I Tried Apple as a Windows Person for a Year

I've used Windows pretty much since I opened my eyes as a human. Windows 98, XP, 7, 8, 10, and 11. Yeah, I missed Vista in the middle. I just did an upgrade and I don't know why. Don't rub that in my face. I feel bad about it myself. Windows Vista was gorgeous. I've also used mobile OSS from Symbian to Java to Android and even Windows Mobile my whole life. So, you get the picture. No iPhone OS, iOS, OSX, or Mac OS. Through all the years of using Windows, I did all kinds of things to these poor PCs and laptops. installing a million Trojans, downloading software from anywhere on the internet, experimenting with everything. Thanks to that, I knew how to reinstall my Windows and set up partitions before I learned what the hell Intel was. Half of my Windows experience was learning how to fix Windows problems myself or repair friends and family's Windows devices. I probably made it worse most those times, but you get the idea. I wrote my first line of code in a Notepad on Windows 7 and made my first website on Windows 8. The only time I used another operating system was when I installed Ubuntu one of VM out of sheer curiosity. And back then, as simple and easy to use as it was, it just didn't stick with me. Spoilers, that changed a bit later. During this time, I barely touched my Android phones except for emergency situations when someone couldn't just message me. I made this channel and all its content on a Windows laptop, and it was all going perfectly well. My laptop was growing slower, and I probably needed a new one, but beside that, it was mostly fine until one year ago, it hit me. I design user interfaces. And if I haven't used every interface ever, how can I have a universal sense of judgment on UI? How can I design different interfaces? I've never used a sketch. I've never written a single line of Swift UI. Hell, I've never even used a single Swift app. It's over for me. Unless, here's an idea, Jucks. What if you gave Apple a try? Well, I guess I could. So, my search on finding a MacBook started. You know, when you're trying to build a new PC or buy a new laptop, your choices are simple. For example, you want 32 GB of RAM or a 5090 and 5 terabytes of storage and so on. But when you go to the Apple universe, it's the M3 chip, M3 Pro chip, A18 chip, etc. Each with their own set of options on RAM and storage and their own respective prices. Now, I know they sound simple, but for a newcomer like me, they made me anxious. So, I had to learn the differences and watch videos on the performance of apps I frequently use. My research, well, my decision took a long time because the more I looked at the numbers, the comparisons, the more confusing they became. My head was filled with questions. The options were so frighteningly different and yet so similar. One moment, I thought to myself, if I get the M3 chip, I'll be fine. But in the next moment, I realized if I paid $400 more, I get the Pro model. And the minute after that, I'm thinking, if I pay $400 on top of that, I get the next best model. It was overwhelming. And yeah, it was about the price. So eventually I decided I lost my mind enough over this. So I'm just going to do some quick math and think of what I actually need. MacBook Pros were powerful and MacBook Airs were more lightweight. I specifically wanted one with fans because of all the video editing and resource intensive tasks. I didn't want to get the top of the line because what if I didn't like it? What if Mac OS wasn't really for me? So I had two options. The MacBook Pro with an M2 chip and a cool Touch Bar or last year's new MacBook Pro with an M3 chip. And eventually I settled on the new one, the MacBook Pro with an M3 chip and 8 GB of RAM. I know, I know, I know. 8 GB of RAM in 2024. Disastrous, at least in my mind. I upgraded my own Windows laptop to have 64 GB of RAM. So, it was a hard decision, but again, I just wanted to get a simple and might I add cheap Mac OS experience. The MacBook arrived and it had Mac OS Ventura in the beginning and soon upgraded to Mac OS Sonoma. Even though everything looked weird and I don't mean weird bad or weird good, just weird different compared to Windows, it was intuitive and in a way kind of worked. So within a day I started installing all the apps I needed from Windows, Discord, Figma, Spotify, and so on. See, at that point, I only knew apps from Windows and very few popular apps on Mac OS. So I was pretty excited to try new apps like Safari. I never tried Safari before and after using it next to Chrome for a while and customizing it for myself. I found it to be easier to use. Though that was just the beginning and after a while I tried a lot of other browsers that weren't even available on Windows back then. So I switched around a lot and my next video is actually about this exact topic. This is the part where I talk about the differences that gave me a culture shock or maybe I should say OS shock. The three buttons of minimize, resize, and close being on the left. It legit took me a week to get used to and the process of transferring files or settings between my Windows laptop and the MacBook didn't help either. The second thing was how installing NAP worked. What do you mean I just moved this icon to the applications folder and it's installed? Wait, is that it? My taskbar or doc was pretty populated in the beginning. Whenever I install Windows, I make sure I customize