iSwitched to Mac Part 3 - The Software Experience
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
2,390 words · ~11 min read
0:00
welcome to the long awaited I hope part three of I switched to the iMac the
0:06
software experience I'll still be doing at least one more look at the hardware
0:10
with a focus on thermal throttling and gaming performance of the R9 295x mobile
0:15
GPU but this is really the meat and potatoes of what it was like for me as a
0:20
longtime Windows only guy to use a Mac
0:23
for over a month as my daily driver It
0:27
Is by no means comprehensive I used the machine like I'd expect a mostly normal
0:31
person to do it without registry edits and add-ons up the wazo but I feel like
0:37
it gave me a good feel for what the Mac experience is supposed to be like and
0:41
I'm hoping to get that across to you guys so here we
0:51
go The Cooler Master nepton 240m features an exclusive pump design and
0:56
their new silencio fans to provide impressive near silent performance click
1:00
now to learn more let's Jump Right In shall we instead of nite.com I used get
1:05
Mac apps which generates a string of text you paste into terminal.app that
1:10
installs all your stuff for you and then started setting up all my network shares
1:13
and whatnot then I spent a fair bit of time in the system preferences menu
1:17
discovering really cool stuff like the ability to log into my Gmail and social
1:21
media accounts within the OS using an application specific password just like
1:26
on a phone to effortlessly set up the messaging client for my hangouts chat
1:30
though it was hard to use because my messages sent through other devices
1:33
wouldn't show up on the Mac the default email clients so that notifications
1:37
popped up on my desktop just like that and the calendar so all the stuff I need
1:41
to do is at my fingertips and struggling to understand
1:45
some of the truly asinine stuff like the inability to disable scroll wheel
1:49
acceleration something that makes using a physical wheel Mouse extremely
1:53
unpleasant in OS 10 use and that ultimately along with the very
1:57
convenient two-fingered swipes to change space or virtual desktops forced me to
2:02
keep using the phenomenally unergonomic Magic Mouse although for a couple bucks
2:07
you can fix that with a third party application I am told expose now called
2:12
Mission Control excuse me access is another thing that I changed by default
2:16
you reach it by double two finger tapping the mouse very unnatural and
2:20
obviously a touchpad design gesture or by moving the mouse to any of the four
2:25
corners of the screen but I found myself doing that accidentally pretty often so
2:29
I was extremely pleased to find that on each Corner this functionality can be
2:34
disabled outright or it can even be reassigned to other useful things like
2:38
peek at the desktop put the display to sleep and open up Launchpad okay mostly
2:43
useful Microsoft deserves the crap that we gave them over the charms menu
2:47
replacing functionality that used to be in start but it amazes me that they got
2:51
so much flak for modern UI when Apple seems to have completely snuck under the
2:56
radar with Launchpad how is it different except that it's icon instead of live
3:00
tiles it's worse it's okay though because just like on Windows you never
3:05
have to use it I kept all my frequently Ed stuff in the dock and then for
3:09
everything else apple plus spacebar brings up Spotlight did I say apple I
3:13
think I meant command whatever you get the point and Spotlight whose ability to
3:19
guess what you were looking for and push the more relevant results to the top is
3:23
Worlds ahead of Windows's built-in search functionality that has improved
3:28
to the point where it actually returns results for for example Windows update
3:33
or uninstall but still presents them in no particular order but before the Mac
3:39
users start nodding their heads knowingly about how silly Windows is
3:44
there is some boneheaded and confusing Mac stuff too especially if you haven't
3:48
used OS 10 before while I was in preferences trying to learn keyboard
3:52
shortcuts and turn on repeat for letters when I hold them down I still couldn't
3:57
figure out what was going on without doing some gole Googling I mean the symbol for alt/option and control are
4:04
confusing as heck and brightness control is F14 and F-15 I mean where are those
4:10
and while we're at it in preferences why are the keyboard shortcuts for Mission
4:14
