit integration. Not sure they even involve the 
> same skillsets. Embarcadero and Remobjects both now support 
> Android/iOS development from their Windows (and macOS in the 
> case of Remobjects) IDEs."
>
> That was to highlight that those two compiler companies have 
> seen fit to also cross-compile to mobile - they saw an 
> importance to mobile development. It wasn't about what IDEs are 
> best for mobile or even what IDEs are being used for mobile.

If you look back to the first mention of IDES, it was your 
statement, "Good luck selling game developers on using D to 
develop for Android, when you can't supply those same game 
developers a top-notch development environment for the premier 
platform for performance critical games - Windows 64-bit."

That at least implies that they're using the same IDE to target 
both mobile and PC gaming, which is what I was disputing.  If you 
agree that they use completely different toolchains, then it is 
irrelevant whether D supports Windows-focused IDEs, as it doesn't 
affect mobile-focused devs.

> Not that it matters, but I don't think that XCode meets the 
> definition of "new mobile-focused IDE" as-as far as I know, it 
> was developed for OS X development and is still used for such. 
> Android Studio may be "new mobile-focused", even though based 
> on IntelliJ IDEA.

Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards mobile 
development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's pretty 
much all that devs are using it for these days.

>> Yes, Windows is dominant, dominant in a niche, internal IT.  
>> The consumer mobile market is much larger nowadays, and 
>> Windows has almost no market share there.
>
> Sad too, because of all the tablet/phone interfaces, the only 
> one that is not just "icons on a background", and my personal 
> preference, is Windows Mobile.

I've always thought that flat Metro interface was best suited for 
mobile displays, the easiest to view, render, and touch.  To some 
extent, all the other mobile interfaces have copied it, with 
their move to flat UIs over the years.  However, it obviously 
takes much more than a nice GUI to do well in mobile.

>> As for Microsoft, Windows is not their only product, they have 
>> moved Office onto the dominant mobile platforms.  As long as 
>> they keep supporting mobile, they could eke out an existence.  
>> Their big bet on Azure is going to end badly though.
>
> They have Word, Excel, Powerpoint for mobile, but they are 
> free. The Android store mentions "in-app purchases" but I 
> wasn't offered any. Maybe it is for OneDrive storage of files. 
> I already have that so it could be why I don't see anything to 
> purchase in the app.

My understanding is that they're not full Office either, that 
features are still missing that you can only get in the paid 
desktop version.  I don't know how much those missing features 
matter, as I don't use Office or any such suite, but MS would be 
making a mistake to not offer those on mobile eventually.

>>> Why did they fund development of a new iMac Pro which is 
>>> coming this December as well as the new MacBook Pros that 
>>> came out this June? That's a contradiction of "milk it like 
>>> an iPod".
>>
>> Because their userbase was rebelling?  I take it you're not 
>> that familiar with Mac users, but they were genuinely scared 
>> that Apple was leaving them behind, since they weren't 
>> refreshing Mac and Macbooks much anymore and all Apple's focus 
>> is on iOS:
>
> So, let them rebel. You said that they would like to see it go 
> away, and/or they want to milk it. If you have to spend money 
> on development to keep selling it, then you can't "milk it".

You and I and Jobs may've let them rebel, but Apple is a public 
corporation.  They can't just let easy money go, their 
shareholders may not like it. Perhaps you're not too familiar 
with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making good 
money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good Apple devs 
off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac financials aren't 
_that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily want to piss off your 
oldest and most loyal customers, who may stop buying iPhones and 
iPads too.

So they have to constantly make a calculation, has the Mac 
userbase shrunk enough yet that they can just ditch that legacy 
desktop OS?  Maybe they have a converged device in the works, ie 
the iPhone XV will ship a macOS GUI/environment as an iOS 
software upgrade to be used with their version of Dex/Sentio, 
after which they can tell those users, "Just buy an iPhone and 
get the Mac software upgrade." ;)

Either way, I'm sure they're crunching the numbers every quarter 
on when to cut bait, but given they've kept the iPod Touch around 
this long, I doubt the Mac will be axed anytime soon.  They've 
already heavily cut their Mac investment though, as all you hear 
from Mac users is that the pace of feature development and bug 
fixes has greatly slowed (this article also dings iOS, but notice 
that most of the specific criticism is for OS X and its apps):

https://pljns.com/blog/2016/02/04/apples-declining-software-quality/

> It is ironic that Microsoft and Ubuntu both saw a convergence 
> of mobile and desktop and began modifying their desktop 
> interace to best suit mobile, and now  Ubuntu has abandoned the 
> idea and Microsoft has abandoned the phone market. As it turns 
> out, any convergence will have to come from the two dominant 
> mobile OSes as it is impossible to go the other direction due 
> to the app catch-22.

I think Jobs got it right that you cannot converge too early, ie 
Apple kept their desktop and mobile OS's separate and are only 
slowly converging them.  One reason is that the mobile hardware 
was just not powerful and efficient enough back when Windows 8 
tried to converge the two UIs.  Another is that the mobile market 
is much more important and far larger, so its better to focus 
more on getting that right, then just add a desktop GUI later as 
a mobile feature.

Microsoft was really caught between a rock and a hard place, as 
that desktop GUI for "lean forward" work is all they knew, what 
the entire computing market and their dominant business was built 
on.  For MS to rush headlong into mobile-first and leave the 
desktop behind would've taken a giant push, one that their 
corporate culture, fat, flush, and arrogant after a decade of 
minting money, was likely incapable of making.

Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even 
Jobs by all indications.  Mobile has really been a tidal wave 
over the last decade.  Funny how all you hear is bitching and 
whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they missed 
the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's nothing 
fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the biggest boom 
of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew right in front 
of their faces. :D