AltTab and Rectangle bring productivity on macOS up to an acceptable level. I assume anyone using macOS without them is in a constant state of frustration.
I bought Rectangle Pro because I liked Rectangle. The Pro came with the added benefit of assigning multiple custom window sizes easily without tinkering with the obscure Keys mapping.
Someone gifted me a MacBook a few years ago, I was floored at the usability nightmare the OOTB MacOS experience is. Especially after being inundated with nonstop articles about how superior Macs are by every single tech reporter/blogger my entire childhood. I assumed MacOS was the pinnacle of OS UX, a very big letdown to learn it was far behind Windows in countless ways.
i mean, as a long-time user who's experienced a ton of ups and downs in the the macOS world, defected to linux briefly, and returned... it is still the best OOTB experience of any computer i've ever owned.
the windows experience of 2024 is very similar to the experience of buying a gateway 2000 in the 90s to me. there's tons of bloatware, ads all over the OS, you're constantly being prompted to buy Onedrive and Office (what the hell?) a lot of the Things i've gotten used to on macOS that windows doesn't have, I miss a lot (consistent shortcut keys across apps fro all vendors, the speed and reliability of spotlight as an app launcher/switcher, the ease of previewing files in the OS without launching separate applications, the fact that for all intents and purposes you're in a *nixlike environment and have basically the full suite of tools available to you first class.) every time I go back to my windows 11 desktop after an upgrade I'm baffled by some other weird addition to the OS that I didn't ask for and don't want. In a way, I kind of appreciate that macOS tends to evolve slowly and doesn't do a lot of experimentation. When there's multiple valid ways of solving a problem, they'll leave it to utilities to provide those options. I kinda am okay with that. I used to think apple was extremely opinionated but it seems more and more like their philosophy with macOS is "leave it to the users to solve this problem." i'd also argue there's a ton of windows features missing, which extremely confusingly i have to add manually by installing powertoys (which means microsoft actively builds the solutions to these problems and then just chooses to distribute them in this bizarre, out-of-band way? it makes no sense.)
I won't deny there's a bunch of obvious stuff that i cannot understand - window snapping being a key thing, they've gone all in on their weird full-screen approach, which I don't vibe with. The fact that I need to buy an app (bartender) to hide icons in my menu bar in the year 2024 is pretty bonkers to me, and I cannot understand what motivates the complete lack of management tools for this, especially given how out of control it can get on a company-managed machine. finder is in need of a lot of love across the board. i'm also baffled by some of the stuff they choose to include - mission control is one of the single most confusing features they've ever added to the OS and i still have zero understanding of what the intent behind it was.
i guess all this to say i feel like having a lot of experience with macOS, i much prefer opening a clean mac to opening a clean windows machine (linux obviously is its own can of worms where it can't really be evaluated by these standards) and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.
> and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.
...even when we're in a thread, discussing the lack of toggle-setting for an annoying default?
MacOS deserves some credit; Apple hasn't whittled away it's features too far yet, and the UI is still fairly nice from an outward-facing perspective. They focus well on keyboard-shortcuts and do a generally good job focusing on getting the basic windowing and desktop presentation right.
Really though, if you give me the choice between a Windows machine and a Mac I'm rapidly approaching the point I'd only take the Windows machine. Using MacOS, for development purposes in 2024, is a nightmare. Docker doesn't work; Homebrew is hanging on by a thread and acts different on different architectures; the Mac default coreutils play musical-chairs when they're outdated; basic APIs and cross-platform frameworks (eg. OpenGL) were forcibly removed in favor of insular non-replacements. Unless you're an absolute apologist for proprietary software solutions it's just so hard to say MacOS is a particularly great user experience today. For christsake, you type git into the terminal and get a modal asking you to download the 5gb developer toolkit - it's absurd.
Part of the problem with setting good defaults is that you're also expected to provide meaningful alternatives. That's the thing about "default" options - they implicitly suggest the existence of another possible option. Apple seems to ignore this, and the only interpretation I take away looking at their devices today is that Apple is chronically afraid of their users discovering that they don't need Apple or Apple services to enjoy their Apple hardware.
I mean I feel like my experience is completely contradictory to yours, and while I can't necessarily understand why, if I was having the experiences you were having I would also be frustrated.
I use docker daily in development - I have little to no issue with it, it's basically transparent and I have zero complaints about its performance or behavior. Perhaps I'm not doing things as complex or unique as you are? I don't really know. I have had no problems with Docker whatsoever, bar the initial migration onto the M-series chips that was clunky and awkward for several months (I was pretty much exclusively on linux, personally, until deep in this process.) Since then it's been A-OK for me. Homebrew, similarly, has just been transparent for me - I had a clunky initial 12-months-or-so and at this point I simply don't notice that I'm on a different architecture any longer. I had a lot of complaints early in the migration to apple silicon, at this point problems at least for my use case are solved.
As for the system-level APIs, yeah - I can't speak to that. I do web development primarily professionally, and then I spend a substantial amount less time mucking around locally, mostly on stuff that runs in the terminal or as a service. I do not have experience with (nor do I use) OpenGL or other whatever other basic APIs that you're referring to - I haven't really had an issue with that (other than Apple's extremely half-hearted migration into SwiftUI which feels hacky and half-finished.)
I absolutely agree that every time I type git for the first time I'm startled by remembering that I have to download the command line dev utils to get rolling with that, I wouldn't necessarily say that I agree this is indicative of a larger problem? The machine doesn't ship with git by default but you absolutely can install git outside the command line utils path if you want to (to the best of my understanding,) that's just the default behavior to unblock you in the event you just want to Get It Done.
My personal experience right now really doesn't reflect yours, and transparently I'm not sure why. I've never felt like apple's pushed any of its specific services on me aggressively, but I've also not used a machine where I didn't have some small subscription to iCloud on my account (I use it for some backups, moving stuff between my phone and laptops) and so it's entirely possible I've just never seen that portion of the experience - I may just be blind there. I just genuinely haven't felt that railroaded by the OS. I've never been using chrome and had a popup at the OS level ask me if I want to try safari, for example. I've never opened my laptop and found that suddenly there's some weird LLM-powered assistant on my taskbar that I cannot remove without a registry change. I've never installed a system update and been taken through an onboarding flow that tried to upsell me into an iWork (or whatever it's called these days) subscription and buying more space in iCloud. The stuff I really rely on (like spotlight) consistently works, and works well. I just don't find the experience as miserable as you're describing. Maybe I just am a person who is perfectly comfortable with apple's defaults and that is my blind spot, not sure.
> Maybe I just am a person who is perfectly comfortable with apple's defaults and that is my blind spot, not sure.
This is likely the answer, if you don’t pay for office365 but do pay for iCloud you’re never gonna see the iCloud ads. I pay for both so I don’t see ads for either but there are enough reports by others (on both platforms) that I believe they exist.
I knew I should have clarified when I made my comment, I don’t mean the OOTBE of a fresh install, I mean the utilities and functions that come prebaked into the OS versus the functionality that must be added with 3rd party utilities and scripts.
Regardless, I’m curious what you mean by bloatwear when comparing macOS to windows.
Both ship with apps I don’t want or use, both push me to buy their proprietary cloud services using intrusive notification ads. Both try to lock me into using their homegrown browser vs one of my own choosing.