Control within keyboard but not within the mission control menu when the mouse
4:19
gestures for Mission Control are Within mission control and not within Mouse ah
4:23
and why do I need a third- party plugin to see favicons in my Safari tabs how am
4:28
I supposed to know what's what Chrome me up Scotty but there's also some
4:33
usability stuff that made the Mac a total pleasure to use having the option
4:36
when you reboot to open all your crap when you log back in is freaking awesome
4:41
yay for little timesavers spaces is
4:44
awesome and Supernatural to use not as good as dual monitors or an ultra wide
4:49
but a surprisingly excellent compromise as a space saer and the way OS 10
4:54
manages updates is just nicer than
4:57
Windows I can ignore it without being bothered if I want and but there's no
5:01
need to because I can tell it to do it automatically when I know I won't be
5:04
working and thanks to OS 10's ability to open up everything I was doing when I
5:08
logg back in I know I won't miss a beat I also like that downloads go to a handy
5:13
little dedicated manager pop up on the taskbar excuse me Doc instead of being
5:18
managed within each browser or forcing me to dig through Explorer excuse me
5:22
sorry finder to track them down but that
5:26
leads well into what I think is my biggest OS 10 complaint it is no wonder
5:30
to me that Apple spent so much time making Spotlight awesome because finder
5:35
is horrendous here are some complaints about it in no particular order sort by
5:40
is systemwide instead of folder by folder so it's almost never right when I
5:45
open a particular folder to help me find the most relevant items at the top
5:48
instead of having a route directory for each drive internal storage all just
5:53
gets piled together I mean no wonder Mac people buy all these external
5:57
Thunderbolt drives to manage their files they have no way of of knowing what's
6:00
where there's legitimately no way to force refresh the contents of a folder
6:04
because it should be automatic which is great except when it doesn't work and
6:09
you rate around for 15 minutes for the file to show up there are only two
6:13
thumbnail sizes and they're buried in some submenu and again must be changed F
6:18
or wide you can't easily cut and paste files and folders yeah seriously Windows
6:23
people watching this Mac people need to install a Plugin or must use keyboard
6:28
shortcuts to hot paste and finally
6:32
though this is a Windows complaint too these days why is up directory missing
6:36
why do I need to use the functionally sometimes the same back button or
6:41
breadcrumbs or a drop down for this can we please bring that
6:45
back and there are other usability things that irk me too picture importing
6:50
versus being allowed to just manage my videos and images with clearly
6:54
thumbnailed directories and drag and drop would be fine if I wasn't usually
6:58
in a hurry when I I was doing it and I guess the same can be said for window
7:02
management it's fine but it just takes
7:05
longer full screening things takes a dog's age for some reason and is more
7:10
like theater mode in a media player than maximize on Windows Aros snap like
7:15
functionality can be added with hyperdoc but until you do that it's basically
7:20
back to Windows XP style resizing and
7:23
dragging around and another frustrating thing for me anyway is managing multiple
7:28
Windows within a single application left clicking just vomits them all all over
7:33
your screen where you left them and selecting a particular one lacks a
7:36
graphical preview so you're stuck just selecting from a list which I find
7:40
slower and less intuitive I really do like the word processor pages though
7:45
aside from the cless of my Windows PC using co-workers needing to rename the
7:51
pages files to dotzip manually in order to open them whenever I forget to export
7:55
a separate copy for them in doc I ended up really liking it
7:59
numbers feels like a bit of a bad joke compared to Excel and keynote I honestly
8:03
just didn't use but pages is a pleasure to write in and I legitimately
8:08
understand why writers might use Mac in order just to have it especially
8:12
compared to Office for Mac y The only positive thing I can say about Office
8:17
for Mac is thank goodness I didn't buy it I installed it using one of my five
8:21
Office 365 installs promptly delicensed it and installed parallels with Windows
8:25
8 on it so I could use Office 2013
8:28
instead parallels by the way is an awesome crutch for those looking to make
