What I Use, Build 2018: MacBook Air (Premium)

I’m taking a Mac to Build 2018, and you’re never going to believe what happens next.

Just kidding. I resent the cheapness and clickbait-ness of this kind of manufactured tech experimentation as much as I suspect you do.

But then, that’s not what I’m really doing.

In truth, I’ve spent over two decades keeping up on Windows competitors like the Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. For the most part, I’m quiet about this work, but it helps inform my opinions about Windows and other Microsoft products and services. Not to mention my opinions about the competition too.

Sitting here in early 2018—in this case, literally, on a plane heading to Seattle—the act of experimenting with alternatives to Windows takes on a new urgency. As I’m sure many of you have noticed, the quality of Windows 10 has nose-dived over the past year or so. Part of this is literal, as seen in the many issues we’re experiencing with the latest Windows 10 feature update. And some is more subversive: The steady drumbeat of dumb features, advertising, and other nonsene in Windows 10 is getting worse and worse over time.

And I’m getting frustrated. Frustrated with Windows. And frustrated with Microsoft for chipping away at the quality this thing that I’ve long supported and still care about very deeply.

This frustration takes many forms, the relevant one here being that I’m able, too often, it seems, to point to some competing offering and see many ways in which it is better than Windows.

Luckily for Microsoft, the competition still lags behind Windows overall: I have no plans, now or in the foreseeable future, to use a Mac, Chrome OS, or Linux in any kind of regular, day-to-day capacity. For all its issues, I still very much prefer Windows.

That said, Microsoft has likewise made it much easier for even those in its sphere of influence to use competing platforms. That makes sense on phones, since Microsoft has no real presence there anymore. But it’s true of the desktop, too.

It’s especially true of the Mac.

I first used Macs back in the 1980’s, and I even owned a tricked-out Apple IIGS for several years before I went to the Amiga. But I bought my first real Mac, an iBook, in early 2001 in order to test Mac OS X, which at that time was the secondary option to OS 9 in a dual-boot system.

And I’ve owned a lot of Macs. More Macs, in fact, than many real Apple fans. A 12-inch PowerBook. An iMac. Two Mac minis. Two MacBooks (one white, one black). And at least two MacBook Airs. I have a hard time keeping track of them all, to be honest.

My current MacBook Air, which is only very slightly different from the newest model (I believe it’s just a single processor generation bump difference) is out-of-date in some key ways. The display is a low-res 1440 x 900 unit with large bezels, an anachronism in this age of Retina displays. The processor is three or four generations of out date. It has no modern connectors, just USB 3.0 (times two), Thunderbolt 2 for video-out, an SD card slot, and a MagSafe power connector. (Some will argue those are pluses. Fair enough.)

But it’s still an incredibly viable computer. It runs the latest macOS version, High Sierra, and the performance and battery life are fine. My purchase-time upgrades to 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage (with an eye on running Windows in Boot Camp) probably help with that.

To date, my Mac usage has consisted of two basic scenarios which vary by machine and over time. Most commonly with the laptops, I’ve dual-booted between macOS/OS X and Windows using Boot Camp. More recently, I’ve used Parallels Desktop to run Windows 10 within macOS, and while there are, of course, some performance implications there, I’ve found it to work pretty well.

(I’m in the Apple Developer Program, so I always keep my Macs and iOS devices on beta versions of the next software releases.)

This time, however, I’m trying something different. This time, I’m just using macOS. I’m not putting Windows 10 on the Air, at least not for now. And I’m going to use it to get real work done. I may suffer a bit in doing so, perhaps. But I bet not too much.

The trick, for me, is to duplicate my tools and workflow as much as is possible. And on the Mac, at least, that is actually pretty easy. I’ve been experimenting with doing this on Linux and Chrome OS and the results are less positive, for sure. (Better than was the case with the iPad Pro, yes, but that’s a low bar.) So I’m going with the Mac first. It’s just the easiest transition.

I think I’ve discussed my basic work-set before, but since I just recreated it on the Mac, let’s step through it.

All of my work-related documents are synced through OneDrive. On Windows, I sync a handful of key folders for offline use, so I’m syncing the same folders to the Mac. As I do on Windows, I’ve added the most frequently-used of these (2018-05, which is for this month’s completed documents, and To-do) to the Favorites area of the Finder (macOS’s version of File Explorer).

