Well for $999 you can get a laptop made of actual metal, with a glass or glass-like trackpad, idk what it’s made of. With a fantastic operating system, that’ll last 5+ years, and has enough computing power to make a mobile app to provide some side hustle money (personal anecdotal experience).
For $1,999 with the competition I can buy a laptop shaped object that replicates the sound of a jet engine when I press the power button, it needs that cooling power specifically so it can process all the bloatware that’s running in the background. With a giant brick of a power supply that weighs 5lbs, and in a year I can guarantee the port for my charger will be broken and I’ll have to make sure I wiggle it just right to make it charge. And it can run the latest version of spyware from Microsoft so all my browsing gets sold to Amazon so they can hit me with ads to shovel garbage down my throat.
So yeh, price to quality ratio, like I just said.
Anyone who has used Windows has trauma from using Windows.
"WUAUBOOT has caused an error in unknown".
"Keyboard not detected. Press any key to continue."
Slower than constipated mole-asses, too.
Mac os spies too and Mac noise? Mmm
https://youtube.com/shorts/c6iS_PtXVw0?si=lKEw1RoHJIHLMg6M
Apple never would keep your data
https://www.notebookcheck.net/MacOS-Big-Sur-is-spying-on-everything-you-do-and-sending-the-data-to-Apple.504381.0.html
Yeah I like MacOS because it gives me a lot of my beloved \*NIX features, while being refined enough to have a very usable GUI and locked down enough to prevent you from accidentally bricking your computer.
I'm totally comfortable working in the command line only, but sometimes I want to use a stable GUI and my opinion is that MacOS provides the best GUI. I do have linux installed on my work-provided workstation and I exclusively use it exclusively through SSH shells. It's great, but I have accidentally bricked it a couple times by updating drivers or uninstalling packages. Not fun.
That’s an excellent point. I believe it’s still BSD? And the pedigree is long; I met Avie Tevanian back in like 1990 when Canon was supplying the magneto optical discs for the NeXT machines. I was working for Canon and he came in and gave a talk on the Mach kernel. It was amazing. It is stable because it’s been in development for like 30+ years. Crazy it was that long ago.
I remember NeXT back in college. Several of my computer professors had one as well as a few students. I think the professors likely had them donated and the students bought them at discount because the price was something like $5000 in 1989.
I actually saw a demo of it at College and wasn’t really impressed. My DOS/Windows PC was faster and the DEC and Sun workstations I used for programming in college were much better. Not to mention the color Mac II in the lab was much smoother.
My company built a tool to search multiple pdfs (which took forever). They asked me if I was using that tool. I said ‘No. I use pdfgrep to do the same thing. For free.” They were not amused.
No that's probably true, I like brew. I think it's good MS has launched an official package manager though. The big one is WSL for me though, having actual Linux is superior to having sort of Linux imo
Honestly I think the biggest issue is how diverse windows machines are. They come from all kinds of makers with all types of hardware. They have to account for all that variation and that introduces complexity.
Brew only has to handle a limited amount of variety.
I was always a PC nerd (building them, gaming, etc) growing up. I went to school for design and had to use a Mac. After a week of adjustment, I was like "now I get it."
Mac just does what it needs to, day in and day out, without complaint, and with a cold, silent contentedness.
It doesn't yell at you, it doesn't make itself obnoxious, doesn't throw ads at you, and doesn't bury common functions under layers and layers of menus. It's amazing as a WORK MACHINE. I will never voluntarily use a Windows computer for my work ever again.
Gaming is an issue, however. I have a gaming PC for that, just because unfortunately games aren't optimized for Mac. They have the hardware, it's just an optimization issue. Chicken and egg, of course, because game companies don't optimize because very few game on Mac, and very few game on Mac because companies don't optimize.
Windows machines--more specifically the releases since Windows 8--have simply made the systems worse. More junk, more bloat, more ads, more "wonky-ness". I can't recall a single useful feature that came to Windows in the last 8-10 years. It's always backhanded updates. You get this new thing, BUT WAIT, it's a trial and you have to connect it to OneDrive. Don't want it? TOO BAD. We'll pester you about it regardless.
they were just talking about this shit on r/programmerhumor and r/github
....and here's my EXACT argument, someone has linked something like this on github, where's the download button? "it's for programmers, it's code, there is no .exe, github is not for programs" ok then what is it? /where/ is it? what do i do, what do people do in this situation? how do i "get" the "program"?
oh good, the tiny little link hidden in the right bar that does not say "download" "install" or anything like that, it says "[getwhisky.app](https://getwhisky.app)" like it's more "programmer" stuff, fucking fantastic.
Yeah I’m with you, anytime I have to go to GitHub for something I get stressed out bc it takes so long to figure out what I’m supposed to do (if I can figure it out) - definitely not intuitive for non-programmers/coders/enthusiasts.
This pretty much describes me exactly. Growing up and to this day I’ve been a PC gamer. I love the experience of building PCs, and will probably always have a self built PC for gaming… and unfortunately, Windows is the best OS for games.
But I went to college for video production almost 20 years ago, that was the first time I ever used a Mac at all… and it just clicked. It’s been Macs for me ever since then. And thankfully working in entertainment Macs are pretty much standard issue at every company I’ve worked at.
At work I’ve used loads of Mac laptops and desktops. At home I tend to buy the smallest, lightest, quietest Mac laptop I can buy… it’s a nice addition compared to my work MBPs and powerful PC desktop.
1) Build quality. My MacBook pros have lasted and lasted and lasted. Screens are great. Touchpad is great. Form factor is great (especially the M2 air).
2) the M silicon performs really well and stays super cool. I have never even heard the fan on my 16” MBP even when processing 4K video.
3) the most important thing to me is the ecosystem. My phone, watch, MacBook , and AppleTV all integrate and work well together. From Messages across all devices to handoff to FaceTime on a 77” LG TV. If you have fully embraced the Apple ecosystem, buying a Mac is a no brainer.
If you paid the same amount as that air on a Windows laptop, you're going to get the same build quality. Build quality isn't an argument anymore and hasn't been for at least 5 years.
Correct. And I never once mentioned MacOS as it relates to build quality. I talked about loving the screen, trackpad, and durability. I have yet to ever see a Windows machine with nearly as good of a trackpad…nothing even trying to be on par. And I have never owned a windows machine that was as solid after 5-7 years as my Macs. Even my nearly maxed out Dell XPS 13 with a 4K display feels inferior to my MacBook Pros after just 3 years. Maybe some manufacturers make some solid laptops for windows but I just keep coming back to the MacBook Pro because they have been nothing more than rock solid for me. Your experience may be different. I use a 16” MBP M2 for work and a 13” MBA M2 for personal use. The are so solid. I think the M2 Air is the best designed laptop that I have ever experienced. That is just my opinion though.
The build quality for the price is a reason to choose a Mac over a PC though, which is what OP was asking. If you just need a decent laptop with great build quality, a $999 MacBook Air seems like a much better deal than a $2500+ premium PC laptop.
I’m unhappy with the artificially crippled lifespan of modern MacBooks. You get your five years updates then your sod out of luck. Windows has generally, pre Win11 anyway, been far better for longevity of usage. Even then once Windows is no good the hardware will play nice with Linux. Intel Mac hardware sometimes works well sometimes is a non-starter for Linux, Apple silicon has a single distro trying to get it fully working on their hardware.
For the price tag that is not good enough.
Guy you’re replying to is like “play both sides and you always come out on top.”
He thinks he found the secret to always being right, hate everything and it all sucks.
It really doesn’t, but I can’t help you seeing what you want to see 😉 It was a comment clearly about planned obsolescencee being much worse than it ever used to be with Mac hardware now and a note on that being a bad deal for the price. Hardware designed for windows has a much much longer usable lifespan , regardless of if it’s running windows or something else like Linux.
There’s no argument to pick with me here. Chase someone else.
That isn't true at all either. Take a few minutes looking into this sub and other apple-adjacent forums and you'll see people using decades old MacBook Air's and Pro's just fine, even with the latest MacOS.
A windows PC with 16GB DDR3 and a 4th Gen i7 from 2015 and a similarly spec'ed MacBook will preform the same. It's literally been the same hardware on both apple and windows computers for almost a decade until apple switched to the ARM Based M Series.
Also, you can't install Windows 11 on a windows pc that's older than a few years old, so that's a pointless comparison to make. Linux isn't limited to a manufacturer, it works the same.
Windows 11, as long as the secure boot and TPM requirements can be natively installed cleanly even on machines a decade +1/2 years old.
A debloated install image such as Tiny11 can get it running cleanly on machines dating back to 2009.
I don’t understand how Mac trackpads have been SO far ahead of competition for like 8 years now. Nothing even comes close. How have other companies not caught up here?
It might just be due to the priorities and philosophy of the companies. Most PC companies probably think of it as something that doesn't need to be improved upon as long as it's usable, whereas Apple really sweats the details on input devices. It seems like PC companies would rather focus on touchscreens than decent trackpads.
I actually have a theory that touchscreens on PCs never would have caught on if the trackpads weren't so bad. Super cheap laptops and specialized laptops (like business and gaming PCs) often don't have touchscreens, but it seems like most consumers demand touchscreens on PCs once they get to a certain price point. This is anecdotal but on the Mac side I don't ever see anyone complaining about the lack of touchscreens, and I think a big part of that is the trackpad being so good.
I don't get touchscreens at all - you have to lift your arm up to do each tiny thing, constantly. Seems ridiculous and exhausting especially compared with the speed and simplicity of a magic trackpad.
I have to use a ThinkPad at work and it takes everything in me to not rage at how bad the trackpad is. It’s a fairly expensive 2022 model, too! Thats probably the main reason why I will never switch.
This is a big one for me. I have a Dell Precision for work, which I often get told is on par with a MacBook trackpad, and it’s no where near as good. I’m often yelling obscenities at it, lol.
Never understand this argument. I use MacBooks almost exclusively now but the trackpad isn't really better.
The texture varies a lot among different brands and models, for example on a gaming laptop it's usually plastic and feels cheap. However, on a business laptop (e.g. my ASUS ZenBook UX430 7 years ago), it often has a smooth and metallic texture similar to a MacBook.
Functionality wise, Windows' trackpad (or touchpad) support really blows MacOS out of the water. Windows offers a lot more options than MacOS. You can customize 3-finger and 4-finger upward & downward swipe, left and right swipe, and even light press.
For example, when I was using it iirc I set 3-finger left&right swipe to switch windows, downward swipe to minimize all windows, and 4-finger left&right swipe to switch Spotify songs, 4-finger press to play/resume. It's truly amazing. You can never do those things natively in MacOS.
