Mine’s still going strong after 10 years! (Though I did replace the original drive with an SSD, as any right thinking person would.)
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Regarding cheaper, if you are someone who must have the latest and greatest and you upgrade every 3 years or so, yes, PC’s are cheaper. But I have found that over time, those windows boxes don’t last as long as macs, so if you invest in a mac that is double the cost of a pc, you’ll get more than twice the use out of it. At my last job, the guy sitting next to me went through 4 PC’s over 10 years, I used 2 macs (they made me upgrade because of security concerns), I used the old mac as a secondary machine off-network because it had some old software I liked to use. I’m writing this on the 2007 17-inch MBP I bought for $2399 in 2007. Yes my daily driver isn’t the fastest horse in the race but it gets the things i need done. When I have to do video editing, i do switch to the kids’ 2013 mac mini tricked out with 16 GB RAM and a fusion drive (that was $1599 and still gets security updates. I’m probably going to replace my 2007 MBP with a 12.9 iPadPro when the next version comes out. My 2007 has ALLTHEPORTS but i never plug anything in to them, except the rare external HD (backup to time capsule, bluetooth for everything else. Heck, I even have an SD express card adapter that i completely forgot about since my camera creates its own network). YMMV, but macs in my hands seem to last forever. Sometimes I wish this machine will die so i have an excuse to get the latest and greatest, but it just keeps on ticking…
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I had the 2011 macbook pro, after about 3 years it died, had the logic board replaced, then later apple admitted it was defective so they reimbursed the cost of the first repair, but then a year later it died a second time. Apparently the logic board had issues with brittle soldier joints. I still need to get the contents of the hard drive off the thing.
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I’ve been an OS X user exclusively for nearly 2 decades when I bought my first Macbook to learn Final Cut. OS X was clean, fast, efficient, and way less hassle than Windows. I loved it.
A few years ago I installed BootCamp so that I could run Win10 to play a video game that was no longer compatible with OS X. Worked great. No hassle, and I still used OS X for everything else.
Then last year a video project I was editing in OS X with Adobe CC stopped working. Just wouldn’t load. No warning. No explanation. Reinstalling didn’t work. My backups wouldn’t load either. Panic! After much troubleshooting, and out of sheer desperation, I installed Adobe on the Bootcamp partition. On exactly the same hardware in Windows the project worked like a charm - faster, better memory use, handled the graphics better. This surprising development, plus that fact I was told at the Apple Store that my 5 year old hardware wasn’t supported anymore (not to mention third party Mac servicing has been crippled), proved I can’t afford to use OS X effectively. If I could upgrade hardware every three years I might feel differently. But I can’t.
Now I use an old Macbook for internet stuff but I’m mostly Windows 10 for everything else. Windows isn’t perfect, but the trade off for usability and affordability is worth it.
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I’d say Linux Mint … but either way is fine 
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I KNOW. Every damn website tells me so.
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No bloatware in Windows? Gateway must have given you a very special copy.
Try deleting Cortana. Try playing Solitaire without being connected to the internet. Try using Excel after 30 days.
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Telegram replaced the first two (Airdrop and Messages) for me. I haven’t found anything like Preview, but Foxit works pretty well.
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Try ditching Microsoft Office for Open Office.
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Was going to make the same recommendation - https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/
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Congrats, you just jumped from one walled garden to another.
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It came with a Norton virus checker, but it was probably a good thing to keep.
It’s no better than the Windows Defender that’s included with Windows 10. It will ask for a credit card number when the free trial expires. I would ditch it.
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Not a big fan of Ubuntu but I am a big fan of Open Source. My poison of choice is MX Linux.
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That is software non grata on any system I control after an update installed spyware.
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Very much this.
Mark’s comments compare the literal best mac laptop you can buy to a budget windows laptop. A better price comparison would be something like the MacBook (or Air) to his laptop.
My takeaway after more than 15 years of continuous Mac laptop ownership:
- I have had more than 5 years useful life out of every one, save for recalled Nvidia graphics chips that resulted in new devices, and
- Every one of them I resold, five years later, for at least $500 or more, and
- I just checked and my old circa 2015 macbook pro can be sent to apple for recycling for $350, completely independently of the secondary market.
There’s a lot to be said about the upfront cost of mac products, but I do not buy into, and have not experienced personally, the notion that the Total Cost of Ownership of these devices is in any way inappropriate. Their resale value alone makes up for any “Apple Tax”.
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Yeah, the control panel UI makes it look like you’re jumping between Windows 10 and XP.
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Interesting article. I’m most at home in Windows, but use both platforms at work, with a switch box. Often I’ll insert PDFs into Word documents on the Mac (can’t do that on Win), then edit the document on the PC, because Word in Windows is more fully featured, and make the PDFs on both platforms, pulling graphics from the Mac one into the PC one as needed. I have a keyboard with custom keycaps to show both Mac and Windows keys. My day to day computer for myself (not for work) is an HP ZBook G6 17, which weighs a ton but you can open it up and replace any parts easily.
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Between home and work on many different machines I’m using 2 versions of mac osx; win XP, 7 and 10; QNX 4 and 6; and ubuntu, pop os, and trisquel.
Personally my preferred os switches between mac and linux (for some software for mac I just can’t find a good floss equivalent) with QNX and windows as even at the bottom. Yeah QNX requires doing 90% of everything from the command line, but many days that is still less frustrating than windows.
I have a Touch Bar equipped Mac and I couldn’t agree more. It’s a solution desperately seeking a problem. I can’t think of a single time I did anything that has been improved by the presence of the Touch Bar save for maybe scrubbing through videos. The time saved by that alone certainly doesn’t compensate for all the other annoyances and all for one big reason: you have to switch visual and tactile context from the main screen/input devices to a different screen/input device. Sort of like driving a car and then having to look down from the road to a touch screen on the console to adjust the climate controls (oh and by the way, those controls aren’t in the same place every time so you can’t rely on muscle memory).
It’s just a gimmick. I’d much rather have the row of physical keys back.
At least they fixed the keyboards this generation.
Moving on to the Windows side of things…
Not exactly user-friendly but you just need to edit a registry key to turn that off. I do that on all my computers, as well as disabling web search from the start menu.
I know, it’s so easy to pick on this one. Solitaire is no longer built in to Windows. It’s something you download from the Store and requires Xbox Live to work (I guess to drive engagement to those services?). Macs don’t have a Solitaire app, either. Not like Apple is much better with regard to requiring Internet connectivity for basic things either.
Excel is not and has never been a free product (although there are some free options). Not sure what your point is here.
Basically you are. Not everything in the old XP-like Control Panels is in Settings, and Settings is not extensible so you need to wait for everything to get ported over. Another inelegant solution to a problem nobody really asked to be fixed.
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This felt more like a comparison/first impressions of a desktop environment, not a kernel. I didn’t see any mention of XNU nor NT!
So the question is, Gnome? KDE? Something else entirely?
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