An essay about my attempt to use a Mac after a lifetime of using Windows desktops and laptops and Linux servers and appliances. Verdict: it's not bad, but I'm using horribly outdated hardware and software, so I'm not certain I'd actually tolerate it if I switched. Other verdict: a Core 2 Duo is still sufficient in 2026 for the majority of stuff I do on the computer, which means the computer is a solved problem and all they need to do is get more efficient now.
It's finally come to this: I'm making an honest effort to use a Mac. So far, the experience has been decent and while I'm tolerating some frustrations, there are fewer of them than anticipated. To briefly explain my motivation, Microsoft has sunk well below the trust thermocline and I suspect that Windows 10 will be the last version of it that I use. It's not that I want to use a Mac so much as I don't know if I want to continue using Windows.
My first impression while doing initial system setup is that Macs aren't nearly as locked-down as the popular consensus online claims. I get the feeling that a lot of the complaints about Apple from power users who use Windows are from power users who can't use Linux. Of course OS X doesn't feel like Windows, but it does feel a bit like Ubuntu with the Linuxy jank sanded off and polished. I'm reasonably proficient with Linux and tend to default to Ubuntu these days, so OS X's UI feels vaguely familiar.
There is a huge philosophical difference, though: OS X is designed to let you forget that you're using a computer in ways that Linux is simply not capable of. Indeed, if you use a Mac the way Apple wants you to use a Mac, you might forget that your machine is as much of an appliance as any beige box from Dell. But prepare for some friction if you deviate.
Apple really does not want you to think about folders and files. You have a music library? iTunes handles it. Photo library? Photos handles it. MP3? JPEG? Don't worry about it. Let the apps build their databases so you can listen and look. Backups? iCloud will sync, don't worry. Time Machine will sync, it's ok. Don't think about it too hard.[1]
It's ironic because OS X is Unix. Underneath the flat design is an honest-to-God Unix operating system where everything is a file. Even Finder by default tries its hardest to obfuscate this. Neither the root directory of the boot disk nor the current user's home folder is clearly visible or easily accessible; file browsers in Windows and any Linux distro I've ever used have shortcuts to both in a sidebar by default. The default view shows files and folders alike as icons. No extensions, no dates modified, no file sizes. Everything gets summarized as a small graphic, all equally important.
Yet Finder also includes the column view, which displays not just the files in a folder but also the files in the folders several levels above it in the hierarchy in a clean, organized view. It does truncate some metadata like file sizes and dates modified to make everything fit, but Finder allows changing the view in one click whereas File Explorer in Windows requires fumbling through drop-down menus. Column view is easily my favorite way to use a file browser on any system, and I wish it were in Windows rather than the tree view. It's so weird that Apple of all companies has made the best file browser UI.
The Mac experience features a lot of whiplash like this. For every time I think "woah, that's really clever!" there's another time I think "stop doing weird shit, Apple!" A lot of it is personal preference and some stubbornness, admittedly, but Apple is more obstinate than I could ever dream of being.
Apple makes lossless music, for example, a colossal pain in the ass for no good reason. Rather than simply support FLACFree Lossless Audio Codec in iTunes and iOS,[2] Apple developed their own lossless audio codec dubbed ALAC.Apple Lossless Audio Codec ALAC works by packing lossless audio into an MP4 container,[3] and it has been open-source and royalty-free since 2011.
FLAC, which everybody else on the planet uses, has been open-source and royalty-free since its inception in 2001, so its adoption has had a ten-year head start. ALAC is also technically inferior to FLAC despite being newer; ALAC files simultaneously require more disk space to be stored and more CPU cycles to be decoded. Additionally, ALAC lacks an equivalent to FLAC's fingerprinting feature, which gives files a baked-in checksum of audio data to indicate corruption. The only reason to use ALAC rather than FLAC is because Apple software does not support FLAC because Apple does not want their software to support FLAC. It's not a good reason, but it is indeed a reason.
Presumably Apple does this to make it harder to switch away from Apple devices because support for ALAC is not particularly good compared to FLAC. If that is indeed the intent, it seems that it's backfired because forums indicate that for every one user who gets locked-in there are ten who refuse to switch because it's pointless and unreasonable to expect somebody to transcode an entire library to a format that does the same thing. It's not hard—switching requires nothing more than FFMPEG and one terminal command—but it's about the principle.
I wanted my music library on my Mac. I queued up ten thousand files in Foobar2000. My 10850K spent an hour transcoding the entire library to ALAC. It cost about a dime in electricity. It's the computational equivalent of busywork. I'm glad I only have to do this once.[4]
I got whiplash when I got to the neat stuff that OS X can do. iMessage, Calendar, and Contacts all sync seamlessly between my phone and computer. I can text and call people, even video call people, from The Computer! Microsoft blew nearly ten billion on Skype and they never came close to achieving this. Seamless Calendar integration would've been extremely helpful in grad school when my schedule was more chaotic and got uprooted every semester.
