The Soul of a Different Machine (Premium)

I’ve been using the MacBook Air 15-inch M3 each day since it arrived in late March, and I took it to New York last week for the Qualcomm briefing on the Snapdragon X Elite hands-on experience. Between these experiences and my ongoing work with Windows 11 on several PCs at home, it’s clear to me that Arm is the future on the desktop. And that the only real question is which platforms we’ll use.

Related to that, I previously expressed my desire to get an X Elite-based laptop as soon as possible, preferably a 15-inch Surface Laptop, assuming Microsoft produces such a thing. That desire is, if anything, even stronger today. Using the silent, fan-free MacBook Air has been more of a revelation than I care to admit. But it doesn’t help matters that the PCs I have here, which are all modern and include some new-generation Core Ultra-based laptops, seem loud, slow, and kludgy by comparison. Windows 11’s declining quality is a particular sore spot.

Still, I am a Windows guy by choice. And I look forward to how truly capable Arm hardware might transform this platform and set it up for the next decade. The dream is still alive.

In the meantime, I have what I have, and can do what I can do. And as my experience with macOS grows, as I find myself getting more familiar with this system, I’m struck by some of the key ways in which macOS, for all its strange multitasking inconsistencies, is conversely superior to Windows in some ways as well. I mean, of course it is. But the differences are fascinating in real-world use and speak, I think, to more general differences between the two companies that make these platforms.

Whether these differences are tied to the respective company cultures, design philosophies, histories, or broader strategies is probably beside the point. (Indeed, it could be all that and more, combined.) What matters, really, is that these differences exist. And they matter.

This is not a subtle distinction: Though Windows and the Mac—and other desktop platforms like Linux and Chrome OS—are all very similar at a high level, they vary in the details, sometimes dramatically. This is true of the respective user experiences (UXes), which is where most tend to focus. But it’s also true architecturally. Each of these platforms has its own point of view, its own personality, its own way of doing things.

These difference impact not just the experience of using the operating system, but also the apps—the types of apps and the ways in which these apps are implemented—run within them as well.

The Arc browser I’ve written a lot about recently is a great example of the type of app that could have only been made on the Mac. Indeed, Arc wasn’t just created on the Mac, it was created for the Mac, using Apple’s Swift programming language, by people who don’t just understand the Mac, but have embraced the way it does things. On Windows, Arc remains a curiosity, and not just because it’s not yet feature complete on that platform. The app just looks, works, and feels more natural on the Mac.

It’s not just Arc, of course. Many Mac-first and Mac-only apps—most of them, probably—likewise seem to feel curiously natural on the Mac and would make less sense on Windows or elsewhere. As you might expect, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating various word processors, text editors, and other writing apps on the Mac. And the choices on this platform are an alternate universe of diversity and difference.

As you may know, I’m a big fan and daily user of the Markdown markup language, which is plain text and human-readable. I write my books—most recently, the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows Everywhere, about 2000 pages of text combined—in Markdown, using Visual Studio Code. But there are many other Markdown editors, and even many other kinds of Markdown editors. These types of things are just more common on Mac than they are in Windows. And are often of higher quality.

iA Writer is one such app. I’ve been aware of this app for years, and when I ran into problems with Typora constantly asking me to re-activate it, I researched alternatives and iA Writer was among the options I considered.

iA Writer is a curious outlier in too many ways to count, and I may write about it separately to discuss that in more detail. But one of those ways is pertinent here: On Windows it’s available in the Microsoft Store (for Windows), but that’s only a trial version, and when you pay for it, you pay iA directly. And that means it bypasses the Microsoft Store’s liberal licensing policies, a key benefit of the store. So I contacted iA to see what its activation policy was like. After all, I didn’t want another Typora activation issue. Their response was encouraging, but uncertain: You can install iA Writer on 20 Windows PCs, but they said they would reset my installation rights “very quickly” if needed. So I passed on it at the time, hoping to just find something with no activation requirements or a normal Store app.

But then I got the MacBook Air, and was reminded of iA Writer by a reader who recommended it. I knew that iA Writer was first made for the Mac, and since I would never need multiple activations on that platform—I review Windows laptops, after all, that’s why it’s an issue there—I figured it was worth revisiting.

Markdown editors are not mainstream apps. But as a writer, a technical person, and someone who values minimalism in all things, I’ve always found Markdown, and the apps you use to write in Markdown, fascinating. Some Markdown editors, like Typora, resemble word-processing apps or rich text editors and are thus friendlier to beginners. Many Markdown editors offer a two-pane view in which you write Markdown code—which is sort of like XML, XAML, or HTML code but more readable—on the left and can see the rich text-style preview output on the right. Visual Studio Code can be configured to work that way.