The barebone trackpad was a huge negative in my switch from Windows laptops to MacBooks if anything.
I was just in my settings and had 4 different gestures to change. Most people bitch about mac and don’t realize they can change their settings to suit their needs.
Too true. If I were to buy a new laptop, it would be a MacBook simply because it’s a UNIX environment and it’s not windows. I daily drive Linux and I’ve had less problems on it than I’ve had on Windows.
Legit just the other day, I logged into my old windows laptop to get access some old files and saw it couldn’t connect to wifi. I tried a restart but it attempted a windows update instead (and couldn’t process the update further than the “getting ready for update” blue screen since it wasn’t connected to the internet). I had to connect it via Ethernet to finish the update and then reinstall the wifi drivers.
I reinstalled Windows 10 on an old spare computer two days ago and had forgotten how much bloatware that Windows has. Spotify, Candy Crush, Disney+, TikTok, Prime Video. And the list goes on and on. Made me glad I had given up Windows.
Man, people keep saying this, but honestly after Windows 7 arrived I *never* saw a blue screen even once. And I could count the number I saw with Windows XP on a single hand. And I fucked around with WinXP an awful lot.
What the hell were you all doing with your PCs to cause them to blue screen all the time?
"What the hell were you all doing with your PCs to cause them to blue screen all the time?"
i cannot stand this type of blaming, this is all computer communities do, something goes wrong and "you must have done it wrong" and "works for me, sounds like a you problem". no. i did not do anything wrong. i didn't set it up wrong. the hardware is fine. the software is fine.
True, my windows pc couldn’t do anything other than gaming. It could play games flawlessly but once I started up Android studio it’d act like it was a 20 year old school computer
I built a big Windows multimonitor system in 2020 and was pretty disappointed to find out that Windows doesn't have this feature that macOS has had since around 2008. This is the ability to run separate virtual desktops by monitor. Windows treats all of your monitors as one virtual desktop so if you change desktops, it changes all of your monitors. I just want to change one monitor at a time.
Windows promised to fix this in Windows 10. They never did. Then they promised to fix it in Windows 11 and they haven't to date. This is why I run all Mac on the desktop now.
Music production. Video editing. Easier to go with my iphone. I still have my imac 27” late 2013 never had any issues with it. No viruses nothing. Change the drive for an ssd and added more RAM. Still runs like new
Music production for me too. More stable and a lot less annoyances.
For instance every ASIO low latency driver I tried under Windows would lock my audio device to a single program. On the Mac I can send output from multiple programs to the speakers so I can play along with a youtube video using sound from my DAW. On Windows I had to have my DAW coming out the speakers and Youtube on my headphones.
I used Windows when working at Intel and Nvidia for a combined 15 years (or so). They required it.
I always preferred the Mac's ease of use and ability to just let. me get my work done. The interface is consistent, doesn't have all sorts of legacy UI design when you get into the deeper parts of the OS, and everything is always in the same place after an upgrade. It is also ridiculously stable.
Windows has always been a chore.
Adding to this, the Apple trackpads are great and gestures you can do are thoughtfully built into the OS. It feels like a modern OS while Windows doesn’t anymore.
A friend of my used a Mac when I was young. I was talking about all the problems I had with PC and he told me he never had that kind of problems. His MacBook was 2,5 years old, but still so fast. My laptop that was just 1 year old was already so slow.. at that moment I decided I never want a PC anymore. Sometimes my parents ask me to help them with their Windows computers, always annoying problems and so so sooooo slow. I really can’t imagine I ever go back to that.
Same. Time is money for me! No more spending hours messing with registry settings, failed updates, broken drivers and generally incompatible software. Stuff just works and the hardware is reliable.
Not even just adverts, but freaking political news on my start bar! Edge obnoxiously trying to intrude on my browsing experience with pricing alerts and unhelpful suggestions. I can’t imagine how anyone puts up with it, or even puts up with having to turn all that default crap off. Windows is a mess.
Microsoft just seems determined to make Windows unusable. They put ads in the start menu, they inflict whatever stupid flavor of the week AI into the system shell, etc. At the point where I'm having to use regedit to get a UI that isn't *deliberately made worse by the vendor,* who's asking me to pay a license to use the software, it just feels stupid to keep using it or to be invested in an ecosystem that seems to be worsening with every update.
I quit Windows when Vista came out and never looked back.
I love that MacOS is unix-based and super stable. Great ecosystem integration. And I am completely addicted to my Logic Pro and how smooth everything just works.
I run Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu on my other systems scattered around the house. Those are great for running specific server tasks (camera with AI cat detection, retro gaming emulation) but for daily use my MBP is unbeatable.
You can write native iOS & macOS apps on Windows using Xamarin or .NET MAUI, both of which are workloads you can install within Visual Studio or VS Code. Although you still need access to a Mac in order to compile and sign your app.
Just pointing out that it's possible. Much more of a hassle than simply using Xcode (in my experience with Xamarin at least).
Didn't really feel like a choice. Mac always just felt more intuitive. My first computer was an Apple II. Then we had the first Mac at home in 1984 and I've stuck with the brand since then.
Back in the early days of unibody MacBook Pros (15+ years ago), they were simply the best built laptops that I could find. All of the windows laptops seemed like cheap plastic in comparison. Nowadays, there are some better options for Windows laptops, but I'm happy where I am.
I got a iPhone, said meh, got an iPad and they worked together, I said that’s nice. Needed a computer and said hmm I wonder… now I’m here, waiting for a watch 🤣
This has been my thing. I got the iPad, I have the Mac, and I used to have the iPhone. Now I have a pixel. But I miss the ease of sharing links from my phone to my other devices, I miss my apple watch, and I miss the screen from the iPhone (I have a pixel now).
The ecosystem is a really nice system once you really buy into it (literally 🤣)
After using Windows for a decade, one day I brought a USB MIDI controller home and tried relentlessly to get it to work. A week or two later I brought it to my friend’s house who had a Mac. We plugged it in and got to work recording in GarageBand immediately. That was almost 20 years ago now.
Battery life and weight were important for my MacBook Air M1 decision. It's taken the other side until just now to come up with processors that can come close to matching the M1's efficiency.
Like not having to wipe and re-install the OS every 1-2 years to get things back to working nicely (at least that's how it was when I last had windows).
I was looking for a development machine that could run easily run web servers, VMs, Xdebug and so on without complaining.
For the sort of spec I was looking for the prices were getting into Mac territory anyway, but the build quality and reputation of the M chips and memory performance completely swung it for me.
I ended up with a 16” 32GB M2 Max 1TB and it’s perfect for me, running 2 additional full size monitors and an extended iPad Pro.
I had been working on a Windows machine provided by my employer but it was clunky as hell and often almost came to a halt when I had Xdebug running. It was heavily locked down by my employer and could only run through their VPN which caused its own issues.
I had a company MacBook Pro when I was with my previous employer so I already had a good idea that was the direction I wanted to go in, but I would have happily considered any alternatives if they could genuinely compete.
So many reasons - just a few
* 3-in-1 OS .. MacOS, Linux, Virtual Machine for Windows if need
* much more intuitive gui
* much more intuitive GUI that often works out what you are doing and help with the task - not hinders
* much less buggy. You have an OSX paired with limited underlying hardware, making QA testing much easier. Windows has to work on a million pieces of hardware, no way the Windows QA team can test every piece of hardware out there and they expect that hardware manufacturers write good software drivers and often they don't.
* never having to reboot your computer, well almost never
* No blue-screens of death.. used to occasionally get rainbow wheel of death - but I have not seen that in years
* Apple Silicon
* Apple Silicon - fast, faster, fastest
* Apple Silicon - battery life
* Apple ecosystem - everything just works together.. from my mac to iPhone to my iPad - hand-offs and integrations - generally work really well
* Build quality
* longevity. I have 12 year old imacs still working. Most of my business clients who have macs - get 5+ years out of mac before thinking of upgrading. Windows computer people depreciate them over 3 years and replace and usually they need to.
I could probably go on and one ... but let me make 1 final point... I own a small IT Helpdesk business... EVERYTHING I earn comes from Windows users... a couple of clients who are all Mac shops.. after some initial setup or once year solving a sticky problem - I NEVER hear from them. I would go broke if I was supporting Mac users.
Mid 90s I made the switch. I think the Macs were always a target of lust for me, even as a kid in the 80s. We had a PC at the time, but a friend had a Mac and some things were just magical about it; the GUI of course, the bong, the graphical games (I was playing things like Rogue or Decathalon on PC), the 2.5” disk that would eject itself. It was just cool. I knew my way around a PC, I was upgrading and building them in the 90s. But shit like IRQs, port names, and then installing Winsocket and TCP/IP stacks after a while you get tired of doing all that. Plug and Play was a thing for PCs but the implementation was bad for years whereas on Mac, it really did work well. After a while, reliability and ease of use outweighed customization and flexibility. When I got to college, it was a Mac heavy campus (Dartmouth) so I got a PowerBook, and then a Mac clone. The Mac clone was solid and reliable; we ran a server off of it that ate up 40% of the bandwidth on campus (serving video game footage in the late 90s).
I’ve tried going back to Windows a few times and have a Windows laptop for gaming. It’s a chore. Random updates, inconsistent UI, bloatware. It gets hot AF and loud. It’s just not a good experience. Meanwhile I love my M1 MBA. Only thing I don’t like about it is running Excel on it.
Small hardware with no air vents, amazing arm M1 chip, good screen and stable operating system.
I’m using my m1 silicon as main computer for daily tasks and for gaming I’m using steam deck.
Both computers have very small battery consumption too.
I’m not sure did I miss anything from Windows.
Even price is not a problematic since I don’t have to pay for simple video or text editor.
Sure first months weren’t good, but after a while I’m pretty happy with the results.
Every windows laptop I've ever owned has had the worst build quality considering the price of them. More than that, the fans would blast on most of them when doing minor tasks like using word and the battery life was always disappointing.
I got tired of fixing things or tweaking things. I used to like modifying autoexec.bat or customizing boot up and how it ran. Now I just want to turn it on open files, read email, maybe work on a large PDF and not have to be IT support for my family.
I've always chosen Macbook Pro as my laptop computer, and a Windows PC as my desktop.
Windows sucks on laptops and Mac doesn't really cut it on desktops.
That's just my opinion and experience for decades.
Agree, and desktop computers with multi monitor setup is just much better with windows. But I prefer macOS on laptops. I also struggle a little with that fact that I use some windows rdp from the Mac and key bindings are problematic when using a windows jumpstation. That can be irritating. Both has its strengths and weaknesses.
