Windows and MacOS

After three years of using MacOS, I have finally switched back to Windows. There are things I remember fondly and there are other things I feel Windows has not kept up.

My laptop is a brand new Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 360. It’s very lightweight and powerful with a beautiful screen. It supports tablet mode, but honestly, I have not used it much. When I walk around, I prefer the iPad Pro.

Hipsters

There is a group of people who are fanatics for Apple. They think the MacOS is superior in every way imaginable and using Windows is a mortal sin. These people say “Clean and Modern” whenever they describe their design. These people will always have an iPhone rather than Android. They will always design for Mac users despite Windows having an 80% market share,.

The simple truth is that 90+% of the operating system functionality is the same. Maybe the keyboard shortcuts are different or the placement of the clock, but at the end of the day, Chrome is Chrome and Slack is Slack and Zoom is Zoom. Even Microsoft Office works basically the same on both.

I think Hipsters are terrible for the design world. They focus on the lifestyle and brand of design rather than the realities real people face every day. It is STILL hard to install a printer for someone over 60 years old.

What I Use the Laptop For

1. Figma
2. Chrome/Firefox (obviously)
3. Zoom
4. Slack
5. Telegram
6. GSuite / MS Office
7. Occasional game with kids

Most of the time, I use it as a “desktop”. In other words, I have a dock and I use a mouse and keyboard and big curved displays. In fact, if I try to type on a flat keyboard my hands start to hurt within 30 minutes.

Figma

Although the UI is basically the same, I have noticed a very significant speed decrease in Windows. Figma is very GPU intensive, so it makes some sense. This is unfortunate since I spend so much of my time in Figma. This alone makes me concerned I chose wrong and should have ordered an M1 Macbook Pro. Too late now, I suppose.

Multiple monitors

Using multiple monitors has working basics for both, but I’ve had troubles in each OS when it gets more sophisticated. For the Mac, I couldn’t get the resolution to scale properly and was constantly messing with the browser zoom. For Windows, it constantly forgets which programs belong to which monitors. I am researching different utilities to fix, but it is annoying.

This is something that should be obvious. I should be able to assign programs to certain window locations in docked vs undocked modes.

Summary

The operating systems are mostly the same. The aesthetics aren’t that different. The capabilities aren’t that different. Software is mostly supported on both. The stores are roughly the same. At the end of the day, you can’t really go wrong with equivalent hardware specs from the PC world vs Apple.

If I could pick anything out as different…

1. In Figma, Macs have a speed advantage
2. Windows Startbar is a little nicer than the dock
3. More games on Windows
4. Better video/sound editing on Mac
5. More hardware choices on Windows

That’s pretty much it. Otherwise, it’s the same. I could have probably written the same post about iPhone and Android.