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 o...