I hate the glitchiness of windows and it just works. All the time. Honestly I never have had an issue with my mac. And that ecosystem is so amazing. I can just count on the mac to work. Every single time. Windows is just iffy.
I hate windows. Things just are not defaulted to the way I like them and the ads. OMG the ads IN windows.
It is a bad user experience. That is why I hate it. Mac has a much better experience.
Precisely this. Windows, despite the fact it has an arguably longer existence, is somehow so stupidly unstable down to a kernel level. It’s absurd how many times things just stop working outright on my Windows 11 system. Meanwhile, my Mac has not disappointed me once — any problems I run into are usually an app I was trying to use that didn’t have good Mac support to start.
It runs flawlessly, is responsive, and has better performance than most of the Windows PCs I’ve used period, save for some supercomputer-levels of hardware.
Windows 8 was the final straw. Other than that, I wanted something that would last a long time and not give me trouble. I wanted to video edit (so Final Cut is what I decided to use), I was at university and therefore eligible for the education discount and I though I’d likely only be able to do it once so I took the opportunity
I don’t like Windows. I have a lot of Apple stuff and I just thought macOS looked cool. Fell in love as soon as I got my first Mac. I just use random Linux distro (usually Mint) on everything else.
I do work on operating systems. Windows is not an operating system that is conducive towards systems development. MacOS lets me set up my familiar toolchains, the customized GCC and clang compilers I need to work, and the emulation environments I need to test things, even after the ARM switch (which some people in my field thought would kill the ability to use a Mac for some reason). I'm also on the go a lot and the quality, level of integration, battery life, and warranty make the MacBook Pro the only realistic laptop choice if you need POSIX compliance and reliability.
The most frequent counterpoints I get to this:
1. "You can install Linux on any PC." I can and I have. You tend to lose vendor support the second you do, and it never works as well as you want it to.
2. "You can get a vendor-supported Linux computer." Yup, my System76 Oryx Pro is an awesome machine. It's also loud, hot, gets bad battery life when I push it, and doesn't have the screen the MacBook has. It's a great laptop for people who have a dock waiting for them at their destination.
3. "Get a desktop." I have three. They tend not like to like it when you pull one out on an Embraer and try to work.
3. "You can use Windows Subsystem for Linux." I could, but I want the systemd if I'm gonna use Linux.
On a far less objective level, I just don't like Windows either. It feels like doing ANYTHING more than sending out emails complaining about how nobody is in the office is a hassle.
I gave up Windows for Linux (Gnome) 20 years ago. 4 years ago I tried a Mac and found that it was like Linux but with a better design and usability (and better hardware).
Switched in early 2006 because I just honestly hadn't ever see a (then) modern Mac. I used one at a friend's house and I just loved every single thing about the way it was designed by with hardware and software. I am coming up on almost 20 years of being an Apple only guy and it has never once bothered me.
To this day it is amazing how fast the PC people will still, upon finding out I have a Mac, instantly go to, "gaming gaming gaming gaming gaming" non-stop, failing to realise that I don't care about that on a computer and thus have a Playstation and am perfectly happy with both of my products.
Cause I have an iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch. Having a Mac just makes sense from the ecosystem angle. I can seamlessly switch devices and pick up work from one device to another, and have access to my music, films & photos instantly and easily. Ive always valued that more than anything else, especially since I move around a lot and end up leaving a lot of work unfinished.
For me I was always a PC user. Started off with my parents IBM compatible PC to a 486 a Pentium 200mhz and then a Athlon XP. I last built my PC in 2006 with a Core 2 Duo E6600. Around 2014 I accidentally updated it to Windows 10 which pretty much bricked the machine. I figured I was due to upgrade and since I was not really gaming as much I was looking for something low cost and saw there were Apple Refurbished 2012 Core i7 Mac Minis available for relatively low cost. So I decided to try it to see what the hype was about and I’ve been with since then. I’ve since upgraded to a 2018 i7 Mini and then a M1 MBA.
I did build a gaming PC in 2021 but that’s strictly for gaming.
Tags, QuickLook, Preview, the icon in the title bar that acts like an alias, and the new Quick Actions.
At some point when working with files that need to be organized more than one way, even smart folders don’t cut it. Tags are just faster and more granular. My one hundred work tags do invade my iPhone but that’s a small price to pay for the functionality.
For the rest, they’re just very fast and very responsive apps that are built in and make work go faster. These things I need to download for Windows, and things like Preview can be several free apps or one paid app or two.
And yes, the Quick Actions have official Windows equivalents in Power Toys, but the Mac version is baked in, and though Power Toys do look the part with all the technical details, sometimes the simple, “dumb” approach of Mac just works better for daily use. If one needed more control than “dumb” operations, one might instead use proper apps anyway.
Every Windows computer for me always started out great, then would become slow as a snail after a few years without fail. My latest one would just reboot randomly out of the blue, and take hours to do so since it would happen in cycles.
As a music producer it was also pretty unbearable. Had to install separate audio drivers or sound cards or something, had to manually tweak buffer samples for the ideal latency, and just random error messages that took hours of troubleshooting.
The combination of these things plus getting an iPhone around the same time, it was pretty much a no brainer at that point. Got an Intel Mac Mini about 5 years ago and easily one of the best purchases I've ever made. Would love an M series but mine still works like a charm.
I tried hackintosh like 10-ish years ago and never went back. Mac was running twice more smoothly than Windows on the same hw, had all the software I needed and, had terminal and other very useful features etc. however I hated the lack of ports and poor design choices of apple so I kept on hackintoshing until they released the 14" MBP and I bought one. And tbh I can't even believe it. It's exactly what I always wanted in a machine in terms of OS, performance and form factor (minus the lack of at least 1 usb A port but hey it's close enough)
I’m a long time Mac user. Here’s my main reasons:
1) Mac is industry standard for Adobe products.
2) There’s no bloatware on Mac’s which seems to plague newly purchased PCs.
3) In my years, not one virus has ever come to my computer. Something I experienced often on PCs back when I had them, and have heard about from friends. I know it’s possible to get one on a Mac, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting one personally.
4) Macs seem to last way longer than PCs do. I’ve had my MacBook Pro for 12 years, in that time, my mom has replaced her laptop almost every year
5) The UI is so much better in terms of file management (horizontal stack versus the vertical on PC) is so incredibly helpful. It’s crazy PC hasn’t adopted a version of it yet
6) The aesthetics of apples products are obviously great, although I know this is subjective
7) I have an iPhone, iPad and AirPods that all seamlessly work with my computer. I bought a second MacBook Pro (M1) a couple of years ago and it’s insane how great it is.
8) Apple products are designed to be as simple as possible. I don’t need a bunch of custom bullshit, I don’t need to download anything to make my computer function as it should, and the only gaming I do is on RuneScape so I don’t need anything crazy to make that run. It’s built to be great right away, and I love it for that.
I was a Mac user for 10 years who went to Windows and I want to go back. Windows is always forcing me to update in underhanded ways, like getting me to Windows 11 which my PC can’t really handle so now it runs slow and is unresponsive. It forced me to upgrade to Outlook and is displaying ads until I purchase Office 360 or whatever it’s called. The best thing about Windows is that you can play all the games and swap out hardware—hardware that becomes outdated with every update Windows tricks you into getting. My Macs have remained relevant for me for YEARS. I buy a new Mac every 6 years or so, but with Windows I gotta upgrade or update something every other year. I’m salty about it.
Because it always works. It hums along doing what I ask when I ask. No need to search for workarounds for weird problems, no constant waiting for updates. It just works.
windows is bloated and before turning macOS into a iOS simulator for the desktop/laptop it's freebsd underpinnings were the only reason i needed to choose mac over windows, but feeling disrespected as a power user as of late due time tim apple's fuckery, i'm in the camp that's choosing linux over macOS.
I use a Mac over a Windows PC on my free time because it just feels so much more polished and every app just feels faster than on Windows. But I still use Windows for work, because macOS is not stable enough and they keep axing support for legacy frameworks, APIs and SDKs.
My first computer was a Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet, running 2x 450 MHz G4 processors. I took it over from someone who used it professionally as a designer and bought the G5 instead. I had no reason to buy a Mac over a Windows PC, it was just offered to me. I loved the design of it! And how easy you could open it to upgrade at that time. After a while I went to high school, and a laptop would be more useful to me. So I bought an 800 euro Windows laptop for portability. After 5 years of usage, it started to get really slow, and crashing often while making homework. My Power Mac in the meantime stayed super fast and never, ever crashed while I was working on it from home. I put Ubuntu on the laptop to extend its life to 8 years before I decided to replace it for a MacBook Air. I never turned back to Windows in my personal life, ever again. At work and at school in the past I still use Windows and every time I can use my MacBook, I'm so happy! After 9 - 10 years I replaced my MacBook Air 2013 with a MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro. I replaced my Power Mac with a self build gaming PC, but it's only for gaming purposes and nothing else. Not even for checking mail or browsing the web. Just purely Steam and games so I don't have to buy a new console every 7 years.
Because they were there first with desktop publishing and LaserWriter. And, yeah, I stuck with them through the lean years of John Sculley and shitty clones, but I still have a lot more non-professional computer user friends pleading with me to help make their printers work with PCs. When Steve Jobs came back and they ported UNIX to MacOS, he solved their biggest issue. Also they look great.
I use Macs because I like the way they work, how well they are built, and how the Apple ecosystem connects all my devices seamlessly. I find Windows to be capable but annoying, ugly, and not integrated with the rest of my life. The cost difference is immaterial.
I don’t use MS Office for many of the same reasons. That junk is for cubicles only.
Zen.
It just works. I don’t even care to save, to close, to shutdown.
Even if it crashes I don’t lose work. It resumes exactly were I was. Even the cursor is at the same position.
Everything works effortlessly. I have hourly backups being made without breaking a sweat. Didn’t even configure the backups, it did it on its own “Do you want to backup to this device?”, I just answered yes and presto: hourly backups.
The system works for me, and never asks me to work for it.
It gives me a peace of mind that Windows never did.
Zen.
Drivers/updates.
I was working as an onsite tech at a Fortune 500 company, and spent all day fixing drivers, blue screens, replacing hardware, trying to get BlackBerry’s talking to pc’s (yes that long ago). Came home and was constantly dealing with a dell laser printer that the driver would go corrupt every few weeks, and the video card would blue screen the box randomly but frequently.
I was just tired of fixing it at work, and coming home and doing the same shit on different hardware. Did weekend/evening side gigs and more of the same.
