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Hmm, considering this is on mac rumours, the title does make sense. But it sounds like the more accurate title would be "Windows 10 Deadline Expedites Fleet Renewels". The +17% in lenovo shipments, along with increases for HP and Asus, will all come with Windows 11 installation count bumps, presumeably. That would be the windows 10 deadline working as intended... damnit!
Nobody looking at graphs will be able to determine if the Mac purchases are defection or full fleet renewal at hybrid companies unless the numbers are large.

You can’t compare percentages like this when they don’t have the same denominator.

Seme though. What are the odds the increase in Mac sales just correlate to old Intel Mac users finally upgrading to AS?
This. Where are "Linux evangelists" in 2025? GNU/Linux as a whole has never been in better shape to catch users fleeing from Windows, it surely looks like a much easier task than it was 15 years ago (even despite UEFI's additional complexity burden).

Spot on the +17% in lenovo shipments, but shouldn't we also care about the huge number of computers they're replacing - just because they're incapable of running Windows 11?

I use Windows for one reason only: Steam and best performance and compatibility for high resolution gaming.

If I didn’t want that, I wouldn’t be on windows at all.

The issue I have with Linux is that it’s 2025 and every single time I’ve created a Linux system in the past ten years, I have some sort of issue that I spend too much of my time figuring out. I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”

The downside of open source is you have to have the time to fix it yourself, and that lack of time is what keeps me from pursuing Linux, even though I am absolutely furious at the crap Microsoft is pulling lately, from shutting off ability to create a local account, to forcing OneDrive, to throwing Ads onto the desktop, to the telemetry and marketing spyware that is now standard on Windows 11.

> considering this is on mac rumours

The findings they are discussing are from Counterpoint Research:

> According to Counterpoint, Apple's global Mac shipments grew 14.9% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, supported by demand for new MacBook models and rising enterprise adoption of Apple hardware.

Even that is a stretch. How are they actually discerning intention/causation?

Didn't we have way more layoffs last year? AI chase hardware is rolling out. Seems like a lot of factors could be involved.

It reads like a fluff piece by that webpage. A rumors site.
My 89 year old mother switched to Mac. She's not that techy but when Microsoft depreciated her Windows 10 system she asked friends what's good and now has a Macbook. I'm not sure this has been a good move from Microsoft.
The TPM 2.0 requirement is also bullshit. I'm sure there are good excuses but I know several people who have older PCs that still run perfectly fine and now have to move to Linux/Mac or buy a new PC. I've been offering to help them move to various Linux distros but in the end, there are going to be soooo many old PCs ending up in landfill because of this decision.

I also would have much preferred to stay on 10 (for various reasons) but my work VPN is locking out anyone using it (even though MS just extended the support deadline for another year).

For kicks I put Windows 11 on one of my retro laptops - a dell e6500 with 8gb of ram and it ran super well. I don't think it meets the tpm v2 requirements but it's wild we can't virtualize a decent tpm.
My older Dell XPS Windows 10 laptop was due for an upgrade, and it was new enough that it supports Windows 11. Microsoft's end-of-life of 10, constant prodding to upgrade and Dell's terrible redesign of the XPS series made me look at my options.

I ended up with an M4 MacBook Air and couldn't be happier.

I decided a Macbook pro M4 pro was the right option for me, 48gb/36 accessible to the gpus with very decent tokens/s throughput for (increasingly impressive) offline midrange open LLM inference and huge battery life. Nothing in the windows world to touch it. But a few windows-only bits of software I occasionally use now run very happily in a Windows 11 arm vm on a free VMware fusion 25H2 on my mac, with a 5 dollar win oem license.
some Dell XPS series come with "Intel PTT" option in BIOS which provides TPM 2.0 functionality. That might open up the upgrade path, FYI.
It seems like if you aren't gonna use Linux and you aren't severely cash-constrained, Macbooks are almost the only credible choice at this point?

Pretty annoying coz Linux is non-negotiable for me. I've just bought a laptop and it feels like I'm getting much worse value for money than I would with a Mac.

If you really need something cheap... Seems you are basically just screwed at this point, unless you are able to use Linux. Admittedly, I installed Ubuntu for my 70 year old mother a few months back and I haven't had a single support request so far. She's on a 2013 MacBook Air.

As a person who switched from windows to mac (while linux being an all-time constant) for other reasons, it still feels like a weird migration because windows is a system full of glaring bugs that everyone experiences but knows how to work around while mac is (feels like) a system absent of huge flaws but there are many more smaller bugs that very small number of users experience that are seemingly impossible to work around.

One thing that's driving me crazy:

So for example you have 5 virtual desktops on Mac, and you use a keyboard shortcut to move left and right. So, if you start from the 1st and go to the 3rd and then immediately try to go back to the 2nd (1->3->2), animations need to complete on the 3rd until you can change direction. Doesn't happen if you start from the 2nd and go to the 4th then change direction to move to the 3rd(2->4->3). Same when beginning from the 5th to the 3rd then back to 4th (5->3->4). Doesn't happen with 4->2->3. Also, the windows which are visible on all desktops are shown until the animation is complete then the last focused windows on that desktop will be shown. And even with reduced motion, some fade animation is still there. Infuriating stuff for otherwise a magical experience.

