The Missing Pieces of the Puzzle (Premium)

I've written a lot about the MacBook Air I purchased last month and some of the interesting differences between the PC and Mac ecosystems. It was important to me to experience the Mac as Apple intended, without the crutch of more familiar PC software or utilities designed to make up for some of the many macOS shortcomings and inconsistencies. But now that my review is done, all bets are off.

I haven't solved all the problems I've found with macOS, but it's somewhat rewarding to discover that those problems are real, and well-understood within the Mac community. I spoke with a long-time Mac-using friend this past weekend for a few hours, and while much of that time was spent just catching up, we also ran down my list of issues and inconsistencies. And he confirmed the lot of them. I'm not crazy.

But I don't want to focus on any of that here. In the end, this kind of technical navel-gazing is interesting on some level, but I just want to get work done. So let me instead push forward with a few more general observations about this platform, and how using the MacBook Air as much as I did over the previous five or six weeks changed me.

First, yes, I did install and configure Parallels Desktop over the weekend. I'd already written about the latest version of this incredible product last August when it first shipped, and there are no major differences to report. But Parallels factors heavily into my Mac experience going forward, so we'll touch on this again in a bit.

Also, for those who recommended third-party utilities to solve some of the Mac's more obvious multitasking issues, I did eventually buy/download two, and they're worth knowing about. First up is Magnet, a $4.99 app in the Mac App Store that provides Snap-like window management functionality that's dramatically better than the built-in macOS side-by-side views (that only work in Full Screen and only support two windows). And then altTab, which as its name suggests, provides a Windows-like Alt + Tab keyboard shortcut so you can access every window in the switcher, and not just every app. With stock macOS, getting to secondary windows is an inconsistent nightmare.

These three apps are the reason I'm writing this. Not so much to explain that they're useful, though they are. But rather to highlight how much I missed the functionality that they deliver, from Windows to the Mac. This isn't just about familiarity, indeed, I did everything I could to conform to the Mac way of doing things. Instead, each addresses what I feel is objectively an inferior or non-existent experience on the Mac. Something that just works better in Windows or is, curiously, only available for Windows.

In my review of the MacBook Air, I noted that moving between Mac and Windows regularly, as I did over those many weeks, was difficult. I can't recommend doing this: If you're going to use a Mac, just use a Mac (or vice versa). Going back and forth between the two is a thankless exercise in overloadin...