Does that make up for all the other bullshit inherent to the Mac experience? I'm not sure yet. We'll see. I'm much more optimistic than I expected.[5] OS X is a lot less locked-down than popularly believed among computer dorks. At a surface level, sure, it doesn't let you do as much as Windows. Troubleshooting boot issues is frustrating since there is no diagnostic readout or user-accessible BIOS and the Konami codes to get into recovery menus require reading documentation that could have been output on the screen. Once in the operating system, you can't dig into something like Regedit and break stuff, and the miscellaneous settings menus don't seem to be as extensive as Control Panel.
But OS X does get a terminal because OS X, again, is Unix. There are quite a few system settings that are available only via the terminal. I've had to punch in a command to enable TRIM, for example,[6] and another to view hidden files and folders in Finder. Should those be visible in the GUI? Probably. Does it matter? I don't know. I can work with it. I had to work with Regedit to turn off Aero Shake.
There is a caveat to the results of this experiment: I'm using 16-year-old hardware. I'm using my dad's old iMac and his old MacBook Pro, both mid-2010 models and both limited to 2017's High Sierra.[7] The iMac is still surprisingly competent stock, and I've gone ahead and upgraded its CPU, GPU, memory, and storage to double or quadruple most performance metrics. As a bonus, the upgraded GPU supports the Metal API, so the upgrade allows it to support newer versions of OS X via OCLP. I have a writeup in the works about upgrading it, but it's currently refusing to power on and I haven't had the energy to do surgery because the motherboard will need to come out again.
The iMac is a perfectly mediocre albeit power-hungry desktop PC with a nice screen by today's standards, but the MacBook Pro is a different story. I threw in an SSD, did a partial RAM upgrade, and reinstalled High Sierra from scratch, but that's all I can do. A friend and I have four laptop DDR3 kits between us that I used to try to upgrade, but it crashes while booting when both SODIMMs are replaced,[8] so I have a weird 10 GB configuration. It's tempting to blow fifty bucks on a compatible dual-channel kit to max out the memory, but I can't justify spending that much money because my workloads are only using about 6 GB of memory and this computer is obsolete obsolete—the system bus is actually too slow for a dual-channel configuration's extra throughput to make a difference judging by Memtest86+ results.
Unlike its 15" and 17" contemporaries, the 13" MacBook Pro doesn't feature an Arrandale CPU, i.e., the mobile variant of Clarkdale, which was the stock CPU in the iMac. Instead, it features a Penryn CPU—a Core 2 frickin' Duo in 2010. It's a BGA Core 2 Duo at that, and I lack both the skills and equipment to perform surgery to replace it.[9] Not like an upgrade could do much—Macs never supported Core 2 Quads as far as I can tell, so I'd be stuck with a Core 2 Duo and thus two hardware threads running an operating system introduced in 2017. In addition, thermal throttling would likely become an issue if the CPU exceeded the stock 25 W TDP. Apple conspicuously did not offer certain 35 W Penryn CPUs as options in the 13" MacBook Pro that they did offer in the 15" and 17" models the prior year. Judging by the anemic heatsink I saw digging into this laptop, I can confidently assume that this was for engineering rather than marketing reasons.
As for the GPU, Apple never used MXM graphics cards in their laptops, so I'd once again have to learn how to replace BGA chips to do anything. But there's another catch with Core 2 Duo MacBooks from this era: Apple wasn't using Intel chipsets. They used Nvidia nForce chipsets.
Stop doing weird shit, Apple!
It does make sense, to be fair. The chipset is an Nvidia MCP89,Media and Communications Processor which as far as I can tell was only used by Apple for this year MacBook Pro and a corresponding Mac Mini. It handles everything the CPU doesn't, combining an entry-level Tesla GPU featuring 48 whole CUDA cores with a northbridge including memory controller and a southbridge featuring I/O such as SATA, USB, and Ethernet. It's a one-chip solution in an era when we'd expect to see three. Those space savings are important in a 13" laptop that still needs to accommodate a DVD drive—sorry, SuperDrive™—and a 2.5" hard drive. But the consequence is that there's only one model of GPU available and it's impossible to upgrade it because it does everything in the system that the CPU doesn't.
This laptop was outdated when it was new, yet it's perfectly competent running software a decade newer than the components within. The desktop environment doesn't feel particularly cramped either even though the screen is only 1280 × 800; this laptop predates Retina displays by a few years, not like it has the GPU to handle a 2560 × 1600 display.
