Choosing macOS after a lifetime on Windows

A younger version of myself would have scoffed and even laughed at the thought of ever buying a Mac. Little did he know that over the years all of his arguments against Apple for his computing needs would either be flipped upside down or fade into irrelevancy—and that Microsoft would be the one to provide him that final push to buy a MacBook.

I grew up in a Windows household, introduced to computers from a young age. I played the original Putt-Putt game on a Compaq PC running Windows 95, spent countless hours in Microsoft Paint recoloring Pokemon sprites on our Windows XP machine, fell in love with PC gaming on a hand-me-down laptop running Windows Vista (later upgrading to a more capable Windows 7 laptop), and eventually built my own desktop PC with Windows 10. I became more and more a power-user over the years, especially once my grasp on coding and scripting was developed in my university years. I’d burned into muscle memory a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and even a moderate list of Alt codes—after all, I do love my em and en dashes (Alt + 0151/0150). I became comfortable in the CME.exe terminal, edited Windows registry keys to fix bugs/annoyances, used robocopy for offline file syncing, and generally became acquainted with lots of power-user features, utilities, and programs through my professional work. I felt good about my mastery over Windows, after all, the professional world runs on Windows, right?

Simultaneously, I had been nursing a relationship with the Apple ecosystem most of this time. For Christmas in eigth grade I received an iPod classic, and this set in motion how I would manage my music to this very day, curating my own collection of MP3 files and playlists, a holdout in today’s era of music streaming. When I went off to university, I got my first smartphone, an iPhone 4, the natural choice given my music lived in iTunes. To some degree, I had initialy felt a bit like a hostage, that I had to use an iPhone owing to insisting on having my music in iTunes and not wanting to mess with other music management solutions. That feeling, fortunately, mostly faded before too long owing to actually liking the mobile experience on iOS, though I did harbor some envy for the extra customization, control, and freedoms of Android.

Even then though, I would never consider buying a Mac. It was simply unfathomable. Why would I pay a lot more money for a machine with worse performance, second-class to absent support for many programs and games especially, and on a relatively niche operating system with hardly any footprint in the professional world of engineering? Furthermore, I saw value in being able to customize everything, in both hardware and software. Maybe this made me a hypocrite for using iOS over Android, but at least on mobile there were plenty more arguments, in my view, for choosing Apple (device build quality, OS polish and consistency, software support longevity, etc.). In the personal computing realm, the only choices were Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux, and Windows was obviously the right choice. And this is how I continued thinking throughout my twenties.

In the summer before my final year of undergrad, I had an internship where I was provided an iMac to use, and I remember just being so frustrated with it. I resented Apple for so many Mac-isms and for, what seemed to me, unintuitive differences in design whose only purpose was to be different. In all fairness, I still hold many of those opinions (looking at you, reversed “natural” scrolling), and being cursed with a Magic Mouse—a design and erginomic nightmare so bad as to be comical—probably contibuted a fair amount toward my tainted view of Macs and Apple’s design philosophy. At the time, I failed to critically reflect on why I had been given a Mac in the first place, for a job involving writing, compiling, and executing Fortran and C++ code.

I did get a taste of Linux in my university years too, though mostly through PuTTY SSH windows, primarily for utilizing the department’s high-performance computing resources for extensive radiation transport simulations. I started understanding Linux’s place in the professional world and its utility. In my first summer of grad school I had the joy of trying to compile Fortran code on a Windows machine, realizing just how much more of a pain it was than in my undergraduate Fortran course where I just SSH’d into one of the department’s Linux machines. For the particle experiments in my PhD work, we used CERN’s ROOT software for data analysis, where I was stuck using an old version owing to deprecation of Windows support. These were my first professional tastes of Windows being the second-class citizen and challenging my preconceptions of the professional ubiquity of Windows.

From grad school onward, I was content with my Windows + iOS setup. Neither were perfect, but I felt like I had made the right choice for my personal needs and priorities. My desktop PC served me well, satisfying my gaming needs and providing a smooth and functional experience. Time continued to pass. As a young adult, I became more aware of the news and formed opinions about how the world should be. I aligned with open source ideals and right-to-repair initiatives (a place where Apple holds a notorious reputation), and more broadly I developed values of personal privacy and data security. Amid incremental steps toward a more Orwellian future, Apple has repeatedly demonstrated its resolve on maintaining its principled stance of protecting user privacy even against the strongest adversaries possible (large Western governments), and this has left a strong impression on me.