And then there’s iA Writer. An app that could only have been made on the Mac, for users of the Mac. An app that is available on Windows but just doesn’t seem natural there. This is a minimalist Markdown code editor, period. You can toggle a preview view, and you can even split its display to show the preview side-by-side with the code you write. But iA Writer makes the most sense if you just want to write in code, ideally in Full Screen and with no visible UI of any kind. It’s bizarre in some ways, and while this type of thing is hard to communicate, I love it, am drawn to it. And as soon as I started using it on the Mac, I knew I would keep using it. And so I paid for it—it’s expensive on the Mac, $50, and that doesn’t cover using it on Windows or other platforms—and have been using it ever since.

In many ways, iA Writer is like Arc browser, which makes sense when you think about it. They’re both quirky, Mac-only apps that were later ported to Windows (and elsewhere). They both look and work best on the Mac. They’re both unfamiliar enough that you need to make the effort to learn how they work, and then customize them as you master them further. And they’re the types of apps that I can’t really recommend to others even though I love them so much: Some will immediately grok the significance of these apps. But most will not. Indeed, most will simply be confused.

But it is these apps, these Mac apps, that in many ways represent the soul of this platform, if that makes sense. It’s difficult to point to specific features or UIs or whatever and say, look, that’s what makes this thing special. But you feel it. There’s something there.

Some of it is specific, I guess. Embracing the Mac Full Screen experience, of course. The design consistency that comes from having to utilize the system menu and its constraints. Maybe other historical vestiges of a Mac past that I wasn’t really part of, and thus don’t quite understand the point.

But a big part of the Mac app experience is the trackpad-based gestures that Apple builds into its MacBook laptops. We have similar capabilities in Windows, of course, but as so many have observed before me, it’s really not the same. Between the smoothness and accuracy of these gestures and their integration with Full Screen mode (and within individual apps) and various multitasking features, these gestures somehow transformed this legacy desktop system in ways are both powerful and simple. It doesn’t feel like a dumbed-down, Fisher Price experience. (He writes, triggering a latent Windows 8 PTSD.)

This is very interesting to me.

In the Windows community, we’ve mocked Apple for innovating in multitouch with the iPhone but not bringing that technology to the Mac. This decision feels predatory on some level—Apple makes most of its revenues selling hardware, so it clearly just wants you to buy multiple devices rather than a single device that can do it all—and thus anti-choice. After all, how does the presence of a multitouch display hurt a PC or Mac user who doesn’t want to use that functionality? There are pragmatic concerns here, too: Because iPhone and iPad app developers must use a Mac, adding multitouch to the Mac would help them test their apps during development. It’s just common sense, right?

I don’t know. I can tell you from my years of experience with devices of all kinds and in reviewing several PC laptops every year for over two decades, that I don’t need or want multitouch on my PCs. I don’t want a convertible PC that can fold, bend, and contort itself into an ungainly version of a tablet I will never use. I don’t begrudge the existence of such things. I just don’t need this functionality: The PC is a productivity tool, and in my world, for my needs, that means a keyboard and touchpad and the biggest screen possible.

The product designers at Apple may or may not be held back by market protectionist thinking dictated from on high, I don’t know. But their message is that the Mac, like Apple’s other products, should remain true to itself. And that feels right to me, aligns neatly with my right tool for the job mantra. And as we have shifted, as a society, to smartphones for most of our personal computing time, what’s left for the PC or Mac is that crucial big screen, full-sized keyboard productivity use case. These devices aren’t just better than smartphones or tablets for certain tasks, they’re ideal and optimized. I make my living, have staked my career and livelihood, on that fact. It’s as true today as it was 20 years ago despite all the other changes in this industry.

Of course, the iPhone and other smartphones have influenced these desktop devices. How could they not? But where Microsoft, to my mind, over-reacted to the rise of multitouch mobile devices in the 2010s by contorting Windows into use cases for which it is still works poorly, Apple has spoken instead of a virtuous cycle in which the appropriate parts of mobile can be ported back to the Mac platform it originally used as the basis for the iPhone. That is, to create the iPhone, Apple gave it the parts of the Mac that made the most sense on mobile and add multitouch and other unique capabilities on top of that. And now it’s a two-way street: Apple is giving the Mac the parts of the iPhone (and iPad) that make the most sense on the desktop.

And that doesn’t include multitouch displays.

We can debate that decision, I guess—no matter how few people use this functionality in Windows, this kind of conversation always inspires fans of tablets and touch-capable PCs to come out of the proverbial woodwork—but there’s no reason for debate. That’s Apple’s strategy. And what I see when I look at the Mac today is a product that is very much optimized for those productivity use cases while offering more naturally integrated mobile-inspired features like full-screen apps and touchpad gestures.