8:33
the switch to Mac because it came in handy so many times whether I couldn't
8:37
find a Mac version of an application or even just for little stupid things like
8:42
installing the drivers to configure a gaming mouse and you know get the lights
8:47
and the you know buttons programmed correctly before then switching it back
8:51
to OS 10 now I feel like I could talk pros and
8:56
cons for another probably 15 minutes here but this is YouTube and I'm likely
8:59
already pushing the limits of the general audience's attention span so I'm going to try and wrap things up here
9:04
there was some stuff about using a Mac for a month that drove me nuts changing
9:08
the back shortcut in finder and Safari from command open bracket to something
9:12
faster requires a registry edit the position of the command key for my
9:16
commonly used keyboard shortcuts like copy and paste is something I've pretty
9:20
much gotten used to now but still find extremely uncomfortable and little
9:24
things like middle clicking to enable mouse scrolling requires a 14
9:29
app called Smart Scroll and I'll be damned if I'm buying that instead of a dozen chocolate bars but there were
9:35
things I liked some first- party app store stuff like Twitter is awesome
9:38
compared to the awful modern UI stuff on Windows 8 add it in font installation is
9:43
way better you just double click it instead of dragging it to the fonts folder which is completely unintuitive
9:48
on Windows the inclusion of functional
9:51
productivity software like pages is great instead of expecting me to buy it
9:55
separately and parallels his excellent performance with Windows applications
9:59
feels very best of both worlds but none
10:02
of this was enough to even begin to tempt me to switch not because Windows
10:07
is amazing and perfect because it's not but because it's fine and the Mac
10:12
experience was also just fine not enough for me to spend
10:16
$3,000 on this machine the high resolution display is beautiful but the
10:21
unexceptional GPU driving it causes it to chug all the time and one of the
10:25
features that I thought would actually be like a killer app continuity being
10:30
able to you know take phone calls and texts from your iPhone on the Mac
10:34
honestly left a lot to be desired mostly due to the stunningly poor voice quality
10:40
on the other end of the conversation thanks to the computer's top mounted
10:45
microphone what were they thinking so I guess that's it for me then maybe in
10:49
another 15 years I'll take another run at the Mac but by then I suspect even
10:54
more of what I do will be browser based and the difference between Windows Mac
10:59
or heck even Chrome OS or Linux based machines will be even less eliminating
11:04
more of the justification that exists today for buying expensive computers
11:08
just for the sake of the OS they run speaking of oh I don't know I'll just
11:13
pick a random word from the last paragraph let's say browsers our sponsor
11:17
for today's episode is I fix it we I
11:21
hope all know about their awesome picture guides over on ifixit.com that
11:25
can help with difficult device repairs and upgrades for phones tablets and even
11:28
all-in-one computers just like this one but did you know about their awesome
11:32
line of Pro Tools I bought myself a prot
11:36
tech toolkit over a year ago and I've used the everyday stuff like the
11:39
bazillion sizes of Phillips heads that it comes with lots of times but when
11:43
it's really paid off for me is when I've needed something bizarre like a security
11:47
Torx or a triwing and aside from the screwdrivers it comes with a whole bunch
11:50
of other stuff you need for tweezing prodding prying and poking while working
11:54
on sensitive Electronics check it and all their other cool stuff out today at
11:58
iFixit / Linus and use code Linus to
12:01
save $10 on any purchase of $50 or more
12:05
that's it guys thank you for watching
12:08
the mostly the conclusion of the Mac
12:11
experience uh for me I have run out of
12:15
gas here like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if your feelings are more
12:18
complicated than this as always we have links in the video description to support us you can give us a monthly
12:22
contribution by a cool t-shirt like this one or change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate
12:26
code so we get a small Kickback whenever bu stuff thanks again for watching and
12:30
as always don't forget to
12:41
subscribe