I’ve been alive for 43 years at this point and I have been using a Microsoft operating system as my daily driver for the last 37 years, starting with MS-DOS running on a Commodore Colt PC in 1988.

I have used every version of Windows from 3.0 in 1990 up until Windows 11 in 2025, mostly because I enjoy playing games and Windows has always catered to gamers. Aside from that, with the exception of Millenium Edition, Vista, and Windows Server, I have enjoyed the experience with relatively few hiccups.

So why switch?

Well as I age, I’m getting much less excited about the idea of cracking open a computer and digging around inside of it. I just don’t have the drive to do it anymore. For well over a decade, I’ve just been buying a beastly new computer and selling the old one without ever touching anything inside of it. I have continued to use Windows solely for my extreme familiarirty with it and Macs generally couldn’t handle the games I was playing without a headache.

I have been much less enchanted by video games for awhile, abandoning triple A titles completely in lieu of much cheaper deckbuilding roguelikes, and the creative side of my soul has been steadily becoming more pervasive. I’m reaching the age where the grey-beard nerds tend to transition from a career in engineering to woodworking, and moving to a cabin in the forest somewhere. Well, that will never be me because I’m incredibly lazy and addicted to the conveniences of modern living. So for the rest of my life, I will be shackled to a computer.

When Apple introduced Apple Silicon, a unified CPU and memory architecture, it piqued my interest. Like I said, I don’t really care about upgrading anymore, so the static nature of the build does not bother me at all. What finally pulled me over to the MacOS side of the aisle was the eye-popping performance benchmarks and nearly zero noise generated by the hardware. As a musician — a vocalist — that is a pretty huge selling point for me.

I had always heard that making music was a more enjoyable experience on a Mac in general, but I had no real reason to test the waters. Well, Apple Silicon and its silent opeation is that real reason. I waited a couple of years to give the software companies and developers enough time to create builds for ARM64 architecture, and the time for that nearly ubiquitous compatability is now.

So I finally made the switch.

Some things felt clunky, especially relearning keyboard shortcuts, but after a couple of days of uncertainty and looking to the right side of my monitor for the minimize button on a worefully lacking Finder interface, every regret faded and I am now fully absorbed into the Mac ecosystem. It honestly makes me feel a little dirty… but who cares?

Finally, let’s go over the pros and cons.

Pros

• I can use iMessage natively from my desktop.
• A lot less telemetry crap.
• It’s fast as f**k, boieee.
• It’s completely silent.
• It’s ridiculously small for the power. It takes up like 1/8th of the space of my gaming rig.
• The OS seamlessly integrates with all of my other Apple stuff. Phone, iPad, Watch, TV, etc.
• I can move apps to my iPad so it acts as a third monitor. Great for monitoring my security cameras.
• Most of the software is a single lifetime purchase instead of a subscription.
• Great privacy features.
• All things audio are a lot more user friendly.
• Apple Podcasts rules. It has an easily reachable “Latest Epidoes” section. Imagine that.
• Logic Pro rules.
• Apple Pay rules.
• Subscriptions are incredibly easy to manage.
• Time Machine backups are cool.

Cons

• Window management is clunky.
• Can’t keep iCloud files on an external USB drive.
• Most of my Steam games are dead in the water without extra effort.
• Not a lot of customization options out of the box.
• Everything costs money. There is a lot less freeware.
• Everything asks for a password. 1Password, YubiKey, and fingerprint sensor are all absolute requirements.
• Apple Arcade kind of sucks. Good idea, bad execution.

Final Thoughts

I personally love MacOS. It provides a pretty amazing user experience for software development, writing, and music production. No regrets.

Additionally, I don’t feel like my personal information and usage habits are being lusted after and scraped, which was becoming more and more of a concern for me as Microsoft focuses in on its AI investments. Even though they aligator-armed it (for now), Microsoft’s “feature” to allows users to track and replay all of their activity from the past however many days, for example, is a dystopian nightmare in my estimation. It’s crazy to me that it ever got greenlit in the first place. No thanks.

I may or may not compile a list of all of the software choices I made if I get some free time and feel motivated enough to do it. If so, I’ll post it to the blog feed!