When I sit down to work for my living or pay my bills, I generally use a Windows 10 machine, but when I’m using a computer for pleasure or curiosity, or when I simply want to take a break, I pick up my MacBook Air and enjoy the real pleasures of Apple’s macOS Big Sur. For me, this efficient and elegant desktop operating system gets just about everything right.
Furthermore, it seems to have been getting everything right for the past twenty years. OS X—Apple’s original name for what is now macOS—impressed me right from the start as the first operating system that was enjoyable to use. I didn’t have to struggle to understand it, and it simplified things other operating systems insisted on making complex. This seems even more true today than when OS X was first released. Michael Muchmore lays out the evolution of OS X in his piece, Mac OS X Turns 20: A Look Back at the Operating System That Helped Save Apple. Here I want to focus on MacOS 11, the culmination of those two decades of development.
A Year of Reflection
The past year led me to think a lot about the ways an operating system can make life easier or harder. It took the stress and tension of the pandemic era to let me see exactly what it is that makes macOS such a low-stress operating system. Almost everything about it feels consistent, predictable, coherent, and undemanding, and each new version lets me get to work without climbing a steep learning curve. Modern Windows versions, even after I’ve used them daily for more than 20 years, still induce low-level tension.
Like everyone, I like to customize my Mac and Windows systems. The Mac puts all its settings in a compact, easily searched System Preferences app, and if I accidentally press the keys that launch a feature like Dictation, a prompt lets me decide whether to use that feature or not. Windows scatters its settings across the new Settings app and the old Control Panel, and I challenge you to find the setting that stops Windows from maximizing apps when you drag their window to the top of the screen. (Hint: in the Settings app, go to System, then Multitasking.)
How I Got Hooked by Apple
I bought my first Mac in 2003 because I wanted to get to know it better for my work as a PC Magazine reviewer. I had used Macs in computer labs for years but wanted to know what it was like to make one my own. The first thing that impressed me—and still impresses me about today’s Macs—was that almost everything I wanted to use on a computer was built into the operating system. In those days, Windows couldn’t read or create PDF files or create a VPN. You needed third-party software, and you had to pay for much of it.
In the Windows world, then as now, Microsoft didn’t have a consistent interface for its own built-in apps, and many third-party vendors devised interfaces of their own. On the Mac, after I learned the basics in one app, working with every other app seemed almost effortless. Every app, and the operating system itself, uses the same top-line menu, and almost every app organizes that menu in the same way. Every app has a Preferences item on its menu in exactly the same place, so that I know how to customize the app without, as in Windows, searching the menus or toolbars for an Options menu.
Apple has put a lot of effort into making users’ lives easier by ensuring that each annual new OS version works very much like the old one. Mail, Contacts, and Safari look a lot sleeker than they did a decade ago, but they still work in basically the same way. Windows users have had to lurch from Internet Explorer through two different web browsers named Edge, and from Outlook Express in Windows XP to Windows Live Mail, and finally to different versions of Windows Mail in more recent Windows versions. Under Windows, I long ago gave up on Microsoft’s shapeshifting built-in apps and instead use Firefox and Thunderbird.
Also, everything on the Mac looks elegant—even beautiful. When Steve Jobs introduced the OS X interface, he said “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.” Over the years, macOS has lost the luscious-looking three-dimensional effects it had at the start, but it’s still mostly gorgeous to look at. And you can make it look almost restful with two easy changes: Choose a solid color for the desktop background, and turn off transparency.
Each new version of macOS adds unobtrusive tweaks that make the OS easier on the nerves and on the eyes. For example, starting with the current Big Sur version, when you open a “modeless” dialog box—meaning the kind of dialog where you have to click on something before you can do anything else—everything in the app window that’s behind that dialog box is slightly grayed, so your eyes focus on the only part of the screen where you can actually do something.
Finding Folders and Files
My machines have a lot of data in folders outside the standard Documents folder, and it’s much easier to find that data on my Mac than on my Windows machines. The Mac’s Spotlight search feature searches everything by default. In Windows, if I forget to burrow down into the Search settings in order to add my data folders to the default Document folders, Windows won’t find anything I’ve stored there. When I search in the Mac’s Finder, the search field pops up a convenient box that lets me limit the search to filenames. Thanks to the Dropbox file-synchronizing service, I keep a few thousand files on both my Mac and Windows machines, and even when I’m working in Windows, I sometimes grab my Mac to search for files I can’t find in Windows.