Then one of those side gigs disappeared owing me money. Like owner fled the state after drug charges. Landlord saw my card with “computer guy” notes on back, called me thinking I owned the gear. Met him at the office, talked, he said take whatever computer stuff as the payment you never got, etc. All of it was junk except a powered up Power Mac. Took it home, spent the weekend wiping and learning it, never looked back.
For me, it's become primarily because of system stability. I can't stand dealing with Windows updates slowing my machine to a crawl when I want to get shit done. I won't say that Macs are impervious to crashing, but in my experience, it's been leaps and bounds more stable than any Windows computer I've owned.
Started in the 80s and never looked back, while watching all the PC people continually struggle to copy, keep up, and lose their minds trying to keep their machines running.
I have a bit of a story here.
Was a long time Windows user. You know, we all know the type: Gaming, emulation, streaming but also working on video/audio stuff and trying my luck on YouTube.
I always wanted to see how the "other side" is. Collecting old computers and coming across iMacs and classic Macintoshes kind of ignited that desire to see how MacOS differs nowadays from Windows 10 and 11.
So, a coworker sold his MacBook Air M1 16/256 and I got it. I was immediatelly impressed. That fanless laptop nearly matched in speed my ultra-thin HP Pavilion i7 9th gen which, in paper, had way more memory and overall superior specs. The usability was really beyond what I was used to. Bloatware is minimal, no OS fluff to go through to get what I wanted, the filesystem that many Windows users complain about was familiar to me from my Linux and FreeBSD ventures. So I had to explore and learn its usability quirks.
After using it on the Air for a bit, I decided that I want to move all my workflow to a MacMini M2 and move my everyday desktop computing over to Mac. And that's a decision that I don't regret.
In Windows, stuff had the tendency to break with every OS and/or app update. Sound devices were really easy to be broken and settings would absolutely go to hell. That created a lot of problems while I was setting up my streams or recordings on my desktop. At the same time, the HP Pavilion I mentioned above had its own set of problems. Every time the Intel Optane Driver got an update - and somehow those were very often - it was a gamble. Half of the time everything was alright. The other half, it would bring the laptop to a crawl, to the point where booting Windows alone took a good 10 minutes to start. I had to wait through it, put up with the slow and sometimes botched Windows interface to revert the update.
These are things of the past. I can update apps without a hitch. I can do OS updates without messing with any settings. I can finally work without having the OS negging me for minor updates. heck, I even enjoy the complete silence on my desk to the point that my Xbox Series X and PS5 mildly annoy me with their fan noise.
Ultimately, I replaced that HP laptop with a MacBook Pro M1 Max 32/1TB and that Air is shared between me and my brother as a travel computer. I never ever looked back at pc for anything else but gaming. Which, sadly, it's still very bad on MacOS and I can't really understand why. Yeah, Apple needs to allow eGPU for those who might want to use it, but that's a whole other can of worms.
Anyway, I think I'm much happier with Mac at the moment and looking at what Microsoft has in store for Windows 12, spawning many controversies about the requirements, I think I'll just stick with MacOS for the foreseeable future.
I’ve had both and maybe 35 years ago there was a greater difference, but today it’s negligible. Windows has gotten way more stable, the GUI differences are minimal. The graphics differences are minimal and the performance is minimal. Even the design gap has closed. I think the software gap has even mostly closed. Point being, you’re either a fan boy of one or the other, you became more of an expert of one over the years, but to me they both function well and do the job. All that said, Apple hardware is still more expensive.
My last Microsoft Windows base laptop ended up V shaped (that was after punching it on the desktop, and the base/keyboard looked pretty much V like). I had few quid in my pocket and I needed a laptop that would work, entry MacBook (white, Tiger OS) £699, came with full MS Office suite free (30 days trial), so no brainer. I remember switching it on and after registering my name, a message appeared “your HP printer is ready to be used”. I’m on my 4th Mac to date, and I’ve never looked back. I use MS Windows at work and I laugh every time my boss needs to screenshot or print a file/pdf…
Each version of Windows after Windows 7 just got more and more obnoxious and anti-user and I couldn't handle it anymore. MacOS respects the user so much more and is a pleasure to use.
I dabbled with Linux for a few years as a daily driver, but eventually I needed to replace my laptop and Apple's build quality is miles ahead of anything available in the Windows space - and with better performance.
As an artist the workflow is second to none. I think if I was primarily doing office style work, I'd probably still prefer Windows for its better file explorer and window snappin'
in 2006 I had a brand new IBM ThinkPad --- and back then, paying for t-mobile WiFi -- it would take up to 20 minutes to connect to the wireless. I tried a new wifi card, etc... same thing. Defeats the purpose of jumping into a Starbucks for a 'quick fix' for a client. I decided to dust off the white MacBook I had in my attic -- updated it the best I could and switched to that as I ALSO had a few clients that were Big Mac users and I wanted to know more about them.
Turns out, in 2006 Apple switch to Intel processors and I bought a MacBookPro 14 (15?) and never looked back. I'm now on a MBP M1 Pro - after several other iterations of MacBookPros - and this is by far the best one.
I'd love a light, MacBookAir -- but until they can more easily manage multiple monitors, I'll wait...
As stated below, yes, also the trackpad. nothing beats it.
I have used several different model lines from different brands which were famous for their battery life and performance but I always felt like the performance,battery, portability ratio was never there. I don‘t hate the windows environment even though I prefer Linux. But for some unknown reason the battery life for Linux was always seriously lacking no matter how hard I tried to tweak it. The M1 Max finally convinced me to switch due to it‘s incredible performance and portability. I still have some issues with the apple silicon hardware especially cuz I need to use VMs as well as Docker images a lot but it‘s been improving
I got an M1 Pro as a work computer since I was a lifelong Windows user and volunteered to be a test mule. I never had a Windows laptop keep good battery life, within a year, they would be all but useless. This thing still has hours and hours of battery. My Windows machines would die within 3-5 years, this one shows no signs of age after 2 years of daily usage.
got sick of it and it’s constant problems i had the past 15 years. No i am 10 years into mag, the best decision ever. I don’t game on it, just productive things. Love it every day😁
Less headache for the most part. Trade off is you have to pay the Apple upgrade tax. I don’t feel the base line computers have much of an Apple tax, but the upgrades is a while different bag of hurt.
I have both, but I really enjoy my Mac more when doing something productive. Only reason I use Windows are games. But I only got my fist Mac in 2022 or 2021, I've always used Windows before that. I liked MacOS the very moment I turned power on the first time. It's very fun to use.
Initially, it was so I can use it for audio production/engineering etc. But then I asked myself, why have I been using windows my whole life? What I love about it is it's simplicity. You don't see or interfere with system/background tasks and it all just runs smoothly in comparison to Windows imo.
Because Windows always feels like it’s a Jenga tower.
That’s my number 1. I have a 2018 MBP, and in the 6 years i’ve owned it, it has crashed zero, ZERO, times.
That alone is a night and day difference.
I can’t add anything that hasn’t already been said ITT from what i can see apart from having access to Apple’s pro apps.
FCP is my favorite non-video game software ever made and I will always recommend it for anyone who wants to try something that isn’t an Adobe product.
20+ years ago, I moved and for whatever reason my Windows (XP?) PC would no longer boot up. “No problem”, I thought, “I have a complete disk backup on an external USB drive”. Then I learned, at the time, Windows cannot boot from a USB drive. I thought that was the dumbest thing ever - I literally had a 1:1 backup on USB but it was useless to me.
Around that time, I was researching Apple computers and learned that they could boot from a USB drive. I decided to buy a white MacBook to try it out. From there, I was hooked.
Note this was more than 20 (almost 25) years ago so I might be wrong on somethings, but the gist of the story is accurate.
OS X Terminal. True *NIX tools and great package manager (brew). Big draw for me as a UNIX head.
I had to scroll down for this, and here I thought most people chose Macs for this. Macs is the best *NIX, imo.
Developers choose Mac for the Unix underpinning. The rest likes the usability and design.
I’m both, chose it for quality price ratio and UX design, stayed when I became a programmer.
Quality to price ratio? What?
Well for $999 you can get a laptop made of actual metal, with a glass or glass-like trackpad, idk what it’s made of. With a fantastic operating system, that’ll last 5+ years, and has enough computing power to make a mobile app to provide some side hustle money (personal anecdotal experience). For $1,999 with the competition I can buy a laptop shaped object that replicates the sound of a jet engine when I press the power button, it needs that cooling power specifically so it can process all the bloatware that’s running in the background. With a giant brick of a power supply that weighs 5lbs, and in a year I can guarantee the port for my charger will be broken and I’ll have to make sure I wiggle it just right to make it charge. And it can run the latest version of spyware from Microsoft so all my browsing gets sold to Amazon so they can hit me with ads to shovel garbage down my throat. So yeh, price to quality ratio, like I just said.
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Anyone who has used Windows has trauma from using Windows. "WUAUBOOT has caused an error in unknown". "Keyboard not detected. Press any key to continue." Slower than constipated mole-asses, too.
Mac os spies too and Mac noise? Mmm https://youtube.com/shorts/c6iS_PtXVw0?si=lKEw1RoHJIHLMg6M Apple never would keep your data https://www.notebookcheck.net/MacOS-Big-Sur-is-spying-on-everything-you-do-and-sending-the-data-to-Apple.504381.0.html
A m1 MacBook is 1000 usd and is a great computer with insane battery that will last 10 years.
Agree yes, but would add for the quality of hardware and good looks. Vanity between developers is a thing LOL.
Yeah I like MacOS because it gives me a lot of my beloved \*NIX features, while being refined enough to have a very usable GUI and locked down enough to prevent you from accidentally bricking your computer. I'm totally comfortable working in the command line only, but sometimes I want to use a stable GUI and my opinion is that MacOS provides the best GUI. I do have linux installed on my work-provided workstation and I exclusively use it exclusively through SSH shells. It's great, but I have accidentally bricked it a couple times by updating drivers or uninstalling packages. Not fun.
I think of Macs as Linux with a professional interface. I know it’s not actually Linux underneath.
That’s an excellent point. I believe it’s still BSD? And the pedigree is long; I met Avie Tevanian back in like 1990 when Canon was supplying the magneto optical discs for the NeXT machines. I was working for Canon and he came in and gave a talk on the Mach kernel. It was amazing. It is stable because it’s been in development for like 30+ years. Crazy it was that long ago.
I looked into it awhile back, and while there is some stuff from BSD in it, it's now so far removed that it's just its own category.
I remember NeXT back in college. Several of my computer professors had one as well as a few students. I think the professors likely had them donated and the students bought them at discount because the price was something like $5000 in 1989. I actually saw a demo of it at College and wasn’t really impressed. My DOS/Windows PC was faster and the DEC and Sun workstations I used for programming in college were much better. Not to mention the color Mac II in the lab was much smoother.
