Comment by aleph_minus_one
14 hours ago
> Apple is stylish and cool by default, with occasional stumbles. Even among tech people, they have good will even though they seem to regard the Open Source community with total ambivalence at best.
This love for Apple seems to be a very US-American thing.
I dunno, I haven’t been to Europe. What do they favor, Linux? Sounds like paradise.
Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters). GNU/Linux has its very vocal users, but as a matter of fact, it is rather a niche outside of nerd circles.
I would thus rather say many European countries are more Microsoft-centered, even though at least in Germany I would say that people deeply hate and distrust the more and more spying functionalities that Microsoft introduces into its software. So I would claim this current dominance of the Microsoft ecosystem is fragile.
Surprisingly, at least in Germany I observe that Microsoft plans to stop providing updates to Windows 10 (and forces the users to buy new computers) has made quite a lot of mainstream users to at least consider switching to the GNU/Linux ecosystem:
It is perhaps difficult to understand to people who are used to the US mentality, but the fact that Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last Windows, and after that broke this promise (and particular importantly: cease to provide further updates for Windows 10 despite this promise) is considered to be near "high treason" by many PC users - a nigh-unforgivable sin. In particular US-American companies should really learn to understand that (in the eyes of German users, who consider such promises to be sacred) if you give a promise, and break it, this is (I am only slightly exaggerating) something that the CEO (or even the board) of the respective company should better commit suicide for because of the shame that he brought to the company.
A lot of people are annoyed with Microsoft in the US as well, although I guess we’ll see if that translates into switching.
> Apple computers are typically rather mostly used by people from media and audio production (+ some hipsters).
For what it’s worth, this is the sort of stuff I meant by “stylish and cool,” these are the fashionable people, right? That doesn’t make their decisions good, at all (I intentionally picked the description “stylish and cool,” not “good and technically solid.”)
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Europe is a Microsoft stronghold in almost all areas except some tiny tech focused startups with young founders,