The Mac also makes it blissfully easy to work with files and drives. The Mac Finder lets me manage photos in a spacious interface where I can add tags, read metadata, and mark up the image, without opening a separate photos app. I’ve set the Finder to show hard drives and connected drives on the Mac desktop, so it’s easy to view and manage connected drives. Windows makes me open an Explorer window or click on a Taskbar icon to perform the same tasks. On a Mac, when you want to make a copy of a file, just choose Duplicate from the pop-up menu (or press Cmd-D). Experienced Windows users know to use Copy, then Paste—but you’d be surprised to learn how many longtime Windows users haven’t figured out that sequence of actions.
The NeXT Kind of App
The macOS evolved from the operating system that Steve Jobs devised for the NeXT computers that he built and sold during his exile from Apple from 1985 through 1996. NeXT failed as a business, but the NeXT operating system, after four years of fine-tuning, became OS X.
One of NeXT’s many innovations was the “application bundle,” a special kind of file folder that contained everything needed by an application, but which the operating system displayed as a single application, not as a folder. This means that on the Mac, unlike Windows and Linux systems, you can have a single folder for all your applications, and you can easily drag almost any application from one location to another without reinstalling it, as you need to do under Windows.
The iPhone Connection
I carry an iPhone, not an Android phone, because the Apple ecosystem is tightly integrated in ways that Windows can’t match (though Windows’ Android-only Your Phone app offers some similar capabilities). For example, if I’m writing a mail message on a Mac, or editing a document in TextEdit or Pages on a Mac, and I want to insert a photo or drawing into the message or document, I can simply click on the Insert from iPhone menu item, and take a photo on the phone, or make a sketch with my finger, and the result goes instantly into my document. (Windows does let you sketch directly on the screen if you have a touch-screen PC or tablet, but Your Phone doesn’t offer the same capability.) I can also start a phone call on the iPhone and finish it from the microphone on my Mac—or vice versa.
In both Windows and Mac, users who know something about programming can automate the system to perform complex tasks via PowerShell or VisualBasic scripts in Windows or shell scripts in the Mac. What the Mac gets right, but Windows doesn’t, is that expert users who know little or nothing about programming can also automate their systems. The Mac’s unique AppleScript uses a scripting language that’s close to ordinary English, so the first line of an AppleScript app might look like this:
tell application “TextEdit” to make new document
And the rest of the script could paste in information like the address and phone number of one of your contacts, using commands that look a lot like ordinary language. There’s nothing remotely like AppleScript in any other operating system, and it’s one of the things that makes the Mac enjoyable and satisfying to use in a way that nothing else can match.
Almost
Of course, not everything in macOS is perfect. The default folder icons are a bright, garish blue, not as blinding as in pre-Big Sur versions, but still too bright for comfort—and there’s no easy way to change them. Some options are still hard to find. The Mac’s “services”—convenience features accessible from a menu—are hidden in the Keyboard preferences pane.
One thing I regret is that Apple is ruthless about killing off outdated software. The two most recent versions of macOS won’t run 32-bit software, which means that some uniquely valuable apps won’t run without elaborate workarounds involving running an older macOS version in a virtualization app like Parallels Desktop. Apple advises asking the developer for a 64-bit version, but that often isn’t practical. Microsoft can also be ruthless about killing off legacy software, but it hasn’t gone nearly as far as Apple.
One reason often cited for preferring the Mac to Windows is that the Mac is more stable, while Windows is plagued by the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Much as I admire the Mac, my experience is different. I haven’t seen a Windows BSOD in years, but I’ve had to restart both my Mac and my Windows machines when software begins to act flaky. I wish both operating systems were more stable than they are, but I don’t think either one has a real advantage.
I started writing this piece on my Windows machine, because Windows apps make it easy to perform almost every task from the keyboard, and I prefer the speed and efficiency of the keyboard to a mouse or trackpad, even the superb trackpad on my MacBook Air. The Mac lets you do everything from the keyboard, but it doesn’t make it easy, and when I need to get a lot of words typed into the screen, spell-checked, printed, and sent via e-mail, Windows gets the job done faster—at least for me.
In every other way, however, the Mac makes my life easier and more pleasant than it would be if I used Windows all day long. I started this piece on a Windows machine, but I finished it in a relaxed mood, working on a MacBook Air.
