Why do you use MacOS?

[Joonikko]

Preface: I've been using a Hackintosh PC since ~2011 and still have a 2012 13,3" MacBook Air in somewhat regular use. The PC also runs Windows 10 64-bit (v1903), I have an Android phone, iPad and couple Raspberry Pi's around the house.

Windowing, tabs, menubar & UI standards

Please read this article from Ars Technica first. Here is a short quote:

Quote

The Mac's window-per-document model naturally leads all Mac software to be able to load and display multiple documents simultaneously; to have multiple documents, just create multiple windows. Multiple documents just mean multiple windows; no problem. The situation isn't so clear-cut on Windows. Because each window represents an entire application, what should an application do if the user wants to load two documents simultaneously? The lack of a single good answer means that Windows applications exhibit a variety of behaviors. The simplest policy is that used by Notepad; Notepad simply can't open multiple documents, and so to get multiple documents you just run multiple copies of the application.

This is probably part of the reason why most Windows applications don't have tab support yet, while almost all applications on macOS support tabs.

Since the menubar is part of the system UI & constant, multiple windows between the same application don't need to duplicate the menu and thus saves screen real estate (in big-O notation macOS O(1) and Windows O(x)). Also it's possible to bind or rebind hotkeys to menu items in the system preferences. If the developer used Application Kit for their UI and used the default elements & colors, the application now also supports dark mode with no extra work.

 

Edit: To clarify, Windows does support multiwindowing for an application (MDI, MTI), but at least in the past it has felt like an hack for something the system wasn't designed to do (no alt-tab previews for documents in Office, for example).

Misson Control (Expose)

Mission Control is nice because it maintains the location & proportion of windows even when it's showing an overview of all windows. If you're looking for the small window that was on the right lower corner of the screen, it's going to be small window on the right lower corner in Mission Control. 

Task View in Windows 10 is hard and tedious to use because it displays ~100x100px tiny windows in a seemingly random order and all the windows are the same size regardless of the original window size. This doesn't allow the user to use spatial memory to quickly find the window they were looking for, but instead makes them sort through a random array.

Software and software installs

The way you install and uninstall applications on macOS is simple and easy. In most cases there is just a directory that ends in an  .app extension and goes to /Applications or to ~/Applications directory. The configuration, cache etc. files go to the user library (~/Library), which allows for proper multiuser support and the transfer & backup of settings to another host easily.

On Windows there is C:/Program Files & C:/Program Files (x86) for software installs, C:/ProgramData for system wide program data and ~/AppData for user data. Inside the AppData directory there are Local, LocalLow & Roaming directories and if you read the Microsoft document explaining the idea behind them, it makes sense but it seems that no application developer read and it's a huge mess. Some applications even install themselves to the user AppData directory. 

 

Customization

macOS is quite cusomizable, you can edit every item in Finder's sidebar, add, remove & arrange icons in toolbars, change program & system hotkeys, keyboard modifiers, what items are displayed in the right click menu, etc.

Other nice things to have:

- UNIX shell (I know there is WSL, but it's not production ready)
- QuickLook
- Autosave and versions
- Standard-ish hotkeys across the system
- Font management: fonts are installed to ~/Fonts and font groups saved to ~/FontCollections
- Search for menu items in the Help menu
- It doesn't change constantly in meaningless ways: You can take macOS 10.14 (2018) and 10.5 (2007) and the network settings are in the same place.

- "Respect for the user": I've never had macOS reboot for an update without asking me first or resetting preferences to defaults, while Windows 10 has done both multiple times. I don't want to work or use a system that reboots and resets my workspace & workflow while I'm getting a cup of coffee.
- Automator: simple & easy to automate tasks. I have an automator script that launches my commonly used applications at once so I don't need to manually do it every time.
- "Services" is what Apple calls the 3rd party right-click items. Examples of what I have: multithreaded image converter / resizer (uses sips & Python 3.2), new textedit document from selection, open shell here & remove empty lines from text.

[scotartt]

I’m a developer. I switched from Linux nearly 15 years ago. I need all my tools to work in a Unix like environment, and the Mac provides that in spades. Most tools that i need are available, eg awk sed grep find dig and so on without weird and wacky workarounds. Homebrew to install tons of other stuff. 

 

The consumer side of the coin - smooth integration with my iphone, music, and photos, and all that stuff, is just icing on the cake.

