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Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scri

Specifically: * HiDPI support in all apps, whethere they are aware of it or not. * Built-in PDF editing and creation from all printable content. * POSIX scripting and CLI. * Very clean and consistent configuration system (defaults). Reset an app to factory? Delete one plist file and potentially an app support folder. Got a new Mac? You could even boot it up from the old harddisk. Good luck doing that with windows registry. * Touchpad support. * Systemwide fulltext search with indexing and complex search terms. Somehow MS still hasn't caught up with 10.4 Tiger it seems to me. * Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu. * A consistent menu system. * Powerful and system wide screenshots. * Very good screen calibration out of the box * Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. On the other hand Windows has: * The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) * The best graphics drivers * The best Office version (although Google Docs has mostly replaced the need for me) * Windows-P, I really like that menu * The Windows 10 task manager, pretty neat. * Pen and Touchscreen support. Overall MacOS beats it hands down for me when it comes to productivity.

nottorp 10y ago
* Touchpad support. I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.
- Godel_unicode 10y ago
  Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.
  - emptythought 10y ago
    Nah. We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros. It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh
    - Godel_unicode 10y ago
      That's interesting, I've used a precision at work and an XPS at home for the last year, both have been totally rock solid.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  Apple touchpads work so well that I don't use a mouse at all anymore. I have a Bluetooth touchpad with my external keyboard, and I even bought an old Fingerworks touchpad to use with my PC. The power of gestures is incredible. Managing macOS windows without a touchpad is awful. With a touchpad it is the best.
- Macha 10y ago
  I have had a work Mac for the last two years. I haven't found Apple touchpads to be this revolutionary change that'd make me like touchpads that others have and still carry a wireless mouse around. I'm not the only one in my office.
- EpicEng 10y ago
  The touchpad is literally the single hurdle to me going back to a windows/linux laptop.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  This is very true. When I reboot my MacBook into Windows the touchpad becomes dumb.
scholia 10y ago
> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) Use the Alt key. For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown. Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H. So, if you want to center some selected text in Word, press Alt, H, then AC If you want to insert an image, press Alt, N, P and so on. The Ribbon makes Office programs much easier to use, so you probably won't want to learn many of these key sequences. However, the ones you already know will almost certainly work. For the record, I much prefer Windows 10. However, the fact is that Apple doesn't sell any of the hardware I use. It doesn't make a proper tower desktop and it doesn't make a small rotating-screen laptop that doubles as a touch tablet. Even if I was willing to compromise on hardware, less-functional Apple products would cost 2x to 4x more.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the most useful, i.e. allowing the shortest mouse travel). Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.
  - pat2man 10y ago
    macOS does have keyboard menu control and it is pretty good. http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-from-your-keyboard http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-fr...
  - scholia 10y ago
    The Ribbon is a much better UI because it takes up less room, makes more features more accessible, and provides much better discoverability. To appreciate the pros and cons, I'd suggest going though the full account of the development [1], though there is a simpler intro/index [2] that links to a good video [3]. Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of-contents/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of... [2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor... [3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09
simonh 10y ago
Big items for me on MacOS * Drag-and-drop automation, scripting and workflow tools. I love folder actions. * Built-in screen recording in QuickTime Player, which also works with attached iOS devices * Time Machine backups. So easy to use and has saved my bacon over and over * iMovie and Photos. I don't use the rest of the bundled apps, both those two are essentials for me.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  I agree, all of these are part of why MacOS is just more ready for work out of the box.
- haikuginger 10y ago
  I literally don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the capability of Automator combined with completely-customizable keyboard shortcuts everywhere. It's seriously a power user's dream.
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  TimeMachine is really great. Does anyone have experience with the Windows 10 backups? I know the Windows 7 one was dire.
sorenjan 10y ago
>* POSIX scripting and CLI. Windows has WSL which gets better in the new Creator's update. >* Touchpad support. I don't use laptops, but I've heard good things about the touchpad in the Surface line, and Dell XPS. >* Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu. Windows has had hotkeys in menus as long as I can remember. I know they where there in 3.1. If you press Alt in Explorer you'll get overlays with hotkeys over the buttons and menus. >* A consistent menu system. I'm guessing you mean that the ribbon is inconsistent. Most programs use the regular menus, and the ribbon is just a glorified toolbar with tabs. I don't see the big deal. >* Powerful and system wide screenshots. Windows 10 has Win+Print screen to save fullscreen screenshots as a file. For more control, there's the snipping tool that's been included for years now. >* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too. >* Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. I usually use ConEmu. I just tested, it does support emoji, but I don't see the point. I just tried "mkdir " (edit: seems like HN eats my emoji, but that's supposed to be a directory with an emoji in the name), and it worked as expected. If I use the built in terminal in VSCode it even looks nice, with colors, but it's just two blank rectangles in both cmd and powershell. The built in terminal supports 24-bit color now though: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-bit-color-in-the-windows-console/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...
- newscracker 10y ago
  >>* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. > Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too. If you mean Command Prompt by "Windows Terminal", this is not the case (if not, I'd really like to know what "Windows Terminal" is - I use Command Prompt for DOS/Windows things and Kitty for *nix related things). At least I have had to turn it on explicitly in the Command Prompt options (quick edit mode), and it's one of the first things I do on a Windows machine after setup.
  - KayL 10y ago
    You could use Ctrl+M to mark it.
- 10y ago
AsyncAwait 10y ago
> * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. To be fair, the built in Terminal.app sucks, you have to get iTerm2, which is a 3rd-party app, but at least it's not another $40 replacement app that shouldn't suck by default, (the same cannot be said for Finder and its replacements).
- _acme 10y ago
  What is it that sucks about Terminal.app that iTerm2 fixes?
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    I'd be interested in that too. I've never wanted anything more than what Terminal.app offers, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.
    - Whitestrake 10y ago
      The iTerm2 features page[1] has a pretty good run-down of all the extra stuff it can do. Personally, I'm a big fan of the split panes, and I use iTerm2 full screen with two panes. That said, almost identical behaviour can be had in fullscreen with two Terminal windows sharing a full screen desktop space. I also enjoy having my terminal be a slightly-transparent black rectangular slate, with no title bars, corner curving, etc., but that's purely preference and has no impact on functionality. [1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html https://www.iterm2.com/features.html
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
72deluxe 10y ago
You forget: Windows has NTFS which is still lightyears ahead of Apple's upcoming APFS, let alone HFS+ (how on earth is it still in use??) And I say this as Mac user.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  John Siracusa, is that you? ;) Btw. in what way is NTFS ahead of APFS?
  - 72deluxe 10y ago
    NTFS supports compression, hard links, streams, transactions, quotas, and has a master file table (or multiples of them) which enables tools such as Voidtool's Everything utility to find files in nanoseconds. APFS does not support any of this. The MFT is very helpful in that it is on the disk itself, as opposed to Apple's solution of getting a separate utility to index the disk (Spotlight) and generating a giant database file on the filesystem in your hidden Spotlight-V100 directory. Spotlight is on the filesystem, not IN the filesystem. The NTFS page on Wikipedia lists all of the wonderful features of NTFS. Also Windows Internals 6 details some in wonderous detail. In any case, APFS is far better than HFS+ (which has to flip all metadata's endianness as it is stored in big-endian format). It also has single-threaded access to this metadata, from what I recall. John Siracusa's review 6 years ago of OSX 10.7 Lion detailed the poor state of HFS+: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/ Makes for sad reading.