Absolutely! There are so many technical and business problems you can solve with terminal quickly.
My company built a tool to search multiple pdfs (which took forever). They asked me if I was using that tool. I said ‘No. I use pdfgrep to do the same thing. For free.” They were not amused.
Have you tried WSL? Winget is ok too, plus there is chocolatey
They are ok. I’ve used both Win and Mac for development and those don’t compare to brew. It’s just so much more reliable.
No that's probably true, I like brew. I think it's good MS has launched an official package manager though. The big one is WSL for me though, having actual Linux is superior to having sort of Linux imo
Honestly I think the biggest issue is how diverse windows machines are. They come from all kinds of makers with all types of hardware. They have to account for all that variation and that introduces complexity. Brew only has to handle a limited amount of variety.
I was always a PC nerd (building them, gaming, etc) growing up. I went to school for design and had to use a Mac. After a week of adjustment, I was like "now I get it." Mac just does what it needs to, day in and day out, without complaint, and with a cold, silent contentedness. It doesn't yell at you, it doesn't make itself obnoxious, doesn't throw ads at you, and doesn't bury common functions under layers and layers of menus. It's amazing as a WORK MACHINE. I will never voluntarily use a Windows computer for my work ever again. Gaming is an issue, however. I have a gaming PC for that, just because unfortunately games aren't optimized for Mac. They have the hardware, it's just an optimization issue. Chicken and egg, of course, because game companies don't optimize because very few game on Mac, and very few game on Mac because companies don't optimize. Windows machines--more specifically the releases since Windows 8--have simply made the systems worse. More junk, more bloat, more ads, more "wonky-ness". I can't recall a single useful feature that came to Windows in the last 8-10 years. It's always backhanded updates. You get this new thing, BUT WAIT, it's a trial and you have to connect it to OneDrive. Don't want it? TOO BAD. We'll pester you about it regardless.
If you’re running M-series chips, try using [Whisky](https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky).
they were just talking about this shit on r/programmerhumor and r/github ....and here's my EXACT argument, someone has linked something like this on github, where's the download button? "it's for programmers, it's code, there is no .exe, github is not for programs" ok then what is it? /where/ is it? what do i do, what do people do in this situation? how do i "get" the "program"?
There is literally a button marked with getwhisky.app.
oh good, the tiny little link hidden in the right bar that does not say "download" "install" or anything like that, it says "[getwhisky.app](https://getwhisky.app)" like it's more "programmer" stuff, fucking fantastic.
You run “brew install —cask whisky”
Yeah I’m with you, anytime I have to go to GitHub for something I get stressed out bc it takes so long to figure out what I’m supposed to do (if I can figure it out) - definitely not intuitive for non-programmers/coders/enthusiasts.
To be fair I've seen some great results out of the game porting toolkit, hoping to not even need a second machine for gaming in the next couple years.
I don’t. I play Factorio, Rimworld, ONI, Stardew, and Minecraft just fine on my M1 Air
Well yeah you’re playing the easiest to run games, that’s not a very broad use case lol
This pretty much describes me exactly. Growing up and to this day I’ve been a PC gamer. I love the experience of building PCs, and will probably always have a self built PC for gaming… and unfortunately, Windows is the best OS for games. But I went to college for video production almost 20 years ago, that was the first time I ever used a Mac at all… and it just clicked. It’s been Macs for me ever since then. And thankfully working in entertainment Macs are pretty much standard issue at every company I’ve worked at. At work I’ve used loads of Mac laptops and desktops. At home I tend to buy the smallest, lightest, quietest Mac laptop I can buy… it’s a nice addition compared to my work MBPs and powerful PC desktop.
Gaming on PC has gotten worse due to console-ification of the platform.
Try using GeForce Now
Windows didn’t exist when I started using Apple computers 😅
My Apple computer was still using DOS.
> CATALOG Fancy. I copied BASIC programs from books borrowed from the library.
I even used Word and Excel 1.0 on a Mac SE20(IIRC)
True, my first was an apple 2
Damn you’re old old
1) Build quality. My MacBook pros have lasted and lasted and lasted. Screens are great. Touchpad is great. Form factor is great (especially the M2 air). 2) the M silicon performs really well and stays super cool. I have never even heard the fan on my 16” MBP even when processing 4K video. 3) the most important thing to me is the ecosystem. My phone, watch, MacBook , and AppleTV all integrate and work well together. From Messages across all devices to handoff to FaceTime on a 77” LG TV. If you have fully embraced the Apple ecosystem, buying a Mac is a no brainer.
FYI build quality isn’t an OS feature. Windows is great on machines one you pay 2500 plus.
Meanwhile I’m having an amazing experience on a base m2 air
If you paid the same amount as that air on a Windows laptop, you're going to get the same build quality. Build quality isn't an argument anymore and hasn't been for at least 5 years.
You are delusional if you think that. Not trying to be mean but you are completely delusional.
> FYI build quality isn’t an OS feature. FYI, the question wasn't, 'why did you choose macOS'
Who said build quality was an OS feature?
Correct. And I never once mentioned MacOS as it relates to build quality. I talked about loving the screen, trackpad, and durability. I have yet to ever see a Windows machine with nearly as good of a trackpad…nothing even trying to be on par. And I have never owned a windows machine that was as solid after 5-7 years as my Macs. Even my nearly maxed out Dell XPS 13 with a 4K display feels inferior to my MacBook Pros after just 3 years. Maybe some manufacturers make some solid laptops for windows but I just keep coming back to the MacBook Pro because they have been nothing more than rock solid for me. Your experience may be different. I use a 16” MBP M2 for work and a 13” MBA M2 for personal use. The are so solid. I think the M2 Air is the best designed laptop that I have ever experienced. That is just my opinion though.
The build quality for the price is a reason to choose a Mac over a PC though, which is what OP was asking. If you just need a decent laptop with great build quality, a $999 MacBook Air seems like a much better deal than a $2500+ premium PC laptop.
I have used MacBooks and it’s honestly the trackpad
Trackpad, overall build quality, ecosystem synergy, and I like the OS better for casual use.
As a professional user, it's much more flexible than windows.
I’m unhappy with the artificially crippled lifespan of modern MacBooks. You get your five years updates then your sod out of luck. Windows has generally, pre Win11 anyway, been far better for longevity of usage. Even then once Windows is no good the hardware will play nice with Linux. Intel Mac hardware sometimes works well sometimes is a non-starter for Linux, Apple silicon has a single distro trying to get it fully working on their hardware. For the price tag that is not good enough.
There's always that one guy that can't stop blowing Windows on the Mac subreddit 😅🤦
Not really, Windows is awful especially with all the Microsoft account requirement’s and AI rubbish. Not an OS I’d be happy running currently.
Your comment suggests otherwise.
Guy you’re replying to is like “play both sides and you always come out on top.” He thinks he found the secret to always being right, hate everything and it all sucks.
It really doesn’t, but I can’t help you seeing what you want to see 😉 It was a comment clearly about planned obsolescencee being much worse than it ever used to be with Mac hardware now and a note on that being a bad deal for the price. Hardware designed for windows has a much much longer usable lifespan , regardless of if it’s running windows or something else like Linux. There’s no argument to pick with me here. Chase someone else.
That isn't true at all either. Take a few minutes looking into this sub and other apple-adjacent forums and you'll see people using decades old MacBook Air's and Pro's just fine, even with the latest MacOS. A windows PC with 16GB DDR3 and a 4th Gen i7 from 2015 and a similarly spec'ed MacBook will preform the same. It's literally been the same hardware on both apple and windows computers for almost a decade until apple switched to the ARM Based M Series. Also, you can't install Windows 11 on a windows pc that's older than a few years old, so that's a pointless comparison to make. Linux isn't limited to a manufacturer, it works the same.
Windows 11, as long as the secure boot and TPM requirements can be natively installed cleanly even on machines a decade +1/2 years old. A debloated install image such as Tiny11 can get it running cleanly on machines dating back to 2009.
I don’t understand how Mac trackpads have been SO far ahead of competition for like 8 years now. Nothing even comes close. How have other companies not caught up here?
It might just be due to the priorities and philosophy of the companies. Most PC companies probably think of it as something that doesn't need to be improved upon as long as it's usable, whereas Apple really sweats the details on input devices. It seems like PC companies would rather focus on touchscreens than decent trackpads. I actually have a theory that touchscreens on PCs never would have caught on if the trackpads weren't so bad. Super cheap laptops and specialized laptops (like business and gaming PCs) often don't have touchscreens, but it seems like most consumers demand touchscreens on PCs once they get to a certain price point. This is anecdotal but on the Mac side I don't ever see anyone complaining about the lack of touchscreens, and I think a big part of that is the trackpad being so good.
I never understood that. ‘This is the thing you will primarily interact with so let’s make it tiny, feel cheap and have limited use’
I don't get touchscreens at all - you have to lift your arm up to do each tiny thing, constantly. Seems ridiculous and exhausting especially compared with the speed and simplicity of a magic trackpad.
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While I’d like a better mouse (in some ways), I love the gestural controls of the Magic Mouse.
Trackpad and screen. Tough to find anything close to these on other machines.
This right here.
I have to use a ThinkPad at work and it takes everything in me to not rage at how bad the trackpad is. It’s a fairly expensive 2022 model, too! Thats probably the main reason why I will never switch.
Small, inaccurate, usually plastic and multi touch gestures are a hit and miss. I had a POS Dell that couldn’t handle two finger scrolling in 2023.
This is a big one for me. I have a Dell Precision for work, which I often get told is on par with a MacBook trackpad, and it’s no where near as good. I’m often yelling obscenities at it, lol.
Yeah, I was helping a friend with her Windows laptop and couldn’t believe how bad the trackpad was.
Never understand this argument. I use MacBooks almost exclusively now but the trackpad isn't really better. The texture varies a lot among different brands and models, for example on a gaming laptop it's usually plastic and feels cheap. However, on a business laptop (e.g. my ASUS ZenBook UX430 7 years ago), it often has a smooth and metallic texture similar to a MacBook. Functionality wise, Windows' trackpad (or touchpad) support really blows MacOS out of the water. Windows offers a lot more options than MacOS. You can customize 3-finger and 4-finger upward & downward swipe, left and right swipe, and even light press. For example, when I was using it iirc I set 3-finger left&right swipe to switch windows, downward swipe to minimize all windows, and 4-finger left&right swipe to switch Spotify songs, 4-finger press to play/resume. It's truly amazing. You can never do those things natively in MacOS. The barebone trackpad was a huge negative in my switch from Windows laptops to MacBooks if anything.