 

Probably the number one ‘ecosystem’ app is iMessage. Being able to text straight off my computer is a god send sometimes. 

[Infensus]

I initially used it for Logic Pro X for my sound design work, that was the main reason I got a mac in the first place. A lot of sound design and analysis tools, for various reasons, are designed for Mac and run better natively on it, something to do with the architecture. Now my mac is my daily driver as I sold the parts of my gaming rig to travel and never got the money together to build another one... I will eventually. Since all I play is like 2D indie platformers that hasn't been as much of an issue as I expected it to be. For specific tasks like sound design it's pretty great though

[harryk]

7 hours ago, Joonikko said:

Windowing, tabs, menubar & UI standards

Please read this article from Ars Technica first. Here is a short quote:

Quote

The Mac's window-per-document model naturally leads all Mac software to be able to load and display multiple documents simultaneously; to have multiple documents, just create multiple windows. Multiple documents just mean multiple windows; no problem. The situation isn't so clear-cut on Windows. Because each window represents an entire application, what should an application do if the user wants to load two documents simultaneously? The lack of a single good answer means that Windows applications exhibit a variety of behaviors. The simplest policy is that used by Notepad; Notepad simply can't open multiple documents, and so to get multiple documents you just run multiple copies of the application.

 

OMG yes. When people complain about having too many tabs in Chrome, and I'm over here with Safari neatly organized with multiple windows each having their own tabs.

 

7 hours ago, Joonikko said:

Misson Control (Expose)

<snip>

To add to your point about size, in many cases I can still read the text on a given window when in Mission Control. This is great for when I am transcribing something I can't copy paste. I don't have to actually switch to that window, just hit one button to toggle in and out of Mission Control. I'd also like to point out that windows inside Mission Control continue to update as if they were open.

 

7 hours ago, Joonikko said:

- It doesn't change constantly in meaningless ways: You can take macOS 10.14 (2018) and 10.5 (2007) and the network settings are in the same place.

This made me think of another point. In Mac nearly all the settings and preferences are in the Settings App, with specific application settings under the menu bar for each application e.g. Safari>Preferences. This is so much cleaner than Windows which has System Settings, and Control Panel, and Device Manager, and numerous other weird little settings programs you find after googling how to do something. Also drivers. While they technically exist, I've never seen any mention of drivers in Mac.

 

Another thing, Picture in Picture in Safari. Not sure if something equivalent exists in Windows, but PiP is great when working with limited screen real-estate and you want to watch Youtube at the same time. 

 

EDIT: One more thing, why does Windows have multiple versions? i.e. Home, Pro, Education, Enterprise etc. With Mac there's just one. There used to be OS X Server but its dead now.

[Video Beagle]

I've been using Apple computers...and even Macs...since before most of the people on the forum...and I think in LMG were born...AND I've done windows tech support for a good number of years, so with those biases stated....

 

It's cliche, but on a Mac, it just works.

Truthfully, there's nothing you can on a mac that you can't on a windows machine...it's just on a mac, it works a bit better. ..just a little bit smoother, just a little bit easier...

 

Some of this comes down to the tighter integration of software and hardware so it all works together and doesn't have to account for hundreds of variables in hardware and software, but the reasons, while an interesting topic, don't really matter...it's just a bit better.

 

(An observation, not perhaps quite on topic, between the two platforms, from owning and troubleshooting personaly and professionaly...I find Windows systems will have a lot of small problems...while a Mac system will have a few MAJOR problems.  Windows you'll spend a day every month tracking down a driver problem, a registry issue, a bad install, and incompatable version.  A mac, your motherboard turned to provolone for some reason once a year.)

[Guest]

17 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

I do use all three of the main OS's, but I spend a hell of a lot more time repairing them, since I work full time at a PC shop.

 

I have never seen macOS fail to boot on properly working hardware. And on a machine that suffered data corruption from a failing drive, I just cloned it to a working drive, and installed macOS over the old one. No customer data lost, since it keeps data when you reinstall.

 

I've just found macOS to be basically bulletproof compared to the cheese that windows 10 is made of. It really does just... keep working. And you can even boot it off an external USB drive!

 

Also, Time Machine is just outstanding. Having a full backup of your operating system and everything else which you can just plug into another mac and even boot to if you want is amazing.

