The Experiment Is Over: Apple Wins
My journey from Mac to PC and back again and how Apple stole the show
My neighbor, an architect with a penchant for minimalist design, has described Apple’s products and specifically the Macbook lineup to me as “timeless” in their asthetic. I was skeptical at first. After all, PC manufacturers are getting ever better at keeping up with good design and Microsoft especially has made some unique style choices with their Surface line of computers that not only keeps up, but manages to bud away from the plain slab of aluminum that Apple is known for without coming across as tacky. There literally is no better time than now to switch to PC. Windows 10 is great and the UWP approach Microsoft is taking has led to some legitimate design choices that developers have to make to get their apps noticed on the platform now. The interface is genuinely good and the UI kits available to devs are surprisingly complete and have matured far past the ultra-flat, whitespace inundated drivel of Windows 8. The computers, too, are better than ever. Light and thin, but still powerful with unique touches like magnesium bodies, fulcrum hinges and alcantara layered keyboards set them apart as something that can be both beautiful and decidedly “not a Mac.” I recently decided to take the plunge and distance myself from Apple to see what was out there and test the waters of Windows computing to see if anything had changed in recent years from the days of old that I remember. It was a short month-long experiment that I had hoped would last longer, but here I am, typing this up on a brand new MacBook Pro. It obviously didn’t stick.
First the good.
Microsoft’s vision of computing is possibly the most futuristic, forward thinking vision out of any of the big players out there today. It’s a clear push toward a science-fiction future where any and every device can run the same things…just plug them into different form factors and get whatever experience you need. TV, phone, desktop: It’s all there. But on top of that, Windows 10 is also ready to tackle things like holographic interfaces and AR/MR applications and has the most well rounded platform I can see for doing that. Google and Facebook are stuck dabbling more with VR experiences and Apple seems to think that tiny screens are the best way to adopt AR for the masses rather than a new piece of hardware. Good, yes, but Microsoft’s vision, while slightly clunky at the moment, is pushing for a future where computing is layered directly over our eyes and ambiant.
Windows 10 is also really quite beautiful. It has a pervasive dark mode that looks stunning and while it remains quite flat, little elements like tinted glass elements and subtle highlights make Windows Store apps come alive. For the first time in history, a native Windows app no longer looks like a mashup of buttons and toggles thrown together in VisualStudio and actually seems to have a cohesive design language. It’s flat and edgy, but it looks good. It’s more aggressive than the foggy glass of MacOS and elementary colors of Google, but that’s a good thing. It has its own place and owns it very well. Google’s aesthetic is one of “humanity” and inspires optimisim and whimsey. Apple’s is class and elegance. Windows, meanwhile, has become the darker, meaner black sheep cousin no one invites to the family reunion that’s here to work hard and play harder. The hardware showcases this: Fulcrum hinges that look alien and industrial; sharp, flat slabs of magnesium softened only by strips of a fabric that feels like a cross between a leather and felt; giant displays that see your fancy 5K all-in-one and then fold flat with a single effortless motion. Windows 10 and its new hardware bodies make Microsoft the cool kid on the block again, and it actually feels good to show off a PC for once in a world of boring slabs of fruit-embossed metal.
But now, for the bad.
All that is how it’s supposed to work at least. In reality, Windows still is plagued with many issues that are hard to work around. For one, that great experience is really only available to owners of a Surface. The setup process on any other PC is still a nightmare of bloatware, driver updates and lengthy Windows Update sessions. That and while most PC manufacturers would like you think they’re all premium-grade now, this usually only applies to a select few flagships: The majority of PCs are still very lacking in the build quality department. Plastic abounds, hinges are weak and screens flex with flimsy. Keyboards are mushy with leaky backlights and most manufacturers still have yet to adopt Microsoft’s “precision touchpad” standard for their default pointing devices leaving the consumer with a mouse pointer that’s, well, hard to point. 1080p displays with massive bezels are still everywhere and for some reason, a 16:9 aspect ratio remains very common.
