Until last year, I’d been a PC guy for my entire life. And I’ve had a lot of PCs: IBM Thinkpads, Lenovo Thinkpads, Dells, HPs, an NEC, and back in the day, a Compaq and a Gateway 2000. My wife has had Macs for years, and whenever I’d use them, I’d feel lost. They made no sense to me. I was sure that I’d never own a Mac.

Then, two things came to a head in 2022 that caused me to try a switch:

First, I had a few bad PCs in a row. It seemed like I constantly needed tech support from work to fix things or even send them off for repairs. Then, in the summer of 2022, my PC catastrophically failed, and my hard drive was “bricked,” and an outside firm could only recover about 90% of my data. UGH. Very frustrating.

Second, around that time, my firm hired Kevin as our internal IT specialist. He’s a Mac guy and uses a Mac at work even though he supports a firm full of PC users. When I complained to him about all my PC troubles, he said, “Well, you could try a Mac.” So I did.

I’ve had my Macbook since the summer of 2022. Changing over to a Mac required some retraining because the operating system works differently: there are different keys and different ways of doing some things. To make the switch less painful, I watched videos with tips for new Mac users transitioning from PCs, and read tutorials. It took weeks to get used to the switch.

But it was worth it, and I won’t be going back.

Here’s what I like and don’t like about using a Mac vs. a PC.

The Downsides of Using a Mac

Let’s get the downsides out of the way.

• Macs (like iPhones and iPads) inexplicably don’t have a forward delete key, only a backward delete (i.e., a backspace). PCs, of course, have both a backspace and a delete key. You can get around this by pressing the “fn” key while pressing the “delete” key. While I’ve mostly gotten used to this, I think it’s dumb and wish Apple would fix this issue.

• My Macbook is not a touchscreen. My last three PCs were. I rarely used the touchscreen, but it was nice sometimes and I wish my Mac was touchscreen.

• I think Windows Explorer on PCs operates more logically than Finder on the Mac. They are similar, but I slightly prefer the PC version.

• This is a work thing: I can’t open email links to files on our company server with my Mac. There are workarounds, but it can be it is frustrating.

• PCs have Control and Alt keys. Macs have Control, Option, and Command keys. It has taken some getting used to using different hot keys on the Mac.

What I Love About Using a Mac

There are a ton of things I love about using a Mac. Here are the main ones:

• The battery life is amazing. With my PCs, I was always running out of battery and having battery anxiety. My co-workers with PCs have to take their chargers with them everywhere. I legit can work 8-10 hours on my Mac on battery. It’s been sort of life-changing.

• It doesn’t slow down or lock up the way my PCs did. I used to have to reboot my PC computers all the time. That doesn’t happen with my Mac. It’s like everything was designed to work well together (and it does).

• The sound is quite good. Zoom calls, YouTube videos, and even Spotify sound really good for laptop computer speakers.

• The Mac is now part of my Apple ecosystem — like my Macbook is a big iPhone or iPad. This means I can send and receive texts and accept phone calls on my laptop. All my iPhone photos are in my Mac Photos app. I can direct the Mac to open a screen on my iPad. The Find My app is on the Mac to easily track family members (or find my iPhone or iPad if I’ve misplaced them). And so on.

• It feels like a higher-quality machine than any PC I’ve owned. Plus, the fan makes zero noise, and it never gets hot (both of which have been issues with most PC laptops I’ve owned).

So — I love it and wish I’d switched years ago.