Yeah, this is also true when switching applications, the keyboard events are sent to the previous application until the animations are completed.

The result? If you switch to an app to close it and use the Cmd + Q to quit it, but if you didn’t wait for the animations to finish, then you just quit the app you came from.

I think this bug was introduced like 2-3 years ago.

I've been using Tahoe since the beta and Clipboard Search / History a new feature showcased in one of the Apple events and never worked.

I finally gave in and contacted Apple support which is not an option during beta, and after a bit of back and forth and getting nowhere they were going to set me up with a specialist call; I asked to schedule it in 30 mins. I decided to do a last ditch effort to see if anyone was out there having the problem, and lo and behold the solution is Spotlight needs to index Documents which I had toggled off because I normally don't want to see those. Tahoe has so many signs of rushed engineering and lack or attention to detail; at least have some state machine notification thing between toggling Documents / Clipboard Search to inform the user they need both. But it is a heaps handy feature now that it is working.

You can set hotkeys to go directly to a specific virtual desktop. I have ctrl-1 though ctrl-9 setup for the reason you called out.
> you have 5 virtual desktops on Mac

The easiest workaround that come to mind is to not use 5 virtual desktops

When Windows 8 and the start page came out, I convinced a lot of my end users (most of my 75 end users did over time) to switch as they'd have to learn something new anyway.

Now with Windows 10 going away, they are picking up the stragglers.

Made my life easier.

What an own goal by Microsoft.
What’s a one paragraph explanation of why 11 is considered so much worse than 10 for someone who didn’t use Windows since 7?
If I were CEO, I'd notice that smart phones, tables, Chromebooks, and a more successful Apple have shifted the market. Windows is only 10% of revenue, so I'm not about to throw it away, but it's declining, and it's my focus. I'd let the engineers do the big breaking change that they've been clamoring for and make sure a key goal is cost savings from dropping legacy platforms. This sets up Windows to go into maintenance mode in 2035.
So I work at Microsoft and will admit that the company has had many Own-goals over the years, but think about it this way. Apple provides software updates for a given model of mac for 7-8 years on average. Windows 10 came out more than 20 years ago. How long should they put resources into it?
I hear Intel in unhappy because enterprise fleets are replacing win 10 with macs.
Weird, because on earning call 2 days ago they claimed that w10 eol is significantly boosting sales
but why wouldn't enterprise just run W10 LTSC until 2038 ?

there will probably be ATMs running LTSC even past 2038

Apple is well positioned for this, it has never been so cheap to own a Mac before, and the price/performance you get at that price is unprecedented.
Depends on where on the globe.
Interesting that environmental organisations are not protesting at Microsoft HQ. It's a massive middle finger to nature.
Organisations of all kinds did, and now ESU updates are free for consumers in the EU: Microsoft conceded that they had to be according to some EU directive, although it was related to software and not to environmental factors.
Datacenters are the much bigger issue now. At least most of the greenwash nonsense has stopped. It wasn't that long ago that Microsoft was bragging about slowing down your PC to help the environment. Between Windows 11 binning tens of millions of computers and all the energy hungry datacenters, the corporate green messaging has been blown apart.
they protested it both in the US and the EU.
Protests rarely work.
Clearly they must not be serious about the environment then /s
Don't worry the bugs of Tahoe will turn it back down :)
On HN every release of MacOS since Mavericks has been an unforced error that will bring the swift, irreversible end of the Mac.
Completely agree, Apple made a vast of unforced errors: beyond UI tastes there are bugs that could have been detected by a below average QA team.
Seems to be pretty good in my experience, compared to previous .0 releases
The biggest issue with Windows 11 for me is the noticeable performance lag in basic apps like Notepad and File Explorer. Simple tasks, like opening files or navigating folders, feel sluggish, and I can visibly see windows rendering in slow motion. I’ve heard this might be due to Windows 11’s UI elements being redrawn over lower level UI. I’m considering switching to Linux as my daily driver.
The Windows hullabaloo actually made me want to move off Mac and try Linux. I tried daily driving Bazzite and Omarchy. It's funny how the smallest things can cause resistance to change. For me, the lack of inertial scrolling with mouse wheel and the different copy/paste shortcuts were the dealbreakers. Even though the tiling windows, lack of bloat etc was super nice
It sucks that DHH is getting so much attention on what is basically his personal rice in Omarchy, to the point that he's becoming a sort of face for "Linux with nicish defaults". He is a bigot who regularly engages in reactionary politics on his personal blog (https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...). I don't want this man representing the Linux community writ large.
Don't expect macOS quality to be any better though, especially if buying laptops running Tahoe.
Windows Vista by all accounts was far worse, and people definitely switched to Mac then because one of the best laptop Windows XP could be installed on flawlessly at the time was a MacBook Pro.
If Apple had released the rumoured budget macbook using the A-series chipset and take a shot at Microsoft in the marketing, I think they would see a surge of orders and converts.
Doubtful. They've already tapped out the white-collar classroom market with iPads, and macOS isn't getting good enough to convert Windows diehards. Frankly I think Cook is making the right decision here, the A-series Macbook is basically guaranteed to be a loss-leader compared to other hardware so you might as well drive current customers to more expensive (eg. redesigned Air) models instead.
It is really weird but at first it made me think of Bootcamp&Windows would be back etc.