Many of the applications I installed and will use are the same as they are in Windows: Google Chrome, Microsoft Office 2016 (OneNote and Teams, primarily, downloaded from my Office 365 subscription), Adobe Photoshop Elements (2018 on the Mac, which I got from the Mac App Store; I also use a Store-acquired version of Elements in Windows), and Skype are all available on the Mac just like they are in Windows.

Some of the applications I use in Windows required me to find alternatives. Here, I was surprisingly successful.

I use MarkdownPad Pro for writing in Windows, but this app is no longer supported and is unavailable on the Mac regardless. Fortunately, I found an excellent alternative called MacDown some time ago. I almost prefer using it to MarkdownPad, so that one’s a win.

The three Chrome-based web apps I typically use in Windows—Google Inbox, Google Calendar, and Twitter Lite—are not available in app-like experiences on the Mac. Google only makes that functionality available on Windows and Linux for whatever reason. So I had to find alternatives for each.

For Inbox, I chose a Mac App Store app called Boxy that almost completely replicates the Inbox web app experience in a native app. It was very inexpensive, and it works great.

For calendaring, I just went with the excellent built-in Calendar app. Not sure what it is, but I can’t stand the macOS Mail app, but I really like Calendar.

And Twitter was likewise a no-brainer: Mehedi’s Tweeten is available in native app form on the Mac and it looks and works great.

Beyond that, I typically use a handful of built-in Windows applications, like Paint and Notepad, which I pin to the taskbar for easy access. Paint is something I’m still working on—I’m experimenting with something called Paint S that might work, and the built-in Preview app has some editing features that might be OK too—but Notepad was easy: The TextEdit app built-in to macOS can be configured to use plain text instead of its default rich text and it works well.

I’ve been using a Mac for almost two decades, so adapting to the different keyboard controls is mostly a non-issue: You use Command + C for Copy, for example, instead of CTRL + C, and the like. Some things in macOS are even better than is the case with Windows, too. You can type Command + Space to bring up a search box mid-screen, which I really like. (Microsoft may be copying this feature for the next version of Windows 10.)

There are some weirdisms, of course. Because I use Chrome extensively, I’m very familiar with how navigating between multiple Chrome windows (ALT + TAB) and tabs (CTRL + TAB) works.

It doesn’t work like that in macOS. Command + TAB switches between applications, and works mostly like ALT + TAB does in Windows. And CTRL + TAB still switches between tabs.

But if you have multiple Chrome windows open, Chrome only appears once in that task-switching view. So you need to know a crazy-weird keyboard shortcut—Command + SHIFT + ~—to switch between those windows. It’s fine once you learn about it. But it’s unfamiliar (and awkward to type).

(As a reader pointed out to me, you can also use CTRL + DOWN ARROW to display all of the open windows for the currently selected application and CTRL + UP ARROW to see all open windows. Not particularly discoverable, good to know.)

Apple doesn’t provide a feature like Snap in macOS, but there are third-party utilities that fill that gap if needed. But my biggest remaining issue with the Mac is that not everything in the UI is keyboard-accessible.

As a writer, being able to keep my hands on the keyboard is huge, and things like typing ALT + F (or whatever) to access a menu is useful. So is pressing TAB repeatedly in windows and dialogs to select the button or other control you want. You can’t do either on the Mac. (Only some controls are selectable by keyboard with the Mac, which is frustrating.) You have to keep using the mouse to select things.

It is, of course, doable. And I’ll find out just how true that is this week.

By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve brought a Mac to a Microsoft event.

Many years ago—in 2006 or so, I guess—I brought a white MacBook to a reviewers workshop at the company’s Redmond campus. Back then, this got a lot of strange looks and many comments. So many, in fact, that I taped a sign to it that said, “Relax, it’s running Vista!” I’ll try to find the photo I have of that somewhere.

These days, I don’t expect a Mac to get a second look from anyone at a Microsoft event. Microsoft is a much different company today than it was then, and is itself much more open to using other platforms, and to others using those platforms too. Some of the bloggers and friends I know there may be curious, of course. But I’m not so much trying to make a point as I am proving something to myself.

But as noted, I’m not switching to the Mac.

I’d like to get a newer and more modern Mac than this MacBook Air, yes. But the current crop of MacBooks and MacBook Pros are lousy: They’re too expensive, the keyboards are known to easily fail, and some design choices (huge trackpads, the touch bar) are questionable. So I’ll make do with I have and see what Apple does in the months ahead to address the many complaints. I’ve already voiced my call for an updated MacBook Air, which, of course, will never happen.

If you have any questions, let me know.