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I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac.

My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally.

It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked.

Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change...

Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, though Apple’s way seems primitive to how Windows handles things; thank goodness it’s a lovely screen.

The situation with using the touchpad (trackpad) and a mouse is ridiculous. When I set the scroll to how I like it with the touch pad, the mouse (an Apple Magic Mouse) works the exact opposite. If I set the mouse, it reverses my selection for the touch pad. The result is that they’re never in sync and never operate the same way. If there’s a way to fix this, it isn’t obvious.

Hey, but Apple things just work, right?

Wrong. I am finishing this short essay on my new PC laptop. I’ve sold the Mac and bought a 2025 Microsoft Surface Laptop 13”, the latest version of the “Go” series. Between starting and finishing this is roughly four months. It only took that long before my frustrations with the Mac built up to a breaking point.

As the warning goes, your mileage may vary, but the Mac offered me precisely nothing. There is nothing that Mac might do that I couldn’t already do on a Windows machine. Indeed, the Mac resisted my every attempt to integrate it into my life. My iPad Pro is likewise resistant, but far more compliant than the Mac.

The Mac despises OneDrive, and while I’m sure others have endless problems with Microsoft’s cloud service, I don’t. It’s where all my work sits and it’s the cloud service that links everything I own, even the iPad. Yet on the Mac, using it was almost a nightmare. The final straw was Scrivener, and if I had done just a hair more research, I wouldn’t have tried the Mac at all.

Because Literature and Latte, the creators of Scrivener, have done a tremendous amount of work on cloud services for their flagship product. The most agnostic cloud service, for them, is Dropbox. If the Mac had offered some compelling reason for the change, I might have finally succumbed and started paying for a Dropbox subscription, shifting everything from OneDrive to Dropbox. Alas, no, the Mac did not. It was far, far easier to sell the Mac, buy the Surface, and just watch everything work.

I’ve seen some ridiculous fan boi videos comparing setting up a Mac vs setting up a Surface laptop, and when I say ridiculous, I mean hilariously biased, such as claiming that setting up a new MacBook Air took less than five minutes, while a Surface laptop was over an hour. For me, the basic Mac setup took around 45 minutes; the Surface took around an hour. On top of that, the Mac took over 24 hours for a first-time sync to OneDrive, while the Surface just…worked.

I am not trying to persuade a Mac user to convert. I am not even trying to sell a newbie on a PC vs a Mac. I don’t care what you use. Frankly, I’d rather resume tinkering with Linux, but that is not currently in the cards.

What I am fanatically obsessed with is computer manufacturers letting me set up things my way, and Apple fights that each and every step of the way. It was bad enough watching the whole iOS vs Android fiasco, and how both Apple and Google resisted any sense of cooperation. The only major company that appears to take any step in the direction of being OS agnostic is Microsoft, of all people. Both Apple and Google (Alphabet?) fight them tooth and nail.

That fight impacts me and every other user. Apple shouldn’t care that I prefer to use OneDrive; I’m the end user and it’s my choice. Alas, no. And yes, Microsoft shouldn’t care if you opt to use iCloud, as I understand that can be a mess on PC. I have no direct experience; I’m not interested in iCloud.

All of these companies use their core products to lock you into their ecosystem. Again, Microsoft appears the most agnostic, but obviously they are far from perfect. It became clear to me that if I really wanted to use a Mac then I’d have to go all the way, meaning iPhone and Mac desktop, and that’s a loud, hard, fast no.

If you already own an iPhone and and iPad, a MacAnything makes the most sense. They’ll all cooperate and work fine together. I run a mixed environment of PC (desktop and laptop) and Android (phone and tablet) with a dab of iPad. With some resistance from the iPad, it still works fine. The MacBook refused to be a part of that mix, so buh-bye.

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