Even still, I was content with my Windows 10 PC I’d built, and I continued to game on it, even lugging it with me to Japan when I moved there (and later Norway too). However, in those years in Japan, working my first “real job” after my PhD, I started doing a bit more introspection about how I was spending my free time, and specifically on the value of my continuing years-long relationship with World of Warcraft, especially as the game itself had started feeling more like a chore than a fun way to spend time. More broadly, I had begun questioning the value of time spent gaming versus productive or other consumptive hobbies, like reading and watching shows/movies. Regardless, owing to the pandemic keeping me at home for most of my time not at work, gaming remained a part of my life, though in a waning capacity and with a shift back toward console gaming (hello Animal Crossing). It was also in these years that the Cortex podcast, which I’d been a loyal listener of, began chronicling the rise of Apple Silicon computer processors, sparking within me the tiniest bit of intrigue for Mac computers.

By the time life had taken me to Norway and I had fully settled in, my priorities and how I spent my free time were quite different from years past. I no longer found myself gaming at all, aside from occasionally booting up my old Minecraft world for some nostalgia and cathartic building or casually playing various single-player or local-multi-player games on my Nintendo Switch. Instead I was spending my free time reading, watching shows and YouTube edutainment, hiking, and socializing. Thus, my aging gaming PC was largely relegated to web browsing and basic computer tasks.

As time marched on, I started noticing a decline in the quality of my experience on Windows. “Did that pop-up always appear after each update? Wait, where on earth did that Word document just save? What do you mean on OneDrive? You mean I can’t make the default behavior to just save the file locally, that I’m forever plagued with extra clicks to get the more sensible behavior? Why do I need to sign-in to a Microsoft account for this? No, really, I am not interested in the Edge browser. Nor Bing search. Please, I meant no the first three dozen times I told you, and no my mind has not and will not change.” The modern decline of software user experiences to maximally squeeze profits from the user base is a well-documented phenomenon, and Microsoft most certainly has not been immune to it.

And this was all before Copilot and Microsoft’s decision to force-feed its users with its solution-looking-for-a-problem AI agent, intruding everywhere in Windows and Microsoft’s other software products. I was flabbergasted when I first heard of Microsoft’s new Windows 11 spyware “feature” called Recall that constantly records your screen for an AI to study, a blatant and reckless disregard for privacy and security. Even after immense backlash, they have still deployed it—though at least it’s only opt-in by default, for now. The fact that this idea was even humored seriously, let alone developed then deployed, was the writing on the wall for me: my ideals are fundamentally incompatible with where Microsoft wants to take Windows. Furthermore, with Microsoft already claiming up to 30% of their code is being written by AI (and hearing through the grapevine that the target is an even higher percentage to be written by Copilot), I personally lost all faith in the long-term future of Windows, at least for me. This sounds like a recipe for the operating system, which already feels like a patchwork mess (with some functions still only accessible via a decades-old control panel), to just completely implode.

Still, inertia is a very strong force. I may not like Windows 11 on my work laptop, but at least I still have good ol’ Windows 10 on my home PC that I can just keep using, right? Nope! I can’t fault Microsoft for phasing out old operating systems; expecting them to support Windows 10 forever would be unreasonable. But, I can and absolutely will fault them for deprecating tons of perfectly serviceable hardware, including my desktop, by ceasing security updates for Windows 10 and requiring newer hardware for Windows 11, seeking to generate tons of e-waste in an effort just to get people on older hardware to shell out for the shiny new “Copilot+ PCs” on offer, equipped with the latest and greatest user-data-harvesting technology. So, an expiry date of 14 October 2025 had been slapped on my trusty (though aging) home-built PC.

Thus, Microsoft forced my hand. If I wanted to keep using my old desktop PC securely, my only option would be to switch to using Linux on it. While Steam’s recent hardware survey shows a good chunk of gamers have made exactly this choice, I ultimately decided that this was not tenable for me, at least not for my primary machine. While Linux does best align with some of my ideals around software, practically speaking I do not have the time to undertake all of the learning, tinkering, debugging, maintaining, and fixing that would come with a move to Linux, not to mention the fact that there are still widespread software compatibility issues I would have to overcome on Linux. This could still be a fun hobby project for the old desktop one day though. But, the more pressing issue was deciding what kind of new primary computer to buy to replace my nearly-ten-year-old desktop for daily use.

This is the context that ultimately made me question: “Do I even want a Windows 11 machine?” Up until this point, it was a given that I would always use Windows as my primary operating system. But, owing to the ill-will Microsoft had garnered from me in forcing my hand on upgrade timing, together with its consistent display of extreme misalignment with my own values, I was starting to ponder: “Is macOS just my only choice here?” At first, I was really not happy with the pickle I found myself in, trying to just pick the least bad option in front of me. After all, what about all of the reasons I had dismissed Macs previously?