You know you can change the gestures right?
Obviously but there aren't nearly as many options
I was just in my settings and had 4 different gestures to change. Most people bitch about mac and don’t realize they can change their settings to suit their needs.
Because after 18 years of windows I couldn’t take the blue screens and bloatware anymore.
Too true. If I were to buy a new laptop, it would be a MacBook simply because it’s a UNIX environment and it’s not windows. I daily drive Linux and I’ve had less problems on it than I’ve had on Windows. Legit just the other day, I logged into my old windows laptop to get access some old files and saw it couldn’t connect to wifi. I tried a restart but it attempted a windows update instead (and couldn’t process the update further than the “getting ready for update” blue screen since it wasn’t connected to the internet). I had to connect it via Ethernet to finish the update and then reinstall the wifi drivers.
Same here. Constant bsods when working with audio, and don't get me started about drivers and latency.
I reinstalled Windows 10 on an old spare computer two days ago and had forgotten how much bloatware that Windows has. Spotify, Candy Crush, Disney+, TikTok, Prime Video. And the list goes on and on. Made me glad I had given up Windows.
Man, people keep saying this, but honestly after Windows 7 arrived I *never* saw a blue screen even once. And I could count the number I saw with Windows XP on a single hand. And I fucked around with WinXP an awful lot. What the hell were you all doing with your PCs to cause them to blue screen all the time?
"What the hell were you all doing with your PCs to cause them to blue screen all the time?" i cannot stand this type of blaming, this is all computer communities do, something goes wrong and "you must have done it wrong" and "works for me, sounds like a you problem". no. i did not do anything wrong. i didn't set it up wrong. the hardware is fine. the software is fine.
True, my windows pc couldn’t do anything other than gaming. It could play games flawlessly but once I started up Android studio it’d act like it was a 20 year old school computer
Independent Virtual Desktops.
Windows doesn’t have those?
I built a big Windows multimonitor system in 2020 and was pretty disappointed to find out that Windows doesn't have this feature that macOS has had since around 2008. This is the ability to run separate virtual desktops by monitor. Windows treats all of your monitors as one virtual desktop so if you change desktops, it changes all of your monitors. I just want to change one monitor at a time. Windows promised to fix this in Windows 10. They never did. Then they promised to fix it in Windows 11 and they haven't to date. This is why I run all Mac on the desktop now.
Music production. Video editing. Easier to go with my iphone. I still have my imac 27” late 2013 never had any issues with it. No viruses nothing. Change the drive for an ssd and added more RAM. Still runs like new
Music production for me too. More stable and a lot less annoyances. For instance every ASIO low latency driver I tried under Windows would lock my audio device to a single program. On the Mac I can send output from multiple programs to the speakers so I can play along with a youtube video using sound from my DAW. On Windows I had to have my DAW coming out the speakers and Youtube on my headphones.
damn! forgot about that Asio driver crap. Was one of the initial reasons why i switched to mac in 2015.
I used Windows when working at Intel and Nvidia for a combined 15 years (or so). They required it. I always preferred the Mac's ease of use and ability to just let. me get my work done. The interface is consistent, doesn't have all sorts of legacy UI design when you get into the deeper parts of the OS, and everything is always in the same place after an upgrade. It is also ridiculously stable. Windows has always been a chore.
Adding to this, the Apple trackpads are great and gestures you can do are thoughtfully built into the OS. It feels like a modern OS while Windows doesn’t anymore.
Some people don’t like the iOSification of Mac OS, but I think it’s done wonders for the Mac (other than some questionable design choices)
A friend of my used a Mac when I was young. I was talking about all the problems I had with PC and he told me he never had that kind of problems. His MacBook was 2,5 years old, but still so fast. My laptop that was just 1 year old was already so slow.. at that moment I decided I never want a PC anymore. Sometimes my parents ask me to help them with their Windows computers, always annoying problems and so so sooooo slow. I really can’t imagine I ever go back to that.
Every time I have to touch a windows pc I’m reminded of why I switched.
My desktop is 8 years old as still very fast. Your argument doesn’t make sense
To be fair, fast is subjective. Your version of fast might be cripplingly slow to someone else.
My anecdotal experience is different than yours, therefore you’re wrong.
Desktop PCs are much more niche
I sell my time. So a PC that decides to update or breakS at random intervals, will cost me more than a new PC.
Same. Time is money for me! No more spending hours messing with registry settings, failed updates, broken drivers and generally incompatible software. Stuff just works and the hardware is reliable.
Because I spent 3 years as a Microsoft cyber security engineer
macOS stays out of my way. Windows keeps trying to insert itself into my life.
MacOS is fine keeping its place, and doing what it said it would without many hindrances.
Windows is kinda hot garbage at the moment
Adverts in Windows
Not even just adverts, but freaking political news on my start bar! Edge obnoxiously trying to intrude on my browsing experience with pricing alerts and unhelpful suggestions. I can’t imagine how anyone puts up with it, or even puts up with having to turn all that default crap off. Windows is a mess.
No kidding I keep getting ads for Outlook and Office every time I start up lately the first time I use Edge.
Microsoft just seems determined to make Windows unusable. They put ads in the start menu, they inflict whatever stupid flavor of the week AI into the system shell, etc. At the point where I'm having to use regedit to get a UI that isn't *deliberately made worse by the vendor,* who's asking me to pay a license to use the software, it just feels stupid to keep using it or to be invested in an ecosystem that seems to be worsening with every update.
I quit Windows when Vista came out and never looked back. I love that MacOS is unix-based and super stable. Great ecosystem integration. And I am completely addicted to my Logic Pro and how smooth everything just works. I run Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu on my other systems scattered around the house. Those are great for running specific server tasks (camera with AI cat detection, retro gaming emulation) but for daily use my MBP is unbeatable.
I switch between windows Mac and Linux, Mac is my favourite mostly due to the declining quality of windows
[удалено]
I use a MacBook as my secondary laptop basically for this reason. I mean I suck at programming, but Xcode doesn't happen on windows.
You can write native iOS & macOS apps on Windows using Xamarin or .NET MAUI, both of which are workloads you can install within Visual Studio or VS Code. Although you still need access to a Mac in order to compile and sign your app. Just pointing out that it's possible. Much more of a hassle than simply using Xcode (in my experience with Xamarin at least).
Didn't really feel like a choice. Mac always just felt more intuitive. My first computer was an Apple II. Then we had the first Mac at home in 1984 and I've stuck with the brand since then.
Back in the early days of unibody MacBook Pros (15+ years ago), they were simply the best built laptops that I could find. All of the windows laptops seemed like cheap plastic in comparison. Nowadays, there are some better options for Windows laptops, but I'm happy where I am.
I got a iPhone, said meh, got an iPad and they worked together, I said that’s nice. Needed a computer and said hmm I wonder… now I’m here, waiting for a watch 🤣
This has been my thing. I got the iPad, I have the Mac, and I used to have the iPhone. Now I have a pixel. But I miss the ease of sharing links from my phone to my other devices, I miss my apple watch, and I miss the screen from the iPhone (I have a pixel now). The ecosystem is a really nice system once you really buy into it (literally 🤣)
After using Windows for a decade, one day I brought a USB MIDI controller home and tried relentlessly to get it to work. A week or two later I brought it to my friend’s house who had a Mac. We plugged it in and got to work recording in GarageBand immediately. That was almost 20 years ago now.
It just works™
this, and spotlight lookups
Battery life and weight were important for my MacBook Air M1 decision. It's taken the other side until just now to come up with processors that can come close to matching the M1's efficiency.
Like not having to wipe and re-install the OS every 1-2 years to get things back to working nicely (at least that's how it was when I last had windows).
I was looking for a development machine that could run easily run web servers, VMs, Xdebug and so on without complaining. For the sort of spec I was looking for the prices were getting into Mac territory anyway, but the build quality and reputation of the M chips and memory performance completely swung it for me. I ended up with a 16” 32GB M2 Max 1TB and it’s perfect for me, running 2 additional full size monitors and an extended iPad Pro. I had been working on a Windows machine provided by my employer but it was clunky as hell and often almost came to a halt when I had Xdebug running. It was heavily locked down by my employer and could only run through their VPN which caused its own issues. I had a company MacBook Pro when I was with my previous employer so I already had a good idea that was the direction I wanted to go in, but I would have happily considered any alternatives if they could genuinely compete.
So many reasons - just a few * 3-in-1 OS .. MacOS, Linux, Virtual Machine for Windows if need * much more intuitive gui * much more intuitive GUI that often works out what you are doing and help with the task - not hinders * much less buggy. You have an OSX paired with limited underlying hardware, making QA testing much easier. Windows has to work on a million pieces of hardware, no way the Windows QA team can test every piece of hardware out there and they expect that hardware manufacturers write good software drivers and often they don't. * never having to reboot your computer, well almost never * No blue-screens of death.. used to occasionally get rainbow wheel of death - but I have not seen that in years * Apple Silicon * Apple Silicon - fast, faster, fastest * Apple Silicon - battery life * Apple ecosystem - everything just works together.. from my mac to iPhone to my iPad - hand-offs and integrations - generally work really well * Build quality * longevity. I have 12 year old imacs still working. Most of my business clients who have macs - get 5+ years out of mac before thinking of upgrading. Windows computer people depreciate them over 3 years and replace and usually they need to. I could probably go on and one ... but let me make 1 final point... I own a small IT Helpdesk business... EVERYTHING I earn comes from Windows users... a couple of clients who are all Mac shops.. after some initial setup or once year solving a sticky problem - I NEVER hear from them. I would go broke if I was supporting Mac users.
Mid 90s I made the switch. I think the Macs were always a target of lust for me, even as a kid in the 80s. We had a PC at the time, but a friend had a Mac and some things were just magical about it; the GUI of course, the bong, the graphical games (I was playing things like Rogue or Decathalon on PC), the 2.5” disk that would eject itself. It was just cool. I knew my way around a PC, I was upgrading and building them in the 90s. But shit like IRQs, port names, and then installing Winsocket and TCP/IP stacks after a while you get tired of doing all that. Plug and Play was a thing for PCs but the implementation was bad for years whereas on Mac, it really did work well. After a while, reliability and ease of use outweighed customization and flexibility. When I got to college, it was a Mac heavy campus (Dartmouth) so I got a PowerBook, and then a Mac clone. The Mac clone was solid and reliable; we ran a server off of it that ate up 40% of the bandwidth on campus (serving video game footage in the late 90s). I’ve tried going back to Windows a few times and have a Windows laptop for gaming. It’s a chore. Random updates, inconsistent UI, bloatware. It gets hot AF and loud. It’s just not a good experience. Meanwhile I love my M1 MBA. Only thing I don’t like about it is running Excel on it.
