Two comments, from another person who is in both worlds (all Macs at home, lots of Winboxen at work).
First, I agree with many of the comments above that Macs are (still) only more expensive if you are constantly going back to the well for a new machine before the old one dies. Cost over time in my experience has been par or a bit cheaper for Macs due to their longevity (typing this on a 9-yo iMac that shows no sign of being done with life).
Second, I agree that Win10 is a big improvement over previous attempts, but I’ll be curious to see if you still like it as much after 6 months. I still dislike it relative to MacOS because I notice it more. The UI in Windows needs more interaction somehow, while MacOS just gets out of my way and lets me work. YMMV, of course.
The real test of the Windows machine will be if it needs replacement in a couple years.
From my experience, one of the best things about Mac machines has been their continued smoothness of operation. I’m still using a Mac mini from 2012. I had an SSD put in about 5 years ago, and it continues to fulfill my basic needs for it. It’s practically bulletproof. I’ve moved it to mainly being my stereo now. My 2015 Mac laptop is still going well, I’m using it for my photography, photoshop, music production and light video editing needs.
When I had Windows PCs they were constantly breaking down, catching virii, having inexplicable nonsense occur with drivers that had to be tracked down and triaged, or WIndows otherwise screwing up and requiring hours of time to maintain them. All of which was not only frustrating, it was time that otherwise would have been better spent doing the things I want to do. Switching to Macs as I did over 12 years ago has meant a lot less digital maintenance.
A caveat tho - I now keep my 2012 mac mini as a way to run my 32-bit Mac programs if I need them, since Apple has now “upgraded” to only run 64-bit programs. That’s pretty frustrating.
The one thing I found the touch bar useful for was doing presentations with Keynote. It makes it easy to switch between slides without popping out of the presentation and going back-and-forth as people normally do.
My Heathkit H11 (PDP-11 clone) served faithfully for decades. My friends’ old Apples didn’t. Windoze works well enough for me now. BTW I despise Apple. So sue me.
Can’t you just use the arrow keys? Or am I just misunderstanding the scenario here? (I’ve only ever used Keynote like once – I typically use PowerPoint.)
Ah - the touch bar shows thumbnails of the last few and the upcoming slides, and it swipes, so when someone asks about that thing 8 slides back, you can just tap it and you’re there.
Using the arrow keys also plays the slide change animations which is kind of annoying when you’re trying to navigate though several slides.
I’m sure we’ve all been in presentations when someone asks about that thing 8 slides back and the presenter stops the presentation, goes into the application, scrolls through the slides, clicks the slide they want, and restarts the presentation…
It’s a very small thing, but I think it helps with a smoother presentation.
I have made this exact same analogy! Touch screens in cars are terrible for all the same reasons. Plus the touch bar is so, well… touchy. I didn’t realize until using it that I have a habit of resting my hands near the top of the keyboard when not typing. Crazy things kept happening in my applications for the first month until I realized I was hovering too close to the very sensitive bar and activating things. Then I had to retrain 20 years of muscle memory to stop resting my hands there. Turning off the damn bar isn’t an option, since many apps are unusable without function keys.
The only Touch Bar thing I like is the emoji chooser. That’s fun. Everything else, bin it please.
I seriously worry though that Apple will never get rid of it, because it will be like admitting a mistake or something. I worry their ivory design tower is so high that they’ll refuse to see that everyone hates it and err on the side of saving face. Apple often does this with risky design moves, believing that once people get used to it, they really will prefer it. The thing is, they are often right about that. When they are wrong, though, it’s doubly painful. They did bring back the physical Esc key, so hopefully they’ll continue that eastward expansion and reclaim all that space for physical keys. I even accidentally activate touch bar stuff when typing numbers. The touch bar is so sensitive and so close to the top row of keys. Even touching the top half of the number keys is dangerous.
I grew up with Macs and used to love them, but switched to PC with the release of OSX and have no regrets. My last PC desktop made it from 2008 to 2018 with only an SSD upgrade, and I just replaced my 2010 laptop with a swanky new convertible thin-and-light. Each of them cost between $800 and $1100.
Windows 10 transitioning to an evergreen OS has resulted in tremendous improvement in dealing with drivers, antivirus, and other old-school sticking points; Even the worst-case scenario of needing to reinstall Windows is fairly painless these days as well, and retains all your data by default.
(Also: I would like to register my curmudgeonlyness as a Debian user. The worthwhile parts of Ubuntu were derived from Debian. Everything they have come up with on their own has been dodgy)
Ah, I can get that as being useful then. I use presentation view in PowerPoint which lets me do similar things by giving me a different view on my laptop screen than what I’m presenting but it also requires that I am using multiple monitors versus sharing my screen which isn’t always practical depending on where I’m presenting something.
Anyway, that seems like a useful use case. Based on my experience, it seems like the only really good use cases for the Touch Bar are those rare ones where the glanceability of the Touch Bar are an asset rather than hindrance.
I don’t want to delay the latest round of the ancient flamewar, but I do really love coming to boingboing and finding throwaway lines like Marks mentioing, without elaboration, that he “used Billy Idol’s Mac to design his Cyberpunk album cover.”
I am tempted to classify that as a douchey name-drop, but that also happens to be my favorite album of all time, so I’m kind of honored to be in the presence of anyone involved with it. So I’ll let it slide this time, Mark.
I think it’s more like a “bought on financing, so here’s a card to track you” rather than a general purpose financial tool. It’s a “credit card” not a “Credit Card”.
My daily driver at home runs Pop!OS, which is a Ubuntu spin-off as far as I can tell.
For a really lightweight windowing environment I really enjoyed Mate on an old Samsung Chromebook running ArchLinuxARM. The April kernel broke the machine so I ended up reinstalling from scratch, ignoring the kernel update through pacman and have a GUI-less laptop that runs for like a week of a charge and runs a few of the tools I like to use.
I grind my teeth and use macOS on a recent MacBook Air for work.
Also a long-time user of Windows/Mac/Linux… Windows 10 is so, so much better these days but for me the one missing feature has to be tabs in Explorer.
Yeah I know you can use programs like QTTabBar or Clover to get this, but as one of the most-requested features in Windows you really would have they’d have added it by now…!
Everything else, bin it please.
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