On the Windows side of things, stuff isn’t much better. UWP apps work and look great…when you can find them. The Windows Store is still a ghost town, and for some reason developers just haven’t adopted the standard yet leaving one to wonder if Windows 10 will just be a brilliant nod to what could have been rather than a pillar of what is. Drivers are still an issue. On MacOS, playing with kext files is more hobby than necessity and I like it that way. On a PC, you’re forced to go hunting for the latest drivers to make sure everything works as expected. It’s daunting, painful and feels incredibly dated in the year 2017. Once again, the Surface line of PCs, designed in house by Microsoft to work in perfect harmony with Windows 10, aren’t bothered by this issue, but these are just a small handful of PCs out of a world of hundreds of thousands. Security remains a difficult subject on Windows as it continues to be the most targeted OS for malware and fiddling with antivirus software will be a task not missed. PCs also continue to accrue lots of garbage very fast, in part thanks to the horrible, outdated MSI installer package that has always failed at cleaning itself up. APPX files were supposed to fix this issue, but once again, developer adoption is basically zero.
So I switched back to Mac.
The Mac has three things going for it. First, the design is amazing. It’s simple, yes, and maybe boring after a while, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. Macs have heft that adds value and a feeling of elegance. The screens are thin, stiff but perfectly balanced against the weight of the body. The displays are bright, crisp and some of the best in the industry. The keyboards, though low travel, are clicky and hapitcally enjoyable and very, very accurate with some of the best backlighting in the business. The touchpads feels amazing with their glass covers, are enormous these days which leads to even greater accuracy and they never fail to detect where I’m trying to move my pointer. The speakers are clear and deep. They’re just great.
Second, the OS is equally good. I think Apple’s attention to iteration rather than innovation can be frustrating at times, but that attention to detail has definitely produced one of the most stable OSs on the marketplace. MacOS is easy to learn and use but is incredibly powerful when needed. It’s nice to be able to sit down and not worry about Python installations as a developer and instead already have a full fledged development environment preinstalled, complete with native SSH, something Windows 10 still lacks for some reason that baffles me. The terminal is incredibly powerful (thanks both to the BASH shell being natively used and also the delightful developer community that makes simple, but powerful command line tools for Mac that couldn’t exist on a PC…have I mentioned how amazing Homebrew is?)
Finally, and herein lies the rub, the developers love Mac. For whatever reason, everybody decided Macs needed more apps and started making them and somewhere along the way, Windows got left behind. On Mac, there’s little apps for everything and they’re all beautifully designed no matter how insignificant. There’s an app for modifying sound output. There’s an app for storing clipboard content. There’s an app for exporting Apple Notes. There’s an app for cleaning out your Sketch cache. All are gorgeous. All are niche. On PC, some of these apps exist, but most are ugly and utilitarian at best, horrifically dated and no longer developed at worst. It’s just easier, these days, to do what you want when you want to do it on a Mac which in turn saves time. And time is money, so…
Right now Windows has a chicken and egg problem. It may be the platform of the future on paper, but in practice, Apple wins as Macs feel more futuristic. Apple has spent an enormous amount of time on their ecosystem and it’s paid off in a big way. It’s more expensive than ever to own a Mac, but with the price tag of luxury also comes an experience that’s just worth the money in the long run. Not everything Apple does is perfect. The Apple TV is dramatically late to the 4k game (seems like that will be changing soon, but this late stage adoption is disappointing) and the AirPods are outrageously expensive with questionable design that basically equates to a pair of $150 EarPods. But with the Mac, Apple continues to score, beating the competition at every turn. If you’re just looking at spec sheets, the Mac isn’t always that impressive. The I/O is lacking, the compute-power to cost ratio is almost scoff worthy and the strict ecosystem control can be off-putting to some. But sit down and use a Mac in daily life compared to a PC, I think you’ll generally find them more enjoyable, adaptable and generally just better at utilizing the resources they’re given. The future is ultimately dictated by where the users are, no matter how badly a single company would like to wish otherwise and if that’s really true, then, as of now, the future is Mac.
