After 35 years of Windows from the very beginning and considering myself a good step above power user, I bought my first Mac. An M4 Macbook M4 Pro. I am now bitextual.
Motivation was my 7 year old PC struggling with Adobe Lightroom Classic AI and reading the great experiences of newer Mac users with same. Even though I have no other reason to upgrade or change out my PC laptop.
I have 266 apps and utilities on my PC. Took my 143 days to build from scratch researching, testing, installing, configuring and adding plugins as needed and desired. I am actively looking at and for equivalent apps and utilities for the Mac. I am in about a month and maybe 60% complete.Going quicker this time. Perhaps because I better know what I want, need and desire.
Some things have positively amazed me. Hardware, speed, lack of a lot of maintenance like editing the Registry (Mac has none), monitoring Event Viewer, etc. But some things just baffle the hell out of me how Apple has gotten away with inferior functions all these years. Being a glass half empty kinda guy, let’s look at a few of those and along the lines I’ll pop in with a few places the Mac is a clear winner.
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FINDER!
I don’t get it. In Windows, I set a size and screen position. ONCE. And then arrange my columns and widths. Once. Done.
I can get ONE finder window to remember size and location. Subsequent do not. No matter what I try in setting my view as lists, column widths change with almost every folder or share opened. It drives me batty!
NETWORK DRIVES!
I Windows, I map a Network Drive ONCE. I check connect at login. I am done. Every time not only when I login, but when I UNDOCK, return and REDOCK those shared drives are there. Done
Mac not so much. There is the Open at Login and they will, but then each mapped drive opens a separate (and different sized) Finder window. I have to manually close. But worst of all, if I undock, take the laptop somewhere else for any period of time from seconds to hours, return and redock..The drives will not automatically reconnect. Has to be done manually.
To be fair, there are two utility apps to deal with open at boot or login and reconnect after a disconnection, but both have their own issues. Neither as functional as Windows out of the box. No wonder Mac is such a small part of the business computing community. What ARE they thinking? This is not rocket science.
And just to finish this thought., Mac requires each USB device to be separately ejected before undocking or removing. So with a Thunderbolt doc and 4 USB thumb drives and External Drives, I have to disconnect first or get hit with a nasty note for each when I forget.
Windows does this automatically. I can undock and drives disconnect. Redock, reconnect.
ARGGGH.
To be fair, there are some great things. Retina screens, hardware and yes, parts of the OS. But more about those later. And more about those apps and utilities that have no Mac equivalent I can find.
More to come…