For the last month or two, I have for the first time been using a Macbook borrowed from my Apple-y girlfriend. So, I think I've earned the right to finally have a proper opinion on these machines, and I must admit I am shocked.
It was always in the cultural zeitgeist that they provide a clean, sturdy, efficient and luxury experience. This is what I came to expect and ho, boy was I disappointed!
After a lifetime of viruses, bloatware, random, unsolvable and crippling mystery problems that render me delusional with fury against existence, I truly expected to take a few weeks to adjust, followed by a huge workflow boost.
But the more I experience this laptop, the more I realise it truly was just propaganda from a cult of the richest company on Earth. It's actually quite a travesty of a user experience.
Sure, I get that I still need to adjust, but I can tell the difference between me being old and slow to adapt, and things that are just objectively badly designed, or not as well as Windows.
So let's run through some of the absolute crap I've been trying to tolerate,
The touchscreen panel is pretty gimmicky. It has a volume control but it's inconsistent. Sometimes theres a volume on & mute. But pressing it goes to a slider. Sometimes it's not there. And it's just too many steps to get to simple brightness controls. When typing, it has the predictive function like a phone in the centre of the panel... Literally zero people will ever use that. This stinks of just pointless filler material to make the panel seem more useful than it is.
F buttons need the FN button in order to illuminate on the panel and exist. This means I have to do a crazy stretch with one hand, unless I want to use both hands to accomplish a simple task. And they don't even tell you what they functionally do, which you'd think having a 'smart panel' of a sort, it would do that. But nope.
Using a browser is infuriating. Moving your mouse to the top brings down one or even two extra bars, meaning you have to re-adjust your position to click the button again.
The bottom taskbar more often than not is hard to bring up. It just doesn't appear half the time unless you really struggle with the mouse.
Screen grabbing is clunky and frankly just pretty shit. The equivalent 3-button custom screenshot on windows is far more versatile, editable and has a very intuitive clipboard you can instantly access with ease. Where's the clipboard on Mac? Who knows.
The whole minimize button system just straight up sucks. If I press green, I go full screen. Now, no matter what I do, I can't just move that around effortlessly. I have to press the yellow button, both of which are hidden by this point. So I move my mouse to the top, it pops up and shifts everything around so I have to move my mouse again to click it. But the yellow button is not there, greyed out! So I have to press the green button again to unlock it from max size. This for whatever reason completely shifts the window to a different size, a new desktop and god knows what else. Then I can minimize it?? It's just not fluid at all.
The whole multi-desktop thing works fine on windows because it's optional. It's more forced on Macs. So I'm constantly scrolling around between 3 or 4 desktops, which is a nightmare if you haven't memorized where you put everything.
Pressing delete on the desktop DOESN'T DELETE THE THING. I think you have to COMMAND --> DELETE. It's the dumbest thing.
I still, to this day, can't figure out how to shut down the computer. Granted you can shut it down, closing all your programs, Sure you can sleep, but it doesn't actually sleep. My bluetooth headphones still end up connecting at the worst times. Is there a normal, functional sleep? Again if so, it's just not intuitive.
One thing that's really pissing me off, is whenever I try to go to the top left to click one of the buttons, all the windows run away and hide off-screen! It's such a common action that this happens constantly.
Look, Windows has all these functions too. But it seems in Windows, it makes more niche and deliberate actions a little more of...well, a niche and deliberate action to accomplish. Not difficult, not unintuitive, but you have to consciously shake your mouse or drag a window to a side (with a notable but small delay) for the action to trigger. Things don't just happen randomly with every heavy-handed movements.
Similarly, Windows teaches you through your own natural experience that things such as right clicking on an icon shows you options you can do with that icon. So when you decide later you want to do something with that icon, you instinctively know 'right click' and you're guaranteed to find what you need in an instant.
This might seem true with Mac, but it's not. If I want to change the icon's image, I 'right click', but I see nothing related. Maybe Quick Action --> Customize? Nope. folder actions setup? Still no. EDIT in the top left corner of the screen? Nothing.
It seems Mac, in contrast to Windows, has a lot of these more niche actions rammed in your face all the time, making you prone to accidental actions in any given moment. While at the same time, having common every day actions either removed or obscured to the point that you just can't do anything with a single click.
They don't want you to customise their desktop to be your own. They have it how they like it, and you should like it too, or fuck off.
I suppose that is rather befitting of the Apple Culture. But when you are working on huge projects in photoshop or Studio One or After Effects or whatever, these little workflow problems add up to huge losses in time and energy, and they slowly sap your enjoyment of a project.
Ok, all that being said, there is one I am truly envious about.
The general build quality is about as good as it can possibly get. The speakers are amazing. The screen is nice, and the keyboard is so low-set and clicky that I just want to type 12 hours a day at 150 words-per-minute. The massive mousepad I guess is pretty good too.
So yeah, physically built like a dream, but if I ever get one myself, I'll be installing Windows from day 1.