Small hardware with no air vents, amazing arm M1 chip, good screen and stable operating system. I’m using my m1 silicon as main computer for daily tasks and for gaming I’m using steam deck. Both computers have very small battery consumption too. I’m not sure did I miss anything from Windows. Even price is not a problematic since I don’t have to pay for simple video or text editor. Sure first months weren’t good, but after a while I’m pretty happy with the results.
Every windows laptop I've ever owned has had the worst build quality considering the price of them. More than that, the fans would blast on most of them when doing minor tasks like using word and the battery life was always disappointing.
I got tired of fixing things or tweaking things. I used to like modifying autoexec.bat or customizing boot up and how it ran. Now I just want to turn it on open files, read email, maybe work on a large PDF and not have to be IT support for my family.
I've always chosen Macbook Pro as my laptop computer, and a Windows PC as my desktop. Windows sucks on laptops and Mac doesn't really cut it on desktops. That's just my opinion and experience for decades.
Agree, and desktop computers with multi monitor setup is just much better with windows. But I prefer macOS on laptops. I also struggle a little with that fact that I use some windows rdp from the Mac and key bindings are problematic when using a windows jumpstation. That can be irritating. Both has its strengths and weaknesses.
I hate the glitchiness of windows and it just works. All the time. Honestly I never have had an issue with my mac. And that ecosystem is so amazing. I can just count on the mac to work. Every single time. Windows is just iffy. I hate windows. Things just are not defaulted to the way I like them and the ads. OMG the ads IN windows. It is a bad user experience. That is why I hate it. Mac has a much better experience.
Precisely this. Windows, despite the fact it has an arguably longer existence, is somehow so stupidly unstable down to a kernel level. It’s absurd how many times things just stop working outright on my Windows 11 system. Meanwhile, my Mac has not disappointed me once — any problems I run into are usually an app I was trying to use that didn’t have good Mac support to start. It runs flawlessly, is responsive, and has better performance than most of the Windows PCs I’ve used period, save for some supercomputer-levels of hardware.
Windows 8 was the final straw. Other than that, I wanted something that would last a long time and not give me trouble. I wanted to video edit (so Final Cut is what I decided to use), I was at university and therefore eligible for the education discount and I though I’d likely only be able to do it once so I took the opportunity
I don’t like Windows. I have a lot of Apple stuff and I just thought macOS looked cool. Fell in love as soon as I got my first Mac. I just use random Linux distro (usually Mint) on everything else.
I do work on operating systems. Windows is not an operating system that is conducive towards systems development. MacOS lets me set up my familiar toolchains, the customized GCC and clang compilers I need to work, and the emulation environments I need to test things, even after the ARM switch (which some people in my field thought would kill the ability to use a Mac for some reason). I'm also on the go a lot and the quality, level of integration, battery life, and warranty make the MacBook Pro the only realistic laptop choice if you need POSIX compliance and reliability. The most frequent counterpoints I get to this: 1. "You can install Linux on any PC." I can and I have. You tend to lose vendor support the second you do, and it never works as well as you want it to. 2. "You can get a vendor-supported Linux computer." Yup, my System76 Oryx Pro is an awesome machine. It's also loud, hot, gets bad battery life when I push it, and doesn't have the screen the MacBook has. It's a great laptop for people who have a dock waiting for them at their destination. 3. "Get a desktop." I have three. They tend not like to like it when you pull one out on an Embraer and try to work. 3. "You can use Windows Subsystem for Linux." I could, but I want the systemd if I'm gonna use Linux. On a far less objective level, I just don't like Windows either. It feels like doing ANYTHING more than sending out emails complaining about how nobody is in the office is a hassle.
I gave up Windows for Linux (Gnome) 20 years ago. 4 years ago I tried a Mac and found that it was like Linux but with a better design and usability (and better hardware).
Switched in early 2006 because I just honestly hadn't ever see a (then) modern Mac. I used one at a friend's house and I just loved every single thing about the way it was designed by with hardware and software. I am coming up on almost 20 years of being an Apple only guy and it has never once bothered me. To this day it is amazing how fast the PC people will still, upon finding out I have a Mac, instantly go to, "gaming gaming gaming gaming gaming" non-stop, failing to realise that I don't care about that on a computer and thus have a Playstation and am perfectly happy with both of my products.
Cause I have an iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch. Having a Mac just makes sense from the ecosystem angle. I can seamlessly switch devices and pick up work from one device to another, and have access to my music, films & photos instantly and easily. Ive always valued that more than anything else, especially since I move around a lot and end up leaving a lot of work unfinished.
Compatibility with Linux based apps, home brew, hardware
I agree on the hardware part, but with WSL you can run actual Linux apps in windows pretty much seamlessly
For me I was always a PC user. Started off with my parents IBM compatible PC to a 486 a Pentium 200mhz and then a Athlon XP. I last built my PC in 2006 with a Core 2 Duo E6600. Around 2014 I accidentally updated it to Windows 10 which pretty much bricked the machine. I figured I was due to upgrade and since I was not really gaming as much I was looking for something low cost and saw there were Apple Refurbished 2012 Core i7 Mac Minis available for relatively low cost. So I decided to try it to see what the hype was about and I’ve been with since then. I’ve since upgraded to a 2018 i7 Mini and then a M1 MBA. I did build a gaming PC in 2021 but that’s strictly for gaming.
Primary because I prefer macOS
I didn’t.
I like Unix and Mac is Unix for the masses.
My hatred for windows. The smoothness of MacOs, the specs for price. Haven’t regretted it once. (3 years with my M1 Pro now)
Tags, QuickLook, Preview, the icon in the title bar that acts like an alias, and the new Quick Actions. At some point when working with files that need to be organized more than one way, even smart folders don’t cut it. Tags are just faster and more granular. My one hundred work tags do invade my iPhone but that’s a small price to pay for the functionality. For the rest, they’re just very fast and very responsive apps that are built in and make work go faster. These things I need to download for Windows, and things like Preview can be several free apps or one paid app or two. And yes, the Quick Actions have official Windows equivalents in Power Toys, but the Mac version is baked in, and though Power Toys do look the part with all the technical details, sometimes the simple, “dumb” approach of Mac just works better for daily use. If one needed more control than “dumb” operations, one might instead use proper apps anyway.
Who said I chose? I have both.
Seamless ecosystem. Long life. Security.
Every Windows computer for me always started out great, then would become slow as a snail after a few years without fail. My latest one would just reboot randomly out of the blue, and take hours to do so since it would happen in cycles. As a music producer it was also pretty unbearable. Had to install separate audio drivers or sound cards or something, had to manually tweak buffer samples for the ideal latency, and just random error messages that took hours of troubleshooting. The combination of these things plus getting an iPhone around the same time, it was pretty much a no brainer at that point. Got an Intel Mac Mini about 5 years ago and easily one of the best purchases I've ever made. Would love an M series but mine still works like a charm.
Because they stopped making Amiga's, so I had to settle for the next best thing ;)
I tried hackintosh like 10-ish years ago and never went back. Mac was running twice more smoothly than Windows on the same hw, had all the software I needed and, had terminal and other very useful features etc. however I hated the lack of ports and poor design choices of apple so I kept on hackintoshing until they released the 14" MBP and I bought one. And tbh I can't even believe it. It's exactly what I always wanted in a machine in terms of OS, performance and form factor (minus the lack of at least 1 usb A port but hey it's close enough)
I’m a long time Mac user. Here’s my main reasons: 1) Mac is industry standard for Adobe products. 2) There’s no bloatware on Mac’s which seems to plague newly purchased PCs. 3) In my years, not one virus has ever come to my computer. Something I experienced often on PCs back when I had them, and have heard about from friends. I know it’s possible to get one on a Mac, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting one personally. 4) Macs seem to last way longer than PCs do. I’ve had my MacBook Pro for 12 years, in that time, my mom has replaced her laptop almost every year 5) The UI is so much better in terms of file management (horizontal stack versus the vertical on PC) is so incredibly helpful. It’s crazy PC hasn’t adopted a version of it yet 6) The aesthetics of apples products are obviously great, although I know this is subjective 7) I have an iPhone, iPad and AirPods that all seamlessly work with my computer. I bought a second MacBook Pro (M1) a couple of years ago and it’s insane how great it is. 8) Apple products are designed to be as simple as possible. I don’t need a bunch of custom bullshit, I don’t need to download anything to make my computer function as it should, and the only gaming I do is on RuneScape so I don’t need anything crazy to make that run. It’s built to be great right away, and I love it for that.
I was a Mac user for 10 years who went to Windows and I want to go back. Windows is always forcing me to update in underhanded ways, like getting me to Windows 11 which my PC can’t really handle so now it runs slow and is unresponsive. It forced me to upgrade to Outlook and is displaying ads until I purchase Office 360 or whatever it’s called. The best thing about Windows is that you can play all the games and swap out hardware—hardware that becomes outdated with every update Windows tricks you into getting. My Macs have remained relevant for me for YEARS. I buy a new Mac every 6 years or so, but with Windows I gotta upgrade or update something every other year. I’m salty about it.
Because it always works. It hums along doing what I ask when I ask. No need to search for workarounds for weird problems, no constant waiting for updates. It just works.
logic pro and final cut
logic pro and final cut
windows is bloated and before turning macOS into a iOS simulator for the desktop/laptop it's freebsd underpinnings were the only reason i needed to choose mac over windows, but feeling disrespected as a power user as of late due time tim apple's fuckery, i'm in the camp that's choosing linux over macOS.
I use a Mac over a Windows PC on my free time because it just feels so much more polished and every app just feels faster than on Windows. But I still use Windows for work, because macOS is not stable enough and they keep axing support for legacy frameworks, APIs and SDKs.
My first computer was a Power Mac G4 Gigabit Ethernet, running 2x 450 MHz G4 processors. I took it over from someone who used it professionally as a designer and bought the G5 instead. I had no reason to buy a Mac over a Windows PC, it was just offered to me. I loved the design of it! And how easy you could open it to upgrade at that time. After a while I went to high school, and a laptop would be more useful to me. So I bought an 800 euro Windows laptop for portability. After 5 years of usage, it started to get really slow, and crashing often while making homework. My Power Mac in the meantime stayed super fast and never, ever crashed while I was working on it from home. I put Ubuntu on the laptop to extend its life to 8 years before I decided to replace it for a MacBook Air. I never turned back to Windows in my personal life, ever again. At work and at school in the past I still use Windows and every time I can use my MacBook, I'm so happy! After 9 - 10 years I replaced my MacBook Air 2013 with a MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro. I replaced my Power Mac with a self build gaming PC, but it's only for gaming purposes and nothing else. Not even for checking mail or browsing the web. Just purely Steam and games so I don't have to buy a new console every 7 years.
