From Windows Laptops to Mac: A Tech Professional's Switch Explained

Published Mar 16, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT

Raghav Sethi began his tech writing journey in 2022, contributing to his college’s open-source community blog. Later that year, he joined MakeUseOf, and since then has written extensively about Apple, Android, and AI. His work ranges from hands-on experiments to opinion pieces that explore the bigger picture behind emerging tech trends. 

Alongside his work at MUO, you can also find Raghav’s articles at XDA Developers, where he mainly focuses on Linux and the world of open-source software. 

Outside of writing, Raghav enjoys working on coding projects, playing the guitar, and living life on the edge by installing the latest beta software on his daily devices.

My first computer was a Windows machine, and I used one every single day until 2021. For most of that time, I did not question it. Windows was just what computers ran, and you dealt with the quirks because everyone else was dealing with the same quirks. But each year something new broke, or something that used to work stopped working, and the list of things I was just putting up with kept getting longer.

And the frustrating part is that this is not an accident. Microsoft's priorities have been a mess for years, and the people paying the price for it are the ones just trying to use their devices.

Related

The hardware isn't the problem, Windows is

Bring back the days of Windows XP, please

Windows 11 has its fair share of problems, but the problems are much, much worse on laptops. The experience is just messy to begin with, and I've had tons of issues for years which have never been resolved.

My biggest problem has always been sleep mode. It is incredibly hard to understand why most laptops just drain their battery and get hot, with the lid closed and in my bag? The entire point of the device is to be a "laptop", not a desktop with a battery which is going to die when you're not even using it. Microsoft has known for years that Windows Modern Standby absolutely sucks, and nothing has been done about it.

Even Windows Updates, as always, have just made my life worse. A few months back, Microsoft pushed a Windows update, which completely broke all ASUS-related tools on my ROG Ally. This meant I could not even control my TDP anymore and was just stuck with lower performance. I have gotten calls from friends and family so many times because their Wi-Fi icon just disappeared after an update. Not acting up, or being slow, just gone, because the drivers somehow uninstalled themselves. What is even going on?

And instead of fixing any of this, Microsoft is clearly more focused on AI slop that nobody asked for. All the time that could go into resolving actual problems is going into Copilot. The meme below pretty much sums it up.

The frustrating part is that the hardware has genuinely never been better. Intel has made a real comeback with Panther Lake this year, and I want to use it. But I just cannot daily drive any of it because of software issues that have nothing to do with the hardware manufacturers. The machines deserve better than the OS they are stuck with.

Even one thing Windows is supposed to be undeniably good at — gaming — is not as clear-cut as it used to be. Except for a handful of titles that are locked to Windows, I just get better FPS on Linux. So what is Windows actually best at anymore? It is jack of no trades and master of none at this point.

The value king is... Apple?

How the turntables

I know how that sounds. But hear me out, because the pricing situation right now is strange in the best possible way.

The MacBook Neo just launched at $599, making it the cheapest laptop Apple has ever sold. That is not a stripped-down, barely functional machine either.

It runs the A18 Pro, the same chip from the iPhone 16 Pro, and benchmarks show it outperforms every mobile processor from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm in single-core performance, including chips from this year. At that price, nothing on the Windows side comes close to matching that combination of build quality, display, battery life, and raw performance.

And it is not just the Neo. The MacBook Air starts at $1,099, and the MacBook Pro lineup, while expensive, gives you a machine that will last five or more years without feeling slow. When you spread that cost out, the value argument starts looking very different compared to a Windows laptop. I am sure you will find a Windows laptop which will beat a MacBook at one specific use-case, but then it's gonna be worse in every other metric.

I am still using an M1 MacBook Air, and it's still going really strong. I have never had any Windows laptop in this price range which has worked as reliably as this thing. In the end, it's a good laptop. I take it out; I have plenty of battery remaining; I get my work done on a wonderful keyboard and trackpad; I come home, watch a movie on a good screen with amazing speakers, and that's it. It's a very simple package that Apple has nailed.

And for local AI work, Macs are quietly the best option most people can actually afford. The unified memory architecture means the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine all share the same memory pool, so running local models is far more efficient than on a typical PC. Apple Intelligence itself has been underwhelming, and I would not sell anyone on a Mac because of it.

But if you want to run something like an LLM locally without spending a fortune on a dedicated GPU, a Mac with 16GB or 32GB of unified memory is hard to beat.

If you don't want a Mac, go Linux

There is always another way

If a Mac is not in the budget or just not for you, the answer is not to keep suffering through Windows. Your current laptop is probably good enough, and Linux will make it feel like a different machine.

Gaming is also surprisingly good now, and I say this having tried all the major gaming distros. CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzite, the performance across the board is better than Windows for most titles. Proton handles the vast majority of your Steam library without you touching a single setting, and in some games you are actually getting better FPS than you would on Windows. The only real exception is games with kernel-level anti-cheat like Valorant, which is a developer decision, not a Linux limitation. But outside that small list, the experience these days is hard to argue with.

Performance on older hardware is night and day as well. A laptop that feels sluggish on Windows 11 because of all the telemetry, Copilot processes, and background services running constantly will feel snappy on something like Fedora or CachyOS. The OS is just not working against you.

I run a Mac and Linux combo and honestly think it is the best setup you can have. The Mac handles everything creative and professional, and my Linux machine handles everything else without complaint. Between the two, I have not opened a Windows laptop in a long time, and I do not miss it.

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Windows is 40 and its midlife milestone comes with a Linux-shaped crisis.

Goodbye, Microslop

Until Microsoft gets its priorities straight, and maybe even starts taking Surface devices seriously again as a first-party device that can actually compete with a MacBook, I am done. The tools are already there.

A Mac if you can stretch the budget, Linux if you cannot. Either way, your current laptop is probably better than you think. Windows is just holding it back.