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While co-pilot is sometimes useful, I agree it’s better to turn it off.

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Peter Deegan

Well, I believe that you have some features in some software on Windows not found on the Mac. However, I have a real hard time thinking that making a blanket statement about power users needing Windows seems a stretch since Apple and millions of other developers, “power users” and others doing advanced work in science and elsewhere have not needed Windows “power” over Apple’s. Even Microsoft’s Mac team uses and has used Macs for decades to develop software. I don’t know how many of them, or what other tools they currently use (my experience with them was some time ago) but I doubt they are only on Windows for their dev work. And Power users encorporate some of the most sophisticated video editing done in Hollywood and elsewhere. Not as much since Apple bailed on the original Final Cut, but still plenty.

What is your time worth? Mine’s worth a minimum of $100 an hour to my clients. Some double that. Could they have used me vastly less by paying a bit more for hardware? Absolutely. So some thoughts: “:…while PC users have been concerned with performance, freedom, and price.” I use both daily, I’ve never had an issue with performance or so called “freedom” on either. as to price, how many f**** hours have all of us spent on stupid issues with Windows updates, etc etc. This entire site exists because of all the hassles we get the privilege to fix “for free”. I’ve wasted far more time on Windows than I have even begun to waste on Mac. Thousands of hours of frustration. I’m sure you have too. So don’t talk to me about price. I’ve paid a very high price for using Windows machines. 

“Being forced to buy [wayyy overpriced] Apple hardware is also crazy.” Once again, pay me now or pay me later. I spent dozens of hours with one of the most expensive Lenovo laptops fighting freezing and rebooting, over and over again. I sent it back three times. Lenovo was terrible to deal with. Have I *ever* had that problem with 20 years of Apple hardware? No. None. Zero. 

Is Windows 11 vastly better/more stable than Windows 10, 9, etc. ? Yes. I think. Though my Lenovo experience was with 11 last fall. Where was the problem?  Graphics Card? Hardware failure? The fact that it was an AMD chip rather than Intel? On Apple it just f***ing works.

The biggest problem I see on Apple is people trying to buy the cheapest model, not realizing they need more. 128 or 256 GB SSD when they will almost immediately need 512. Buying 8 GB RAM when they immediately need 16, though even that is less an issue with Mac than I see with Windows.

 

 

 

 

I guess to me the point is that Edge is available on both the Mac and Windows. I use it daily on both when I am doing consulting.

The vast amount of people using a Mac do not need the power of Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Myself included, even though I have a subscription to M365. I hate using the products anymore.

Between Apple’s Pages, Notes, and if anything else, Google Docs, I can’t imagine urging a single user to pay Microsoft for their products. The only times I find it needed is for writers (my wife’s one) and people sharing work with people on M365. For average users, Apple products are fine and getting better. Notes is a fabulous note-taking product these days, Apple’s spreadsheet is fine. All this just for the price of the OS. How can you lose?

And the OS is vastly more stable. Having been an IT consultant for decades, having extensively used both platforms, I can see virtually no reason to recommend Windows today. The money you save is quickly used up in frustration and irritating updates.

I have to use both and avoid Windows as much as I can.

Oh, and I use Parallels to run Windows when needed, no need for actual hardware.

as a long time user of both the Mac and Windows,(I go back to the first Mac in 1984 and Windows 1.0 not long after) I can say I’m happy that you’re finally seeing that. We do need to consider both platforms whenever looking at an  upgrade. I also am a consultant to small businesses and nonprofits in the area and I have to say that in over a dozen years of doing this work I see vastly more problems with Windows machines than Macintosh. I enjoy using windows, I love the power keys set ups that are much more easier to deal with than the Mac world, but the day-to-day aggravations mount up.

I chose not to buy a physical Windows machine, and bought a Mac mini a year ago for my desktop machine. I am extremely happy with it and run parallels on it to keep my Windows skills up-to-date. It works wonderfully.

for small business people who are using primarily web-based products for their business, I have no problem recommending Apple. There are many though who are long-term Windows users and expect to see file explorer the way they always have, and for those users it’s usually Windows as a choice.

Thanks again for your great reporting. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing.

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Still Anonymous, Will Fastie

As a Microsoft certified consultant dealing with many nonprofits and small businesses in my area, I have made sure that none of them have moved to the newOutlook. I’m going to have to also make sure that the settings are set so they don’t get forced to do that in January. I cannot understand why MICROSOFT is forcing this on businesses at this point in time. the product is still a beta product in my mind and I’m sure in the minds of most of their customers. Personally, since I’ve been using a Mac for a number of years as my primary machine, I’ve actually found myself moving back to Apple mail, which has added a number of features over the leaders and is a serious contender for anyone using the Mac. while there was plenty to complain about with the old classic outlook, the lack of feature sets in the new Outlook and the other shortcomings you point out make it a horrible upgrade for anyone that has years of experience using it. And what the hell is the problem with not being able to open PST’s? Doesn’t Bill Gates have like 50 years of PST’s on his computer? If you guys get a chance to interview him you might want to ask that question.