Well, it turns out most of those were moot or wrong now. Computer gaming is the least important it’s ever been to me in my adult life, so there goes that argument for Windows (even with Mac/Linux gaming continuing to make remarkable progress in recent years). While it’s true Apple still charges a premium for its products, I’m also a working adult now and not a poor university student. Furthermore, what that money gets me today is genuinely best-in-class build quality (something Apple has long done well) on top of genuinely excellent performance and efficiency thanks to the progress with Apple Silicon. As far as program support is concerned, macOS actually comes out ahead of Windows on this front owing to a number of the software I use professionally actually being developed for Unix systems (macOS and Linux) and Windows either being an afterthought or wholly unsupported, with most other major software today being distributed across both Windows and macOS.

On top of this, I started researching the benefits of the Apple ecosystem—the synergies I’d benefit from by using both macOS and iOS together—and suddenly started feeling a bit of excitement surrounding the prospect of moving to macOS. As it turns out, there’s a bunch of cool functionality and conveniences to be gained. It also felt like a nice opportunity for a clean start of sorts, a chance to rethink my file management system from the ground up along with other facets of my digital life in terms of the tools I use and how I organize things. While a part of me is reluctant to be willingly handing over some degree of my digital sovereignty to Apple by investing in their ecosystem, I would argue that it is nigh impossible for most of us to fully escape the clutches of the big tech companies today, so I might as well choose the company whose values best align with my own and that maximizes convenience. (No big tech company is perfect; see Wikipedia’s nicely compiled list of criticisms of both Apple and Microsoft, along with the others with pages in the “Criticism of companies” category.)

So, I pulled the trigger and bought an M4 MacBook Pro, and I am happy to report I have absolutely no regrets two and a half months in! I have genuinely had a great time on macOS, despite the current version 26 Tahoe being controversial among the established Mac community. It has not been without its growing pains. There have been plenty of moments where I have to search for how to do something or have been a bit frustrated at something I’m used to doing quickly in Windows being a bit more arduous in macOS. Often though, I will find there is a sensible “Mac-native” approach to accomplishing my goal that is simply just different from how Windows had trained me to think, and this time I am embracing these differences with an open mind instead of faulting macOS for not being Windows. I will also add that the Supercharge app has been worth every cent I paid for it and addresses many of my remaining grievances with macOS so far.

Furthermore, (re)learning all of the new keyboard shortcuts has been an ongoing challenge, though with time I am internalizing patterns for how things work and realizing there is some degree of logic to when the various modifier keys are used. On that note, I am very happy that my beloved em and en dashes are typed far more sensibly on macOS (Shift + Option + hyphen / Option + hyphen) than the Alt codes on Windows, and it gives me a little bit of pleasure each time I discover yet another symbol on macOS that is sensibly typed rather than requiring memorization of a four-digit code. Developing and enacting my revisions to my file management and overall digital strategies has been a substantial amount of work, though I am very happy with how organized my previous mess of files now is. (This is more the fruits of my hard labor, not really a macOS benefit though.)

I have also enjoyed the passionate online media and community around Apple and macOS, with podcasts helping me fulfill my power-user nature on macOS and casually following news and rumors around Apple, news sites where I can keep up-to-date with new features being added to macOS and iOS and future releases, and blogs that have chronicled Apple for many years. I feel like I have learned quite quickly and have already achieved some macOS power-user-level feats in making tools for my personal workflows and resolving minor annoyances.

I must admit, I have felt a degree of schadenfreude in seeing the news covering the mess that has been buggy Windows 11 updates in early 2026 wreaking havoc, like I’m witnessing the results of AI slop code being pushed out to the masses recklessly without adequate testing. I understand that Apple is widely regarded as having fallen way behind on AI, but this is a feature, not a bug, for me. I don’t know why Apple has failed to achieve their initial AI goals, but I like to think it isn’t because they lacked the talent but at least partially because they are holding themselves to a higher standard of quality and reliability than the rest of the tech industry clambering to “move fast and break things” in the pursuit of AI rollout. Perhaps they underestimated the difficulty of developing an AI that can actually be trusted to have permissions on your phone or computer, but I am grateful Apple has chosen to withhold AI features and take a bit of egg to the face instead of following this trend of shoving unhelpful (and sometimes destructive) AI everywhere. I just hope this remains to be the case moving forward.

I do not see myself becoming one of the Apple fan-boys my past self would have scoffed at—I have no intention of blindly defending any poor decision-making at Apple—but man am I thrilled about actually enjoying my personal computing experience once again.