nottorp 10y ago

* Touchpad support. I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.

Godel_unicode 10y ago
Precision touchpad gestures on Windows 10 solves that problem, especially on the Dell XPS/Precision machines. It's really, really good.
- emptythought 10y ago
  Nah. We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros. It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh
  - Godel_unicode 10y ago
    That's interesting, I've used a precision at work and an XPS at home for the last year, both have been totally rock solid.
snowwrestler 10y ago
Apple touchpads work so well that I don't use a mouse at all anymore. I have a Bluetooth touchpad with my external keyboard, and I even bought an old Fingerworks touchpad to use with my PC. The power of gestures is incredible. Managing macOS windows without a touchpad is awful. With a touchpad it is the best.
Macha 10y ago
I have had a work Mac for the last two years. I haven't found Apple touchpads to be this revolutionary change that'd make me like touchpads that others have and still carry a wireless mouse around. I'm not the only one in my office.
EpicEng 10y ago
The touchpad is literally the single hurdle to me going back to a windows/linux laptop.
72deluxe 10y ago
This is very true. When I reboot my MacBook into Windows the touchpad becomes dumb.

scholia 10y ago

> The best keyboard-only UI (although ribbons were a big step backwards in that regard - very hard to discover now) Use the Alt key. For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown. Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H. So, if you want to center some selected text in Word, press Alt, H, then AC If you want to insert an image, press Alt, N, P and so on. The Ribbon makes Office programs much easier to use, so you probably won't want to learn many of these key sequences. However, the ones you already know will almost certainly work. For the record, I much prefer Windows 10. However, the fact is that Apple doesn't sell any of the hardware I use. It doesn't make a proper tower desktop and it doesn't make a small rotating-screen laptop that doubles as a touch tablet. Even if I was willing to compromise on hardware, less-functional Apple products would cost 2x to 4x more.