And that’s before even considering the Continuity-style benefits one gets by using two more Apple devices together. Apple’s biggest fans will tell you that the combination of a Mac and an iPhone, or an iPad and an iPhone, or whatever, feels greater than the sum of the parts. In this world, 1 + 1 = 3. There’s something to that, too, but I’ll dive into that in a future update.

Speaking of which. Updates. We have to talk about how Apple and Microsoft keep their respective desktop platforms up-to-date.

My opinions about desktop system and optimization is mostly subjective, of course. But Apple’s approach to updating the Mac software platform—a process that includes adding new features as well as just fixing problems—is objectively better than how Microsoft updates Windows 11. There’s little reason for me to repeat my complaints about the chaotic, illogical, and dangerous way in which Microsoft adds features to Windows 11 now, other than to note that Apple does not do this. And while some may see Apple’s product updating strategy as slow and plodding—not just with the Mac, but with each of its platforms—it’s impossible to ignore that this pace benefits customers and aligns with the lengthening upgrade cycles of recent years. Nothing speaks to the immaturity of a platform more than a rapid, unpredictable release of new features that allegedly improve it.

And yet, that’s what we still see with Windows, a product that dates that back almost as far into the mists of time as the Mac. Meanwhile, the Mac gets what Microsoft promises but doesn’t deliver: A single feature update each year, interspersed with monthly bug and security fixes. The Mac is treated like the mature, stable platform that it is, while Microsoft treats Windows like the devil’s playground. The inmates are running that asylum.

We’re tech enthusiasts, I get it. Minor, predictable upgrades are, in a word, boring. Consider Windows 8, which for all its insanity, was at least interesting if not outright fascinating for the audacity of its radical changes. But making big, wrong bets is a failure of imagination that landed us where we are today, and there is nothing fascinating about Windows 11. The current Windows team’s lack of maturity and professionalism is also taking a toll. Its scatterbrained approach to updating Windows 11 is both a symptom and a disease, a cancer that is killing the platform from within and undermining its strengths. Nothing makes me sadder.

Well, maybe one thing.

I mentioned up front that this MacBook Air has inspired me to see an Arm-centric future for the desktop, and that I will be getting some kind of X Elite-based Windows laptop in mid-2024. It can’t happen quickly enough, but the fact that we’re still waiting for Microsoft and its hardware partners to successfully transition Windows to Arm even as a secondary option for customers remains a painful reminder of how poorly this has gone. After all, this is a transition that could and should have started with Windows RT in 2012.

But Apple just did it in a few short years. It announced the transition, and then it upgraded each of the Macs in its product family and made it happen, shipping 3+ generations of Apple Silicon chipsets in the process. Today, these processors are the wonder of the personal technology world, and the primary source of jealousy for those of us in the Windows community who understand Arm’s inevitability and are tired of waiting for it to actually happen.

It’s hard not to fall into the trap of what-ifs when it comes to the failures of Windows on tablets and phones, and the cascading side effects those failures triggered. But there it is. I have often wondered aloud whether Windows would ever survive the mistakes of Windows 8, but inertia is an interesting force that can help to hide the internal rot until it’s too late. The result of that inertia and internal rot is Windows 11. And it’s hard to feel good about where we are.

Please, don’t get me wrong. Apple doesn’t do everything right, and there are glaring inconsistencies in the macOS user experience that rival some of the issues I raise with Windows. Not enshittification level issues, to be fair. But curious lapses given the design- and quality-centric vibes this company gives off. I pointed out some of these inconsistencies in my MacBook Air multitasking article, and have come to the conclusion that some of these behaviors can only be fixed with third-party utilities like AltTab, despite my attempts to stick with what the system provides.

But there’s more, of course. And there are deeper issues with the ecosystem. Apple’s approach to the iPad is notably directionless, in part because it would cannibalize sales of the Mac if it made the iPad too good for productivity, and in part because this product has no real competition other than other iPads. There’s too much hardware there, and too little software, if that makes sense.

The corollary to “right tool for the job” is the mythical hybrid device, the one device that can replace two (or more) independent devices. The iPhone is perhaps the best example of this type of thing—you may recall its original “three devices in one” marketing—but the iPad is nothing like that. It could be, probably. And it is, sort of, but only for a small base of users, similar to that for Windows tablets. But we’ll never know the real potential there unless Apple pulls the trigger. That it hasn’t is a byproduct of the same underlying mentality—the culture, the philosophy, the history, and whatever else—that makes this company different from Microsoft. It’s good and bad. Maybe it’s the right decision.

All I know is that Apple has done right by the Mac. And in an age when Microsoft is doing wrong by Windows, that resonates. We can quibble over strategies and individual design decisions, but my complaints about Windows 11 boil down to a lack of respect for customers and their choices. And I just don’t see that on the Mac, despite Apple’s reputation for control.