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windbg, Cybertooth, Mr. Austin

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-apps/end-of-support/microsoft-365-services-connectivity

Office 2016 for example.

• Support for connection to Microsoft 365 services with Office 2019 and Office 2016 ended on October 10, 2023.
• As stated in a April 2017 blog post, only perpetual Office versions in mainstream support are supported for connecting to Microsoft 365 services. Office 2016 is now out of mainstream support, but its coverage was extended until October 2023, as stated in a September 2018 blog post.

the issue as I recall it was that the perpetual licenses they had bought through tech soup no longer could or maybe never did connect to SharePoint services and I do remember that they were having difficulty having it actually saved to OneDrive. Of course they could navigate to OneDrive through file explorer to save it, but it wasn’t saving the documents natively in OneDrive for business. these perpetual licenses are relatively rare in my experience, but if they’re buying through tech soup as an NGO, they very likely would’ve bought those versions back in the last decade. Just a heads up. for anyone running into this issue I would recommend totally uninstalling office 365 from those days if they have a perpetual license and there’s actually a special way to uninstall the entire thing. I do believe I had to go and use a special tool that I’m forgetting the name of right now sarah? or something like that in order to totally uninstall the product. new version would not install until I had totally eliminated the old version.

I had a client that had the office 2019 version installed, and I seem to remember there was some problems using OneDrive with that product. If I remember right, I don’t think it supported saving to the cloud in OneDrive but you don’t mention any limitations on using OneDrive with this new product. Have they fix that issue?

I also believe there’s no support for SharePoint with that product. Did they change that with the new version as well?

I still always set up my computers for my clients using local admin. And while I agree with your assessment, one of the problems is the amount of money one can charge to try to get a client out of one of these labyrinths that they’ve gotten themselves into, vs versus buying a new computer. It’s aggravating to spend 2 to 3 hours trying to solve a problem and either watching my hourly rate go down because it’s impossible to charge a client for three hours of struggling to get their windows machine back up and running, versus just telling him to buy a new machine and throw the old ones away which I don’t want to do. I usually end up eating my hourly rate as a favor to the environment, but I know myself and other IT consultants in the area have talked about this trade-off. We need to charge certain amount to keep our businesses going, but we really can’t charge clients the amount that they need to be charged for our expertise. while I understand that Microsoft and others are doing all they can to try to make these machines they’ve created more secure, one of their answers seems to be to make them disposable.

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Cybertooth, Steve S., rbailin, Donny H, SkipH, Steve, DLivesInTexas, PKCano

The tech teams at Msft have nothing to do with naming or marketing. This whole fiasco is from the Marketing and senior mgmt within the Office product teams.My guess is they all are under 4o and have never worked in IT before. They likely have little sympathy or understanding for us who use and actually support the product.

the PST version does not exist today on any Outlook.

just yesterday. A friend of mine called needing help because he had been switched to the new outlook and he had been using the old Microsoft Mail program.   he could not send an attachment with the new Outlook. He was totally confused. I didn’t really believe him, but I logged into his machine remotely and sure enough there was no way to get outlook to send attachments. It failed with an error message every time. He also had Microsoft Outlook the business version on his machine so we went to that version and I turned off the new outlook . and yes, magically outlook, The old outlook, was able to send attachments with no problem. I have no idea why the new outlook could not send attachments, but since I was seeing the same error message over and over again “try later”I assumed it was a problem at Microsoft. But why would the mail reader not be able to send an attachment? I just don’t understand that

Yeah, I’m very impressed with what Apple has rolled out at least from a marking perspective. If they can follow through with these AI-based improvements to their existing feature set that would be extremely useful way to go.

i’m really grateful that they’re going to be doing the processing and their own data centers rather than going out immediately to chatgpt. It of course remains to be seen how successful they are in implementing these how quickly but I for one I’m looking forward to them and I’m lucky enough to have Apple Silicon new enough to use these.

I would only add as a reminder that PST’s are going away in the next version of Outlook. You can’t even open them at least at this point in time depending on how long you want to save these PST’s you might be going down to dead end. perhaps convert the PST into a standard OST when you’re inside of Outlook with them?

Another possible opportunity might be to set up a pop connection with the Google email. That way you could designate to delete from the server after downloading. I haven’t tried it, but I assume that would work since Google still supports POP.

I haven’t finished my 1st cup of morning coffee so take this with a grain of salt.