m_mueller 10y ago
As I wrote I still do consider keyboard UI on windows the best, because it's AFAIK the only widely supported destop OS with full keyboard control of the GUI. But the Ribbons are not for me - it's a menu system that's also trying to be a context aware palette, which makes it worse than either a classic menu (easy to skim though and find what you want, especially on MacOS) or a palette (can be placed wherever it's the most useful, i.e. allowing the shortest mouse travel). Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.
- pat2man 10y ago
  macOS does have keyboard menu control and it is pretty good. http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-from-your-keyboard http://lifehacker.com/321595/access-the-dock-and-menu-bar-fr...
- scholia 10y ago
  The Ribbon is a much better UI because it takes up less room, makes more features more accessible, and provides much better discoverability. To appreciate the pros and cons, I'd suggest going though the full account of the development [1], though there is a simpler intro/index [2] that links to a good video [3]. Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example. [1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of-contents/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of... [2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the-ribbon/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor... [3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

simonh 10y ago

Big items for me on MacOS * Drag-and-drop automation, scripting and workflow tools. I love folder actions. * Built-in screen recording in QuickTime Player, which also works with attached iOS devices * Time Machine backups. So easy to use and has saved my bacon over and over * iMovie and Photos. I don't use the rest of the bundled apps, both those two are essentials for me.

m_mueller 10y ago
I agree, all of these are part of why MacOS is just more ready for work out of the box.
haikuginger 10y ago
I literally don't know what I'd do if I didn't have the capability of Automator combined with completely-customizable keyboard shortcuts everywhere. It's seriously a power user's dream.
72deluxe 10y ago
TimeMachine is really great. Does anyone have experience with the Windows 10 backups? I know the Windows 7 one was dire.

sorenjan 10y ago

>* POSIX scripting and CLI. Windows has WSL which gets better in the new Creator's update. >* Touchpad support. I don't use laptops, but I've heard good things about the touchpad in the Surface line, and Dell XPS. >* Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu. Windows has had hotkeys in menus as long as I can remember. I know they where there in 3.1. If you press Alt in Explorer you'll get overlays with hotkeys over the buttons and menus. >* A consistent menu system. I'm guessing you mean that the ribbon is inconsistent. Most programs use the regular menus, and the ribbon is just a glorified toolbar with tabs. I don't see the big deal. >* Powerful and system wide screenshots. Windows 10 has Win+Print screen to save fullscreen screenshots as a file. For more control, there's the snipping tool that's been included for years now. >* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too. >* Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. I usually use ConEmu. I just tested, it does support emoji, but I don't see the point. I just tried "mkdir " (edit: seems like HN eats my emoji, but that's supposed to be a directory with an emoji in the name), and it worked as expected. If I use the built in terminal in VSCode it even looks nice, with colors, but it's just two blank rectangles in both cmd and powershell. The built in terminal supports 24-bit color now though: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-bit-color-in-the-windows-console/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

newscracker 10y ago
>>* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal. > Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too. If you mean Command Prompt by "Windows Terminal", this is not the case (if not, I'd really like to know what "Windows Terminal" is - I use Command Prompt for DOS/Windows things and Kitty for *nix related things). At least I have had to turn it on explicitly in the Command Prompt options (quick edit mode), and it's one of the first things I do on a Windows machine after setup.
- KayL 10y ago
  You could use Ctrl+M to mark it.
10y ago

AsyncAwait 10y ago

> * Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support. To be fair, the built in Terminal.app sucks, you have to get iTerm2, which is a 3rd-party app, but at least it's not another $40 replacement app that shouldn't suck by default, (the same cannot be said for Finder and its replacements).

_acme 10y ago
What is it that sucks about Terminal.app that iTerm2 fixes?
- m_mueller 10y ago
  I'd be interested in that too. I've never wanted anything more than what Terminal.app offers, but maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.
  - Whitestrake 10y ago
    The iTerm2 features page[1] has a pretty good run-down of all the extra stuff it can do. Personally, I'm a big fan of the split panes, and I use iTerm2 full screen with two panes. That said, almost identical behaviour can be had in fullscreen with two Terminal windows sharing a full screen desktop space. I also enjoy having my terminal be a slightly-transparent black rectangular slate, with no title bars, corner curving, etc., but that's purely preference and has no impact on functionality. [1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html https://www.iterm2.com/features.html
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

72deluxe 10y ago

You forget: Windows has NTFS which is still lightyears ahead of Apple's upcoming APFS, let alone HFS+ (how on earth is it still in use??) And I say this as Mac user.

m_mueller 10y ago
John Siracusa, is that you? ;) Btw. in what way is NTFS ahead of APFS?
- 72deluxe 10y ago
  NTFS supports compression, hard links, streams, transactions, quotas, and has a master file table (or multiples of them) which enables tools such as Voidtool's Everything utility to find files in nanoseconds. APFS does not support any of this. The MFT is very helpful in that it is on the disk itself, as opposed to Apple's solution of getting a separate utility to index the disk (Spotlight) and generating a giant database file on the filesystem in your hidden Spotlight-V100 directory. Spotlight is on the filesystem, not IN the filesystem. The NTFS page on Wikipedia lists all of the wonderful features of NTFS. Also Windows Internals 6 details some in wonderous detail. In any case, APFS is far better than HFS+ (which has to flip all metadata's endianness as it is stored in big-endian format). It also has single-threaded access to this metadata, from what I recall. John Siracusa's review 6 years ago of OSX 10.7 Lion detailed the poor state of HFS+: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/ Makes for sad reading.