My Journey From Mac to Windows and Back

It’s been a wild ride.

I recently picked up a 14-inch MacBook Pro, and it’s honestly one of the best laptops I’ve used in a long time. It’s so good that it has me kicking myself for being so hesitant to give Apple’s computers a fair shot.

If I had switched sooner, I probably could have saved myself a lot of frustration. But hey. Live and learn, right?

This is the story of how I got here.

I grew up with Windows and DOS.

As a kid, I was around computers pretty much constantly. My dad even built a little network in our house using Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and I thought that was so cool. The idea of one computer being able to “talk” to another was just fascinating to me.

I quickly learned some DOS commands and how to navigate Windows. Eventually we upgraded to Windows 95, then 98.

At the age of 15, I got my first computer — the first one that was mine. It had a single core 2.5GHz processor, a whopping 256 megabytes of RAM, 64 megabytes of graphics memory and ran Windows XP, but I loved that machine. I used it for a lot of school work and even some website creation.

Not long after, I bought a Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop running Windows XP Media Center Edition. I loved that I could watch movies on my laptop and even use a remote control to control it like a TV. It had a stronger GPU than my desktop did, so it was my primary gaming system.

Windows was my OS for gaming, school and content creation. It’s the OS I used as I learned to build websites with what was then called Macromedia Studio and edit video in Adobe Premiere.

My first jump into macOS

But as I prepared to go off to college, I wanted to give something else a try. I had heard that Macs were “better” for media creation and video editing, which is something that I very much enjoyed. I really wanted to get a Mac, but money was a problem, of course. I was a high school student — soon to be a college student. Money wasn’t exactly dripping from the ceiling.

Eventually, I sold my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop to be able to afford a 2007 15-inch MacBook Pro. That was easily my favorite computer of all time.

With that machine, I built several websites, wrote a lot of content, did school online, and even played some games. When I first got the machine, it had OS X 10.4 “Tiger.” And I upgraded to 10.5 “Leopard” on launch day. 10.6 “Snow Leopard” was my favorite.

But I didn’t get to use 10.7 “Lion” for long because one day, the Mac would no longer turn on. I was so sad.

Like many of this model, it had succumbed to the NVIDIA 8600m GT failure that plagued that this series. I discovered too late that Apple had a repair program for this and didn’t get it repaired, which was a bummer.

I only came to find out years later that I could have had this fixed but didn’t. You can imagine how I was kicking myself at that point.

Back to Windows, I guess.

Even after my Mac failed, I still needed a laptop for school and for content creation, but I didn’t exactly have the money for another Mac. Sure, I would have loved to buy one of the newer “unibody” MacBook Pros, but that was more than a little out of my price range.

Eventually I wound up with a Toshiba Satellite L775D-S7132. While it wasn’t a Mac, I was still happy with it overall. It had plenty of storage for what I wanted to do, even though by today’s standards it’s old and under powered. I used that machine for several years. I eventually even upgraded the 640GB HDD it came with to a small solid state drive, the first solid state drive I had ever used — and wow was it fast.

Then I picked up a second machine which was a Lenovo G505s. That machine I never really fell in love with — or really even in like with. It ran hot, and it was slow. Lenovo did graciously attempt to get the heat under control for me and sent a service technician to me to replace some parts, but the issues were never really resolved. Eventually, the hinge broke, and I decided to put that machine out to pasture. After all, I still had my Toshiba.

Eventually I upgraded to an HP Envy 15-q493cl. That was the best Windows machine I had used to date. It had a 1080p touch screen display, an i7 processor and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M, so I could play a couple of games here and there at low to medium settings. Compared to my previous Windows machines, it was pretty snappy.

Somewhere in there I built my own gaming desktop. I loved finding all the parts and assembling it. It was very much a budget build. Eventually I bought and installed a GTX 960 graphics card, and I was finally in mid-range gaming territory. That was fun. A bit later, I sold that machine to help pay down some debt.

Then, I bought an Asus GL503VMF gaming laptop from Best Buy. It was easily the best laptop I had ever used. It was fast, had a decent screen, and was so much faster for Blender and gaming thanks to its GTX 1060 mobile GPU.

But I was still a bit bored with Windows.

My first trip back to the Mac

Not long after the first edition of the 16-inch MacBook Pro was released, I picked up an expensive one with 32GB of RAM, 2TB of storage, and an Intel i9 CPU. That set me back a pretty penny.

And it was a great machine, at first. After I had it all set up, I noticed a few screen defects and took a trip to my local Apple store to get it exchanged, and they were very understanding and took care of it for me. But then I had to get another exchange (for a reason I don’t recall). Eventually, I returned the third unit due to a variety of issues including additional screen issues. I was very disappointed.

At least I still had my Asus laptop which was ok.

A bit later, I bought another 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro, hoping that the issues I had experienced the first time around were just growing pains for the new model line and that a new unit wouldn’t have any big issues. Sadly I was wrong, and eventually I returned that one too.

Bummed, I just kept using my Asus for a while.

The Asus gaming laptop meets its demise.

Sadly, after a few years, my Asus GL503VMF’s fans started to malfunction and made a horrible grinding noise after running for a bit. Of course the fact that I dropped it a few times may… have something to do with it. Oops.

It would work for a bit and then sound like a fork in a blender — leading me to suspect that it wouldn’t be the wisest idea to keep it powered on.

In the interim, my employer got me a laptop to use for work, which was very kind, and I used that while I was searching for a replacement personal machine.

During that time, I bought and subsequently returned several different Windows laptops due to various issues — mostly backlight bleed and rattling fans.

Finally, after a long search for a replacement, I bought my current Dell XPS 17 9710, which is an overall great laptop with a few minor issues that I’ve griped about elsewhere, so I won’t bore you with that here.

