Mac or Windows?

Becoming a Mac user was an accident. Around 2005 the Mac was ahead in music and other multimedia tools, so an iMac came home for composing music with a keyboard, and I followed with a white MacBook. At home I mostly used macOS, but at work Windows was still the main system, so I had basic experience of both. This post records my years of “Mac vs Windows” experience.

The 10-year Mac experience

After the white MacBook (2005), we added a 27-inch iMac at home in 2008. In 2011, I got a MacBook Air as a gift to myself. The white MacBook was in fact very durable (It still worked in 2023!). New hardware was only about getting a bit more speed. The MacBook Air again still worked too but I got a 15-inch MacBook Pro in 2017 as I would like to have a laptop with a “bigger” screen.

Other operating systems

Over these years, while I worked mainly on a Mac, I also tried other operating systems, such as an iPad or a Chromebook, assessing whether they could replace my main computer. After the iPad mini 2, I almost gave up iOS. The main reason: iOS is easy to use, but unless you use iCloud and commit fully to the Apple ecosystem, you still need a stable, durable “computer”.

For a while the Chromebook was my first choice as a mobile computer. It has the “desktop” version of Chrome thus much more capable, in my workflow, than an iPad. With a built-in keyboard and a relatively light build, it became my choice of “tablet” machine.

Trying Windows again

All that trial of tablets and different OS made me curious about the Surface line: putting a full Windows operating system in the form of a tablet. In 2016 I bought a Surface 3 for my parents. Then, when the Surface Book 2 came along, I couldn’t resist buying one in 2018 to try it. I wanted to know what it would feel like to use Windows as my main computer again after so many years.

The Surface Book 2 was a very appealing design. It turned into a tablet whenever I wanted and it had a touchscreen. At the time it fully met my work needs, and after years of macOS it felt fresh in many ways. But after a year, just past the warranty, the battery declined fast and it dropped out of the “laptop” category. The Surface Book 2 was never light to begin with. With the charger in my bag every time I went out, it became a portable piece of gym equipment.

Windows had also improved a lot. Updates and daily use no longer came with the old anxiety. I no longer felt that macOS was “really faster” or “really more stable”. My daily work was mostly documents, the web and reading, and the software I used felt almost the same on both systems: Chrome, Office, PDF readers, VLC and so on. What I noticed between the MacBook and the Surface from 2018 to 2023 was no longer a difference in software or operating system. It was the two companies’ different approach to hardware.

Back to the Mac, but…

I had sold the 15-inch MacBook Pro while I was using the Surface Book 2. When the 15-inch MacBook Air came out in 2023, I went back to macOS. How it felt after the switch: no more worrying about the battery, and the keyboard and trackpad suited me better.

Then I needed to run some Linux-based analysis tools, and found that most of them are set up for Linux or Windows. macOS can run them through emulation, but I spent days changing settings on a MacBook Pro and still failed. These tools are usually written and tested for Linux. Between “almost Linux” and “actually Linux” there is still a wall that is hard to get over. The machine that solved it was a Windows PC: a Minisforum AI X1 Pro, running the tools in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

The answer now

Mac or Windows?

I probably still “like macOS more”. My main computer is still a Mac.

But it is no longer a question of which one is better to use. The question is: what does your work mainly need? For twenty years my work was documents and browsers, and the Mac’s stability won. Now my work is Linux tool chains and local AI, and Windows with WSL fits better. Not because Windows got better, but because it actually answers my needs.