I'm not dissatisfied with the Core 2 Duo for basic usage even now. Sure, all I'm really doing is writing and light web browsing, but it gets the job done. Why get something faster when faster doesn't help? Its energy efficiency is, politely, hot garbage, but the battery still lasts a few hours on a full charge. I can't say I'm concerned by the planned obsolescence meme at this point. This laptop is so old that performance degradation due to intentional sabotage would look like the expected advance of technology.
The 2010 MacBook Pro specifically has a couple of major advantages over the otherwise-similar 2009 MacBook Pro. First, the previous year's model featured an Nvidia MCP79 chipset, which only contains 16 CUDA cores in its GPU; graphics performance nearly tripled in a single year, and the integrated GPU in the 2010 MacBook Pro outperforms the discrete GPU in the larger 2009 MacBook Pros. Second, the trackpad was the first to offer inertial scrolling,[10] so it feels close enough to a modern MacBook trackpad. There isn't any haptic feedback, not in 2010, but it feels like a MacBook trackpad should.
Finding software can be a little tricky, though, and it's in stark contrast to the Windows experience of installing weird 20-year-old freeware on a new computer with few hiccups. Still, it's been generally pretty easy.
| Software | Purpose | Ease of installation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High Sierra | Operating system | Disk image still officially available, but had to be downloaded and flashed using family member's MacBook | |
| Dropbox | Cloud storage | High Sierra-compatible installer on their website, no issues after installation | |
| Syncthing | Self-hosted file synchronization | High Sierra-compatible installer on their website, no issues after installation | |
| Mozilla Firefox | Web browser | High Sierra-compatible legacy installer for v115.28.0esr on their website, no issues after installation | |
| Obsidian | Note-taking | High Sierra-compatible legacy installer on their Github, compatibility confirmed with forum posts, no issues after installation | |
| Mumble | Voice chat | High Sierra-compatible legacy installer on their Github, compatibility confirmed with trial-and-error, no issues after installation | |
| Night Shift | Blue light filter | Introduced in OS X Sierra but incompatible with Tesla microarchitecture GPUs and unavailable | |
| f.lux | Blue light filter | High Sierra-compatible installer on their website, no issues after installation | |
| Adguard | Ad blocker | High Sierra-compatible legacy installer on their website, no issues after installation | |
| Nikon Capture NX-D | Photo editor | High Sierra-compatible legacy installer found on Internet Archive, no issues after installation | |
| Plex | Self-hosted video streaming | No High Sierra-compatible app still officially available, compatible legacy version found trawling through forum posts, several core functions broken, lots of crashes | |
| ; however, | |||
| Plex web app | Self-hosted video streaming | No issues in Firefox 115.28.0esr | |
While I'm impressed particularly given Apple's reputation that the eight-year-old OS on the 16-year-old laptop using an 18-year-old Intel platform works as well as it does, it is also my biggest concern regarding this experiment. Apple's current hardware situation is dire in every way except performance metrics. The unibody MacBook Pro that I have can be easily gutted and serviced, BGA chips aside, but it was the last MacBook Pro designed with this in mind. The current crop of Apple Silicon laptops are magic black boxes that become ewaste the moment a hardware issue is encountered.
I also do not know if the Mac experience has changed significantly since High Sierra, but my experience with iOS suggests that it's probably gotten more frustrating with no upsides or clear reasons as to why. The focus on Apple Intelligence in new products is something of a concern given that AI has been, charitably, a bit shit. Apple's take on it is no exception, but a couple of features that they've advertised such as realtime translation of phone calls seem genuinely useful, and unlike every other company Apple appears to care some iota about privacy? It's not Windows Recall at least!
I've been trying to focus on the bits of this experience that get my brain buzzing as it settles into the workflow of a new-to-me computer, but I can't avoid venting about the state of the tech industrial-complex because ultimately my negative feelings towards it are the root cause of my desire to switch. I don't like or trust Apple; I simply dislike and distrust them less than everybody else in certain aspects that impact my day-to-day use. My disdain for Google is why I've owned an iPhone since the 4S even though I never owned any other Apple devices and I'm exactly the kind of dork who should like tinkering with an Android phone. It's impossible to ignore Microsoft's incompetence too now that Windows gets semi-regular vibe-coded updates that brick boot drives and jam Copilot someplace else nobody asked for. The state of PC hardware is also pretty bad[10] between Nvidia's going all-in on datacenter parts for the AI bubble, Intel's slamming their dick in the car door once per quarter, AMD's using the small die strategy yet again for GPUs, and Qualcomm's scrounging together half-baked desktop and laptop platforms. Now that they make their own chips, it really feels like the least-bad option left for both software and hardware is Apple.
"But Phoebe, have you considered Linu—"
I said good option.
