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It might surprise you to hear that I was once a Windows-only kinda guy. Or, more accurately, kid.
Bar a few brief flirtations with the Mac at school and during a week of work experience at a local newspaper, my formative years in computing were spent regularly interacting with the Start button.
As a result, most of those years were also spent fixing stuff and butchering my computers to within an inch of their lives just to get <insert name of the latest game title here> working.
I wouldn’t swap those years for anything; they taught me so much about what goes on under the hood of a computer and within an operating system. Although, I am glad they’re behind me. And I’m even more glad I eventually made the full switch to the Mac in the early 2000s.
I’ve been thinking about why I’m so glued to the Mac, and I think there are five key reasons this is the case.
1. Continuity
This feels like such a weird reason to be glued to the Mac, but it is easily one of the most important Apple ecosystem features for my business. I use it constantly.
For the uninitiated, Continuity refers to the many ways in which Apple devices can talk to one another. You can ‘hand off’ FaceTime calls between your iPhone and your Mac, share content from one device to another, unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch, edit PDFs on your iPad when you open them on your Mac, use your iPhone as an ‘Instant Hotspot’, and so much more.
The list goes on, and on, and on. Apple has added consistently to the capabilities of Continuity over the years, and while it isn’t unique, it does just work as all great Apple features should.
However, there’s one Continuity feature which I simply couldn’t live without, and that’s the ability to transfer the clipboard between devices. It might be a URL or a piece of text, but the ability to simply hit copy on my Mac, for instance, and then immediately paste the contents of the clipboard onto my iPhone is so useful.
If my allegiance to the Mac was akin to the end of the world, Continuity would be the last fully intact cockroach floating through space.
That analogy made more sense in my head.
2. Hardware
This is definitely the main bone of contention for anyone outside of the Apple fanboy/fangirl circle. To them, we’re viewed as people with more money than sense – people who will literally buy anything Tim Cook places in front of them.
That’s a little unfair. Although, if it has chamfered edges…
But hardware really does matter to me. I’ve used and owned some absolutely dreadful Windows computers and laptops. And while I fully appreciate that there are some wonderfully designed and built Windows machines out there today, I’m afraid I can’t shake off the beige-walled, corporate jungle connotations I’ve forever attached to Windows hardware.
This is entirely subjective, but I think Macs remain the best-looking computers on the market. Even the Mac mini is a weirdly handsome device.
3. The absence of OS crashes
macOS never crashes.
Ever.
There’s the odd stutter occasionally, and you might have to restart Finder once in a while, but I’ve never experienced anything remotely close to Blue Screen Syndrome with any of the Macs I’ve owned and used.
As a Mac user, you get used to this quickly. As you should. Operating system crashes just aren’t a ‘thing’ in macOS land, and that does wonders for your productivity and happiness.
4. Final Cut Pro
On a recent episode of Eight or Sixteen, Rob was telling me about Samsung’s impressive ecosystem. Clearly, Apple’s biggest rival has been working just as hard as Tim Cook’s company to tie all of its devices together.
So, why don’t I give it a go, he asked. It was a fair question, but it was at that moment I realised the real reason I’m so wedded to Apple.
It’s Final Cut Pro.
You see, without my reliance on that piece of software for video editing, I could, in theory, switch to a completely different ecosystem for a couple of weeks. Everything else I do is completely transferrable.
Video editing should fall under that banner too, of course. The problem is that switching to something like Adobe Premiere Pro would be a massive lift, operationally. I’d have to learn a completely different video editing platform from the ground up – a task for which I have incredibly limited time, given the absence of any slack in my production process.
It’s a crap excuse and one that I do need to address one day. Final Cut Pro isn’t even necessarily the best video editing software out there – it’s just the one that I know like the back of my hand, and it’s the key reason I’m glued to the Mac.
5. The writing apps
If I switched to Windows tomorrow, my daily writing wouldn’t take much of a hit in terms of productivity.
The problem is that I’d probably end up using Microsoft Word.
Yuck.
The reason for this is simple – there appears to be an unfathomable lack of decent writing apps on Windows.
I spent some time a while ago investigating this and, try as I might, I could not find a Windows replacement for my beloved Ulysses. It was incredibly frustrating. The closest I found was Obsidian, but even that didn’t quite cut the mustard.
The list of macOS-only writing apps is vast. It includes the aforementioned Ulysses alongside Drafts, Bear, and iA Writer. They’re all wonderful writing platforms for anyone who wants a distraction-free canvas with simple but effective organisation for their work.
This might be entirely unfair – and it is certainly noted without much research beyond the writing realm – but I do have a feeling that some of the best app developers shun Windows, and I have no idea why.
Final thought: what keeps YOU hooked?
I can’t see myself ever abandoning the Mac. As anyone who is engrossed in macOS will testify, once you’re in, you’re in.
The ability of a single operating system and its associated hardware to hold you captive fascinates me. So, I’ll turn the question over to you: why are you welded to the Mac?
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