User Experience impressions (first 2 days) — Moving from iPadOS to macOS
Impressions from first 2 days of use. What I find different switching between OSs
Note: I wrote this 2 days after I had bought my brand new 2020 M1-based MacBook Air (Base Model — Gold Color). By the time I published this, it‘s already 5 days old.
I am still in the process of settling in with my MacBook Air. The whole experience of setting up the new laptop has been a breeze. As a first step, I installed all my favorite apps that I use across my other Apple device. Most notably Things 3, Ulysses (that’s what I am writing on now), Lastpass, Todoist (long story on why I use both Things and this), MindNote, Day One and VMWare Horizon Client. And I know I have a quite a few more that I need such as, Firefox, Chrome, etc.
One thing you got to know is, it has been almost 3 years now since I last used a MacBook (as part of my previous job). For most of my lifetime I have been a Windows user. So given the long time, my use of macOS gotten a bit rough. I struggled a bit to navigate around, especially using the shortcuts. But this is like cycling right, it comes to back to you. Now I am a bit comfortable navigating around.
However, I couldn’t help notice myself struggling quite a bit after years of iPadOS usage. As I had mentioned in my previous stories, my (mostly) only personal device since late 2018 has been my 2018 iPad Pro w/ Magic Keyboard. Now that I am trying to use MacBook, I see myself getting frustrated with these very subtle but constant struggles. For a long time macOS user, these are naive and laughable, perhaps, but for me, I still fell a sense of frustration and I thought I should write about it. So, here it goes.
First, is me constantly trying to reach and touch the screen. Even now, in this story, until this point, I would have tried touching the screen at least 10 times. It has kind of become a habit for me having used iPadOS for such a long time. Say for example, if I want to randomly jump to a particular place in a paragraph and start editing, I will naturally reach out to that place and tap the screen. I know you can use the trackpad and/or navigate using the arrow keys, but I am sorry, I just cannot help it, I feel frustrated, and I end up cursing Apple for not having a touch screen yet. I sincerely hope that Apple considers a touch screen going forward. But then I wonder if Apple may want to reserve the touch screen as a differentiating feature for the iPads.
Second, I can’t help notice how neatly designed the apps are on iPadOS vs macOS. It feels that the developers have a license to deliberately do a bad job when it comes to look’n’feel and finish. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel that apps in general look very clean on iPadOS. Maybe it’s the tightly controlled design aspects of the UI controls and navigational behavior on the iPadOS. Or maybe its just specific to certain apps/developers that I have encountered so far on macOS. Even Apple for that matter with their News app. In some screens the font size looks ridiculously small and I did not find a way adjust the font size anywhere. Anyway, it’s just my initial impression, and maybe I am biased with my new OS (macOS) and hopefully the experience will soon grow on me.
Lastly, multi-tasking and overlapping windows. I know this is weird. When on iPad, I used to complain a lot about not having good multi-tasking capabilities or having the ability to keep multiple windows open in an iPad. Yes switching apps with CMD+Tab is possible, but it still wasn’t very efficient and somehow I found it very cumbersome on the Magic Keyboard. Or I could use the multi finger gesture to bring up the app switcher and select one. iPadOS also has some limited multi-window capability in terms of split view and slide over (and some limited picture-in-picture). But now that I have a full-blown OS in macOS, I somehow feel a bit overwhelmed with so many overlapping windows being open and multiple desktops to switch over. Somehow I miss the zen and simplicity of just having one window open at a time.
Again, it sounds naive and bizarre that I complain about macOS. But hey you are hearing my unfettered opinion fresh out of the box (literally).
PS: I am super impressed with this MacBook. Especially the battery life. It’s my fifth day, and I am still at 31% battery. That’s outright crazy. I may share more thoughts on the device performance later.
