There is a difference, although I am saying this purely out of my personal experience:
- Display: Even on the lowest spec Mac I get a nice display (at least after 2012). I don't even have the option to go for a display that sucks. On the PC world they may include a display that makes my eyes bleed.
Just well, probably best to avoid the MacBook Airs through 2015 and iMacs through late 2014, as well, as these don’t have the Retina/4K+ display which, for some, is a must-have killer feature.
- Font rendering: Mac OS X 10.6 has better font rendering than Windows 11, especially non-Latin characters. This surely has an impact on the browsers.
Nothing but facts here.
- Stickers: Though this is not a Windows problem. They are ugly and they sometimes have bigger stickers than the brand logo.
Goo-gone and 99 per cent isopropyl alcohol solve (pun not intended) that minor annoyance in a hurry.
- Trackpad: Apple really did a good job extending my hands. It's like my brain is directly connected to the Mac.
This one is very much a personal taste thing. I still prefer the physical click of the unibody MBA/MBP multi-touch pad over the haptic response (“force touch”) replacement on later, post-2015 models. As the latter is software-dependent, I have had the rare, but recurring (and, ths, annoying) experience of the haptic response being absent despite pressing down to select something.
- UI and Animations: They are mathematically beautiful, especially the curvature continuity.
The animations are wonderful.
Starting around (if not just before Sierra and, possibly, as far back as Yosemite), I began to see tiny bits of sloppiness in the UI which didn’t exist prior to.
That, plus there’s an increasing inconsistency for UI elements across different apps, post 10.x, becoming more of a headache as, it seems, the current crop of Mac UI/UX developers at Apple are not communicating as well with one another or maintaining a strict compliance with their own UI/UX standards guide. Possibly the most annoying of these, aside from how the “traffic buttons” can now have at least three ways of revealing themselves, is a lack of WindowServer “memory retention” of saving where a user places short-term modal dialogues (like the kind to appear when deleting a bunch of files or, say, copying them to a new location: the latter, as always, is remembered, and future appearances will continue to appear in that spot; the former, however, will not, and may appear wherever the system defaults it).
What this amounts to, from a 33-year user of Macs, is clever, low-level thinking and a strict adherence to consistency both now run secondary to flashy ways to show off the hardware within. In this sense, Apple’s tack is feeling more and more like the way Microsoft tries to re-invent the UI, often to sloppy, inconsistent ends.
- OS update: Well I don't see memes mocking macOS forced updates.
Yet.
- UNIX foundation: very handy for my job
It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft, as they expand emphasis of Windows on ARM chips, will attempt to implement some kind of POSIX-based undercarriage with the kind of stability associated with NT in the 3.51 and 4.0 days. That could be a game-changer for developers.
I believe these reasons justify my decision to purchase a Mac, despite the sky high price of RAM, SSD, out of warranty service, and the below par repairability, and software bugs in recent years.
The problem with current Macs isn’t so much their “low repairability”, as it is their active measures to prevent repairability, down to “pairing” (unsoldered) components within cryptographically, forcing all to rely on Apple Genius Bar interaction for any repair… so long as your model isn’t obsoleted by Apple. Once that happens, there is no recourse, no fix — shy of someone leaking the cryptographic matching software Apple keeps tightly locked down at their Apple Store repair centres.
