Switcher 2026: Coping With the Mac ⭐️

Of all the Windows 11 alternatives I'm currently testing–too many Linux distributions to count, Chrome OS and Chrome OS Flex, and, soon, an iPad–the Mac is the most obvious choice if you're looking for a professional and familiar system where everything–hardware, software, and services–just works. Plus, the Mac is having a moment thanks to the MacBook Neo, a laptop I think most readers should skip in favor of the vastly superior MacBook Air. But whichever Mac you choose, there will be challenges for those coming from Windows.

So many challenges.

The good news is that most of them are minor. With Linux, I run into all kinds of problems, from sound that doesn't work only in games to online services that never connect correctly and can't seemingly be made to work. But the Mac is more like death by a thousand cuts. There's nothing endemically wrong here. Just numerous small differences and some things that objectively just don't work as well as they do in Windows, like basic multitasking.

However, there's good news, too. These issues are mostly surmountable. So let's dive in, starting with the most problematic blockers.
﹩ You will need a new computer
As I noted in Switcher 2026: The Mac is for People, Not Businesses ⭐️, the biggest issue with the Mac, from the perspective of a switcher, is that you can't run macOS on a PC you already own.

A reasonable Mac–the MacBook Air–starts at $1099, which is a bit expensive but also in the "you get what you pay for" category. Even a base-level MacBook Air is a terrific laptop with incredible performance, epic battery life, and silent, fanless operation.

You can lighten the financial load a bit by:

Shopping the Refurbished Apple Store
Shopping the Education Apple Store, which typically sells Macs for $100 less than the normal retail pricing. The base MacBook Air costs $999 for education customers
Paying over time through Apple.com; that $1099 MacBook Air costs $91.58 per month for 12 months

? You can't sign in with your face
Though Apple offers its incredible Face ID facial recognition system on iPhones and the iPad Pro, we're stuck with Touch ID on all Macs (except for the base MacBook Neo, which lacks even this nicety) and most iPads. And that's ... OK. It's fast and accurate, but Apple, like Google, sometimes requires you to type in your password to sign in like it's the 1990s again. This is one of many areas in which Windows is vastly superior to the Mac: They never bypass Windows Hello-based biometric sign-in and force you to type a password.

The workaround here is classic Apple, meaning you have to spend more money: You can also sign in to a Mac using an Apple Watch. It's not as fast as Touch ID or Face ID, and you will still have to type in your password sometimes. But if you do have an Apple Watch, this is a nice option.
✈️ Multitasking is a mess
Multitasking on the Mac is a disaster of inconsistency and complexity and this is the biggest problem I encounter on...