MacOS is especially uncaring where you install from or to. So if you have no USB to install Windows, its often no-banana. Whereas you can install MacOS from an external HDD, SSD, SD-Card etc. Which is so nice because all my USB sticks tend to go for walks. Even if you don't have any you can choose three recovery options, normal recovery, internet recovery, or internet recovery with the OS that came with your laptop. 

[xn--cr8h]

17 hours ago, Joonikko said:

Windowing, tabs, menubar & UI standards

Please read this article from Ars Technica first. Here is a short quote:

 

 

This is probably part of the reason why most Windows applications don't have tab support yet, while almost all applications on macOS support tabs.

I'm a bit confused about this. Unless OSX has changed drastically since I last used it, I've used almost no OSX programs with tabs aside from Safari?

[Joonikko]

14 hours ago, harryk said:

OMG yes. When people complain about having too many tabs in Chrome, and I'm over here with Safari neatly organized with multiple windows each having their own tabs.

There is multi-window support for applications in Windows, but the implementation depends on the application.

 

4 hours ago, xn--cr8h said:

I'm a bit confused about this. Unless OSX has changed drastically since I last used it, I've used almost no OSX programs with tabs aside from Safari?

In macOS 10.12 Apple added tab support for more applications and if a developer followed the defaults in Xcode, they seem to get the feature for free.

[Video Beagle]

Also...Microsoft gave us clippy.

 

Apple is giving us.,,

[Ezio Auditore]

On 7/16/2019 at 2:52 AM, WebPlayz said:

I love the simplicity and streamlined connection between my phone and the computer with airdrop and being able to continue where I left off on my laptop from my phone's web browser.

You can technically do that on windows by using the edge android app and OneDrive

[tylerkyran5]

mac os is kinda trash tbh like you cant even run .exe

[KarathKasun]

15 hours ago, floofer said:

MacOS is especially uncaring where you install from or to. So if you have no USB to install Windows, its often no-banana. Whereas you can install MacOS from an external HDD, SSD, SD-Card etc. Which is so nice because all my USB sticks tend to go for walks. Even if you don't have any you can choose three recovery options, normal recovery, internet recovery, or internet recovery with the OS that came with your laptop. 

You can do this with Windows 10.  I have installed it from an old Android device that still supported "USB Mass Storage" mode and external HDDs.

[WebPlayz]

7 hours ago, Ezio Auditore said:

You can technically do that on windows by using the edge android app and OneDrive

Technically yeah, but I have ios ;/ 

[Zando_]

Well polished, great ecosystem and syngergy between Apple products and services. Multitasking is excellent, it handles trackpad input extremely well and mice just fine too. Gestures are intuitive and make sense, animations are smooth. Control over updates is nice, I have access to Spark (a mail client I really like but isn't on windows, only mac/iOS). I like the file management more for what I do at work than Windows, which I use at home for games and such. Generally runs smooth and is very reliable, feels a lot less clunky than Windows and has much better software compatibility than Linux. For work it's pretty much my perfect OS, only thing it's missing is window snapping. 

[Wano97]

MacOS is a great, polished system. If it wasn't for the crappy butterfly keyboard, I wouldn't think twice about buying a new macbook pro. Windows just has issues you usually don't see with MacOS

[iKingRPG]

On 7/15/2019 at 4:18 PM, James said:

Hey guys! We're doing another "10 Reasons _____ is just Better" video - this time with MacOS. Now's your chance to tell us what you love about MacOS and/or why MacOS is better than Windows/ Linux.
 
*** We don't really want to hear from the Windows or Linux users here. We want to hear from current MacOS users ***

 

 

 

I dont

[lewdicrous]

28 minutes ago, iKingRPG said:

I dont

Quote

*** We don't really want to hear from the Windows or Linux users here. We want to hear from current MacOS users ***

This thread was not for you then..

[James]

On 8/4/2019 at 11:39 PM, iKingRPG said:

I dont

thanks for quoting me and giving a notification broooooooooooo0000oooaoooOO

[iKingRPG]

On 8/7/2019 at 1:58 PM, James said:

thanks for quoting me and giving a notification broooooooooooo0000oooaoooOO

No problem 

[Bustapalapano]

Late to the party, video already made. But damn, coding on OSX is just so much more hastle free than on Windows. I can't really explain it, but IDEs just work better on OSX. I'm not savvy enough to explain why. I got a MacBook Air for work, and I often prefer working on it to my desktop Gaming PC just for reliability.