the hell out of my taskbar and everything right in the beginning. So, in this case, I tried to do the same thing. When I had an app open and I clicked on this X icon, it didn't close the app. there was still a little indicator that showed the app was open. Then I learned that this behavior was similar to how Windows minimizes the app to system tray. So you have to rightclick on the app icon and quit it. Then there was another problem where the apps I quit would remain in the dock even though they're not pinned to it. After looking at opts and searching in the settings, I realized that the dock holds more than just pinned apps. It could have the suggested or recent apps and downloads. After lots of customization, I settled with the first draft, but the finder and trash icons not being removable kind of bothered me. I searched and I searched for ways to further customize the dock, but that was it. Now, I'm not complaining. That was fine. I just wish it was more customizable. I saw some people removing every item from the dock and shrinking it completely because you don't actually need it if you use the Launchpad to launch apps, which was another really cool thing about Mac OS to me. I had only seen something like this on tablets before. So having such a big picture of my apps kind of helped. The next thing to get used to was the Finder itself. You see, Finder is a finder. It's not exactly meant to be used the same way that we use the file explorer on Windows. I learned that after looking for the My PC homepage with the different drives and the folders in them and found nothing but a Macintosh folder divided into system files, user files, and applications, which is in a way similar to how a C drive is structured on Windows. I gave up and just pinned some of the folders I thought I'd be using often to the sidebar. Of course, this all changed later when I learned the way a Mac OS system works. The next thing that kind of surprised me was the spotlight search. It was fast, really fast. I could be searching the contents of a random file and it would show me the results all over my entire computer faster than I could blink. The next step in my journey was upgrading to Mac OS Seoia, which looked mostly similar with a few features that I soon found to be useless for me. So, I turned them off. Around that same time, I decided to also switch to an iPhone from an older Samsung. Everything was fairly the same compared to my Android phone. Beside getting used to the gesture navigation and the differences in the app menu and the iOS native apps, and most importantly, the seamless integration with the MacBook. Copy on iPhone, paste on MacBook. Put a file or photo in iCloud Drive, access it on MacBook. Plus, on Mac OS Seoia, you have the phone mirroring app. So, it was crazy. I thought to myself, if Mac OS and iOS go so well together, what about the other devices like the iPad or Apple TV? I don't want to go through every detail, but the most satisfying thing about integrating with these other devices was that I just had to sign in with my Apple ID. I even started buying old iPhones like the iPhone 5S or 8 Plus just to see the evolution of Apple products. I loved the iPhone 8 Plus so much I used it as my main phone for a while in 2025. During this whole time, I had one concern that my MacBook had only 8 GB of RAM. I had the activity monitor on my dock and I looked at it every 5 minutes. The little amount of RAM swap from the SSD drove me insane. I read articles about how RAM swap can cause wear and tear on the SSD in long term. So, I monitored the RAM closely and restarted the MacBook whenever it was using more than a gigabyte of swap. It was insanity and I started to feel this regret because I happen to really like Mac OS and the RAM felt limiting in a way. I kept wishing I had just upgraded to 16 GB of RAM and more and just saved myself the headache. I shared all this with a friend and the response kind of opened my eyes. Why don't you just use it like you used Windows? My friend was right. I just had to start doing whatever the hell I wanted with this device. Do my experiments. Go 8 GB over in swap. So, I did. I closed the activity monitor and used as many apps as I wanted. The fans started protesting. I didn't care. I just made sure that the SSD had tons of free space, emptied my trash often, and cleaned out the large files regularly. And then Mac OS started to really feel like home. I crafted my own custom icons for the apps on the dock and really made it my own. Yeah, I did scream at Apple when they upgraded their base model to have 16 GB of RAM literally 6 months later, but what the hell? I loved it so much I forgot about my Windows laptop. I only booted up the old girl once in a while to try another OS on the VM or, I don't know, do experiments or whatever you want to call this. I mainly use the Windows laptop for gaming. I wasn't expecting to game on Mac OS, but decided to give it a try anyway. Not all my Steam games were available on Mac OS, but I found more of my games supported than I initially expected. I had to see if the Productivity Beast can pass the gamer test. Rise of the Tomb Raider was already in my library, so I started a benchmark on that. Okay, never mind. I mean, it wasn't unplayable, but it was pretty laggy, and the fans were begging me to stop. So, I decided I'm just going to use it for less demanding games like Stardew Valley or Bellatro. Everything was fine