Given the resounding oddities in my life, like how my birthday and my wedding anniversary are the same day or how there’s always a cardboard box laying around our house like a straggler from a move (though we’re going on nine years here) or even at the Sun Day how we celebrate odd-year anniversaries rather than the primary even ones (10 years? What’s so special about that? Let’s have a bash for 11!), it makes complete sense that I have a Mac computer but am running Windows on it.
Feels off, doesn’t it?
Nah, it’s just par for the course for me.
If you’ve been a reader of Happy Trails, you’ll know that I’m not very into technology or gadgets and am oftentimes over wowed by technological advancements that are ten years old because I’m so behind: “You mean your phone can give you directions somewhere? Yep, been able to for about fifteen years now. Hmmm, I had no idea.”
Yes, that’s me. The man forever behind on the technological times.
However, over the years I’ve decided to make an effort to embrace these advances and have slowly incorporated several Apple products into my life, such as their phones, a watch, and Air Pods (which I have to say I shouldn’t have criticized so much in the past because they’re kind of awesome, despite that I’ll take over-ear headphones that plug into a jack any day over an earpiece).
When I looked around, I realized Apple had done it’s job with me and had effectively groomed me into an Apple/Mac consumer, despite my earliest protests that I would never use Apple or Mac products.
Then one day late in 2019 I decided to make the biggest switch of them all: move from Windows to Mac.
After weeks of research, I decided on the Mac Mini, mostly because of my work with the Sun Day, I have a very good professional monitor that, at the time, was quite new still, and I didn’t want to toss it aside for the iMac. Also, iMacs have a glossy screen. If you’ve ever seriously photo edited, you’ll know that highly reflective screens and daylight are not a good combination.
I won’t say that I went into this decision easily. I’ve been working on PCs since the home computer became popular, and I admit moving to a Mac felt like a betrayal. Still, every Mac user I’ve known spoke of Mac’s superiority and insisted the operating system would make my life easier.
Long story short, it didn’t.
In fact, working on a Mac decreased my work productivity by probably 25% or more. Tasks that took me an hour to do on a PC took me sometimes two hours to do on a Mac…or even more.
The problem isn’t so much the operating system, which is mostly fine and not that different to navigate than a PC’s once you learn the equivalents. The problem I had was mostly with the dock and how it operated and managed open windows and tabs and folders. Basically, it doesn’t manage them and offers almost zero organization. You’d think whoever designed the dock was a light computer user at best, who only surfed the web or did emails. One or two open programs on a Mac is fine. Anything more than that feels like there’s a tiny monkey living inside your desktop, playing three-card Monte with your apps.
A Windows taskbar keeps everything where it is, so let’s say you open a Word document, the Word icon in your dock expands to a rectangle that displays the document title (or as much of it as it can, depending on how many other programs/files/folders you have open). Then if you open a second Word document, it produces another rectangle right next to the first and again displays the document title. Every program in your taskbar operates like this. Everything is kept in one place and that place is the place where it starts. But on a Mac’s dock, when you open a file, first, the dock does nothing. The file just opens. Then when you minimize the file, it drops it into a square shape on the far right of the dock, which would be fine if when you opened a file, an icon of that file just appeared to the right of the dock and stayed put. But like I said, it’s only there when the file is minimized, so if you have multiple documents open on your desktop, they’re all just hiding behind each other and the only way to navigate them is to right click on the icon in the dock, which will show you a list of open documents for that program, hit your desktop view, which will break apart your screen into all your open documents, or start crazily minimizing whatever the foremost document is until you find the one you’re looking for.
If this sounds like a mess, it’s because it is. In fact, I’m aware that was a very sloppy and confusing and tiring paragraph I just wrote, but I left it that way because it’s a good representation of how disorganized working with multiple open programs, files, an tabs are on a Mac. It’s maddening.
I don’t think PCs are perfect, and in many ways, Macs are far superior, such as in their communications ability. Being able to link or sync all my devices to the Mac definitely made my communications much more efficient and easier. And although the Mac environment can look a bit cartoonish to me, I do like the overall atmosphere of the Mac’s operating system. But how anyone can navigate a Mac’s dock efficiently and easily is beyond me.
In my opinion, Macs and Pcs are like manual and automatic transmissions. A Mac definitely offers a much more manual user experience, but when you just need to get where you’re going quickly and without all the lever pulling, an automatic is the way to go.
So after five months of cussing at my Mac, I turned it into a PC by loading Windows on it. The Mac’s operating system is still there, lurking alongside Windows, tempting me to come back over to the other side, to take just small bite. And I sometimes almost do. It’s a very attractive operating system with a lot of bells and whistles. But then I remember the last time someone was tempted to take a bite out of an Apple and look how that turned out.