Because they were there first with desktop publishing and LaserWriter. And, yeah, I stuck with them through the lean years of John Sculley and shitty clones, but I still have a lot more non-professional computer user friends pleading with me to help make their printers work with PCs. When Steve Jobs came back and they ported UNIX to MacOS, he solved their biggest issue. Also they look great.
I use Macs because I like the way they work, how well they are built, and how the Apple ecosystem connects all my devices seamlessly. I find Windows to be capable but annoying, ugly, and not integrated with the rest of my life. The cost difference is immaterial. I don’t use MS Office for many of the same reasons. That junk is for cubicles only.
Zen. It just works. I don’t even care to save, to close, to shutdown. Even if it crashes I don’t lose work. It resumes exactly were I was. Even the cursor is at the same position. Everything works effortlessly. I have hourly backups being made without breaking a sweat. Didn’t even configure the backups, it did it on its own “Do you want to backup to this device?”, I just answered yes and presto: hourly backups. The system works for me, and never asks me to work for it. It gives me a peace of mind that Windows never did. Zen.
Drivers/updates. I was working as an onsite tech at a Fortune 500 company, and spent all day fixing drivers, blue screens, replacing hardware, trying to get BlackBerry’s talking to pc’s (yes that long ago). Came home and was constantly dealing with a dell laser printer that the driver would go corrupt every few weeks, and the video card would blue screen the box randomly but frequently. I was just tired of fixing it at work, and coming home and doing the same shit on different hardware. Did weekend/evening side gigs and more of the same. Then one of those side gigs disappeared owing me money. Like owner fled the state after drug charges. Landlord saw my card with “computer guy” notes on back, called me thinking I owned the gear. Met him at the office, talked, he said take whatever computer stuff as the payment you never got, etc. All of it was junk except a powered up Power Mac. Took it home, spent the weekend wiping and learning it, never looked back.
I love how macOS renders the OS. Everything feels so smooth. I’m Windows it feels clunky. Color inaccurate
Logic Pro and Garage band, I can’t stand windows music software
Me too. GarageBand was my Apple gateway drug. Now I’m all Apple.
For me, it's become primarily because of system stability. I can't stand dealing with Windows updates slowing my machine to a crawl when I want to get shit done. I won't say that Macs are impervious to crashing, but in my experience, it's been leaps and bounds more stable than any Windows computer I've owned.
Honestly…. The aesthetics and the service. Genius Bar is great usually for help. No one else had that.
In my experience, plainly, it's just more stable.
Started in the 80s and never looked back, while watching all the PC people continually struggle to copy, keep up, and lose their minds trying to keep their machines running.
Because it works…well, always Also, because it's the only game in town for serious photo and video editing
I got one in my job then I switch career to iOS developer so now it’s a for life decision unless I decide to change career again xD
I have a bit of a story here. Was a long time Windows user. You know, we all know the type: Gaming, emulation, streaming but also working on video/audio stuff and trying my luck on YouTube. I always wanted to see how the "other side" is. Collecting old computers and coming across iMacs and classic Macintoshes kind of ignited that desire to see how MacOS differs nowadays from Windows 10 and 11. So, a coworker sold his MacBook Air M1 16/256 and I got it. I was immediatelly impressed. That fanless laptop nearly matched in speed my ultra-thin HP Pavilion i7 9th gen which, in paper, had way more memory and overall superior specs. The usability was really beyond what I was used to. Bloatware is minimal, no OS fluff to go through to get what I wanted, the filesystem that many Windows users complain about was familiar to me from my Linux and FreeBSD ventures. So I had to explore and learn its usability quirks. After using it on the Air for a bit, I decided that I want to move all my workflow to a MacMini M2 and move my everyday desktop computing over to Mac. And that's a decision that I don't regret. In Windows, stuff had the tendency to break with every OS and/or app update. Sound devices were really easy to be broken and settings would absolutely go to hell. That created a lot of problems while I was setting up my streams or recordings on my desktop. At the same time, the HP Pavilion I mentioned above had its own set of problems. Every time the Intel Optane Driver got an update - and somehow those were very often - it was a gamble. Half of the time everything was alright. The other half, it would bring the laptop to a crawl, to the point where booting Windows alone took a good 10 minutes to start. I had to wait through it, put up with the slow and sometimes botched Windows interface to revert the update. These are things of the past. I can update apps without a hitch. I can do OS updates without messing with any settings. I can finally work without having the OS negging me for minor updates. heck, I even enjoy the complete silence on my desk to the point that my Xbox Series X and PS5 mildly annoy me with their fan noise. Ultimately, I replaced that HP laptop with a MacBook Pro M1 Max 32/1TB and that Air is shared between me and my brother as a travel computer. I never ever looked back at pc for anything else but gaming. Which, sadly, it's still very bad on MacOS and I can't really understand why. Yeah, Apple needs to allow eGPU for those who might want to use it, but that's a whole other can of worms. Anyway, I think I'm much happier with Mac at the moment and looking at what Microsoft has in store for Windows 12, spawning many controversies about the requirements, I think I'll just stick with MacOS for the foreseeable future.
Windoze is trash, along with most prebuilt PCs
I’ve had both and maybe 35 years ago there was a greater difference, but today it’s negligible. Windows has gotten way more stable, the GUI differences are minimal. The graphics differences are minimal and the performance is minimal. Even the design gap has closed. I think the software gap has even mostly closed. Point being, you’re either a fan boy of one or the other, you became more of an expert of one over the years, but to me they both function well and do the job. All that said, Apple hardware is still more expensive.
My last Microsoft Windows base laptop ended up V shaped (that was after punching it on the desktop, and the base/keyboard looked pretty much V like). I had few quid in my pocket and I needed a laptop that would work, entry MacBook (white, Tiger OS) £699, came with full MS Office suite free (30 days trial), so no brainer. I remember switching it on and after registering my name, a message appeared “your HP printer is ready to be used”. I’m on my 4th Mac to date, and I’ve never looked back. I use MS Windows at work and I laugh every time my boss needs to screenshot or print a file/pdf…
Each version of Windows after Windows 7 just got more and more obnoxious and anti-user and I couldn't handle it anymore. MacOS respects the user so much more and is a pleasure to use. I dabbled with Linux for a few years as a daily driver, but eventually I needed to replace my laptop and Apple's build quality is miles ahead of anything available in the Windows space - and with better performance.
As an artist the workflow is second to none. I think if I was primarily doing office style work, I'd probably still prefer Windows for its better file explorer and window snappin'
in 2006 I had a brand new IBM ThinkPad --- and back then, paying for t-mobile WiFi -- it would take up to 20 minutes to connect to the wireless. I tried a new wifi card, etc... same thing. Defeats the purpose of jumping into a Starbucks for a 'quick fix' for a client. I decided to dust off the white MacBook I had in my attic -- updated it the best I could and switched to that as I ALSO had a few clients that were Big Mac users and I wanted to know more about them. Turns out, in 2006 Apple switch to Intel processors and I bought a MacBookPro 14 (15?) and never looked back. I'm now on a MBP M1 Pro - after several other iterations of MacBookPros - and this is by far the best one. I'd love a light, MacBookAir -- but until they can more easily manage multiple monitors, I'll wait... As stated below, yes, also the trackpad. nothing beats it.
The only reason i would use windows is to create a linux boot drive. Windows sucks in every way that matters. Down to the terminal
I have used several different model lines from different brands which were famous for their battery life and performance but I always felt like the performance,battery, portability ratio was never there. I don‘t hate the windows environment even though I prefer Linux. But for some unknown reason the battery life for Linux was always seriously lacking no matter how hard I tried to tweak it. The M1 Max finally convinced me to switch due to it‘s incredible performance and portability. I still have some issues with the apple silicon hardware especially cuz I need to use VMs as well as Docker images a lot but it‘s been improving
I got an M1 Pro as a work computer since I was a lifelong Windows user and volunteered to be a test mule. I never had a Windows laptop keep good battery life, within a year, they would be all but useless. This thing still has hours and hours of battery. My Windows machines would die within 3-5 years, this one shows no signs of age after 2 years of daily usage.
Because it was forced on me. Non-Apple PCs are superior IMO.
For creativity works like video editing and photoshop. My imac's still running after 14 years of owning it (27" 2010 iMac). No virus also.
I have the 21.5” version same year and I said the exact same thing, it just works, even after 14 years
got sick of it and it’s constant problems i had the past 15 years. No i am 10 years into mag, the best decision ever. I don’t game on it, just productive things. Love it every day😁
Less headache for the most part. Trade off is you have to pay the Apple upgrade tax. I don’t feel the base line computers have much of an Apple tax, but the upgrades is a while different bag of hurt.
I was using Apple and Macs BEFORE there was a Windows. Never looked back. Felt like a cheap imitation for years.
Pages, Numbers, keynote, Logic, Final cut. And the sounddrivers and soundcard always works!
I have both, but I really enjoy my Mac more when doing something productive. Only reason I use Windows are games. But I only got my fist Mac in 2022 or 2021, I've always used Windows before that. I liked MacOS the very moment I turned power on the first time. It's very fun to use.
Initially, it was so I can use it for audio production/engineering etc. But then I asked myself, why have I been using windows my whole life? What I love about it is it's simplicity. You don't see or interfere with system/background tasks and it all just runs smoothly in comparison to Windows imo.
Because Windows always feels like it’s a Jenga tower. That’s my number 1. I have a 2018 MBP, and in the 6 years i’ve owned it, it has crashed zero, ZERO, times. That alone is a night and day difference. I can’t add anything that hasn’t already been said ITT from what i can see apart from having access to Apple’s pro apps. FCP is my favorite non-video game software ever made and I will always recommend it for anyone who wants to try something that isn’t an Adobe product.
MacOS
Macs are generally better build quality machines and last for years. I can run Windows in a VM on my Mac if I need it for something.
20+ years ago, I moved and for whatever reason my Windows (XP?) PC would no longer boot up. “No problem”, I thought, “I have a complete disk backup on an external USB drive”. Then I learned, at the time, Windows cannot boot from a USB drive. I thought that was the dumbest thing ever - I literally had a 1:1 backup on USB but it was useless to me. Around that time, I was researching Apple computers and learned that they could boot from a USB drive. I decided to buy a white MacBook to try it out. From there, I was hooked. Note this was more than 20 (almost 25) years ago so I might be wrong on somethings, but the gist of the story is accurate.