until a few months ago when I looked at some of my old design or coding projects, and it hit me. I changed. Apple's design had changed my brain. The standards and design language of Apple changed the way I looked at design. Back then on Windows, I explored so many different options and ideas. I kept my mind open. I tried fun code pin challenges. Once in a while I made random website with impulsive ideas just for the hell of it. Yeah, it did lead to some goofy stuff, but at the end of the day, it was more me. Apple caused my brain to constantly hold myself up to certain standards, look only in one direction, and it was a constant battle not to do that. I had to constantly rewire my brain to think different every 5 minutes. Hell, even that sounded like Apple. I even started questioning whether I'm becoming an Apple fan unwantedly. And to balance that, I tried other things. Like since switching to Mac OS, I use the terminal increasingly, for example, to install apps with homebrew. So I got pretty comfortable with terminals and using the terminal in Linux didn't make me cry anymore. I even gave Nothing Phone a try as a second phone. I just genuinely believe that there is no side. There is no Apple side or Samsung side or Google side. It's all about providing feedback and receiving feedback. Last year, Apple released some really questionable updates to iOS 18 developer beta. And it being the first actual iOS update I get from Apple, I installed it that same day. It was buggy and laggy and glitchy and it didn't make sense. For example, they made a customizable control center but forgot to make the connections options customizable. So if you didn't like this, you had to use the singular icons, but there was no Wi-Fi icon. Or they made customizable app icons that could be tinted with your selected color. But that also looked weird in the beginning and there was no light mode for it. Everyone provided their feedback and within a few months, some of them actually got fixed. Fast forward to this year, Apple released an entire new generation of design with what they call liquid glass. Being as curious as I was last year, I installed the developer beta again. In summary, it looks beautiful in some spots, responsive gyroscope based lighting, and glass edges that reflect the colors around them. Amazing aesthetics overall, but it's kind of hard to read in some other places and has really low contrast. It's almost like creating really beautiful components that look stunning on their own, but put them all together in one picture and it looks weird. I know these are mostly nitpicks about the beta and they're hopefully going to fix them. Plus, most of the contrast issues could be fixed by increasing the blur amount or reducing transparency, but I noticed some other updates I'm personally concerned about. For example, they seem to have changed the launchpad that I mentioned I really liked earlier and they moved it to the spotlight search or now the app icons seem to be restricted to the squirrel boundary. So no going over the icon frame anymore. Basically no more of this and more of this instead. On the plus side, there's now a clipboard on Mac OS and Spotlight has been upgraded to support actions much like your favorite productivity apps like Raycast and Alfred or that iPad OS now shares lots of features with Mac OS and you could have multiple windows and way more options in them. I see all these changes and I'm excited for what they're doing and waiting for the fixes to arrive. But what I'm trying to get at is I think my one-year experience of using the Apple ecosystem has been more hectic than all my years of using Windows combined. I mean, I use every Windows version for at least 3 years. I've had time to get used to everything, and updates mostly included fixes and stuff. Nothing major in the UI. But for Apple products, I had a lot of homework to do, getting familiar with different UI updates that messed with my muscle memory, removing tabs in the photos app, and then one year later bringing them back in another design, moving menus around in native apps, and many more cases. So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe we don't need a new Mac OS or iOS every single year and instead we need the existing features to become perfect. There are many things from last year's update that still need to become better. Why not do 80% of the features at 100% quality instead of all the features at 80% quality? Listen, this is my workstation, my entertainment corner, my little personal computer. I don't want it reimagined every year. This isn't your playground or UI sandbox. New features are awesome. Customization is awesome, but some things can be confusing. This design is beautiful, but it's so there all over the place. But hey, it's just the developer beta that I installed with my own hands, and I'm probably going to get used to it. And I will continue using the Apple ecosystem as long as it works for me. Now, I kind of find myself more excited about what I want to try next. In a way, before Apple, I was mentally OS locked to Windows. But now, I'm looking at trying more Linux distros and maybe finally trying Arch Linux. Just maybe though, I still like seeing the sun and touching grass once in a while. So, tell me what I should try next and what you're using right now. Well, that's all for this video. If you liked it, make sure you do your magic down below and see you on the next one.