But I still wanted something portable

Don’t get me wrong. I do like my Dell XPS, minus its mediocre battery life, and it’s screen simply doesn’t come close to the quality of my 14-inch MacBook Pro. But it’s not exactly portable.

Even though it’s a 17-inch laptop with the body of a 15-inch laptop (which is pretty neat), it’s heavy and feels like a solid brick of metal. It’s not exactly what I would call “travel friendly.” Sure, I can put it in my backpack without any issues, and I can travel with it, it’s not the most enjoyable experience.

If I go anywhere, I have to remember to take my charger along. And the weight makes it less than ideal for carrying around — even around the house. So I started searching for a smaller, portable machine.

I was really looking for a machine that could check all the right boxes:

• Something small-ish. I didn’t want another 15+ inch laptop. Just something I could carry with me as needed.
• Something with a great screen. I’m very picky when it comes to screen quality. Excessive backlight bleed, IPS glow (any more than necessary, and low resolutions are no-gos for me.
• Something with good performance and battery life. I wanted something with respectable performance to be able to run things like Adobe Illustrator without having to be tied to a power outlet after a couple of hours of use.

Honestly, I didn’t think that was too much to ask. But, as you can read in the article linked below, I encountered all kinds of issues and bought and returned more machines than I can remember in search of something high quality. It was ridiculous and discouraging.

The second (temporary) dip back into Mac land.

Frustrated, I bought a 14-inch MacBook Pro — one with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. For a while, I loved it. But eventually I returned it due to concerns I had regarding the longevity of its SSD. It was writing what I considered to be excessive amounts to its SSD. I didn’t think I was doing anything too strenuous on it, but I had concerns that it was chewing through its estimated lifespan too quickly. With that and a couple of other issues, I decided to just return it.

Normally, that SSD usage wouldn’t be a problem, but since Mac laptops have soldered storage that can’t be upgraded — or even removed — I was concerned that the writing (which I perceived as excessive, right or wrong) was going to lead to the demise of the Mac. This was during the whole M1 Mac SSD wear scare where M1 Mac owners were reporting “excessive” SSD wear in their Macs. Whether that was due to a real issue or a software reporting issue, I don’t know.

So, I returned it. But I missed it almost immediately.

More disappointing purchases.

The search for a good portable laptop continued. Sadly, it didn’t go amazingly.

I found a machine that interested me at a local Costco — a Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X. So I bought it. It advertised 14 hours of battery life plus a high quality, high resolution screen. Excellent!

There was a problem though: After a good few days, it stopped turning on reliably. Well that and the fact that its supposed long battery life turned out to be more of a marketing gimmick. At least on the unit I had.

Awesome. Neat.

Cool.

So I chatted with Lenovo support to get their thoughts, and they agreed with me that it was most likely a hardware issue. Forget that. I returned it. I’m not playing the “let’s repair the new computer” game. No thanks.

Fine. I’ll just try a Mac again.

I was frustrated even more at this point. Why did Windows laptops suck so much? Seriously. It was like a bad joke. So, after reading reviews and listening to lots people I trust on YouTube, I decided to pick up a MacBook Pro at my local Best Buy.

Maybe I was misunderstanding the whole SSD wear thing. Maybe I needed to go back to basic math class? I don’t know. But since the 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM was on sale at Best Buy, I decided to go for it.

And so far? I’m really liking it. I’m loving writing a lot of my content using the Mac. Its screen and battery life are excellent, and I’m loving the ability to boot a couple of different builds of macOS from external Thunderbolt solid state drives.

While I haven’t yet done any video editing or After Effects work using my MacBook, I’m feeling better than I was previously about the longevity of the solid state drive. In fact, I’ve been monitoring the amount of data that’s being written to the drive via a tool called DriveDX. I may write a bit about that in the future.

But I know that if it ever became an issue, I have AppleCare+ for my Mac so that shouldn’t be a showstopper.

My current laptop setup

If you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that I’m still using a Dell XPS 17 as well — and it’s a great laptop overall. While it’s far from perfect, and its fairly typical IPS display leaves much to be desired, it’s an excellent Windows laptop.

But I’m also loving my 14-inch MacBook Pro. Is one better than the other? That’s hard to say. Each is objectively better at some things than the other. Perhaps I’ll write some content about that in the future for those who care to read where each system lacks or excels in my opinion.

However, I will say that as a portable, powerful machine with an excellent screen, the MacBook Pro is easily the best laptop in its class I have ever used. And honestly, it makes all the more portable machines I’ve tried before it seem pathetic by comparison.

So currently I’m using both a Windows machine and a MacBook Pro. I guess the real shocker for some people is that I actually like both Windows and macOS.

Where will I go from here? Windows or Mac? Or both?

Will I finally jump ship to macOS as my OS of choice, or will I still have a place for Windows? I suspect for the foreseeable future I’ll have a solid need for both operating systems and types of devices. I’m no Apple hater or Apple fanboy (and I’ve never really liked those terms, to be honest).

Windows is one of the most frustrating operating systems I’ve used in recent memory, but many of the programs I need run on it — and I appreciate the raw GPU power the RTX card in my Dell affords me. MacOS has its flaws as well, and some things about it are just… weird, but I love how it handles notifications, and being able to quickly transfer files to and from my phone via AirDrop and send messages via the Messages app are huge advantages that I miss any time I’m using my PC.

I’m hopeful that both systems will last for a good long time, but after that? I’m not sure. I suppose where I land will depend a lot on how each machine holds up to the intense workloads I require and whether or not I’m willing to put up with each operating system’s many quirks.

Time will tell, perhaps, and I think that will be a good topic for a future article.