Switching to Mac after 10 years as a Microsoft User

It's honestly kind of a weird and kind of difficult video for me to make. I've been using just PCs and Microsoft for as long as I can remember. Ever since college, that was my first laptop. And then I got out of college and started working in data. And I've only ever used Microsoft. But now after all these years, I'm switching over to Mac. And I never thought I would have said that even 5 years ago, four years ago, 3 years ago. But here I am. I'm completely switching over to Mac OS and everything Apple for a few reasons that I'll talk about in this video. Now, to give you some context, I've owned tons of different laptops that all ran on Microsoft operating systems. So, I've owned Yoga, which my wife also owned. I've had Microsoft Surface Pros, Lenovo ThinkPads, and most recently, I've had HP Omen's all running on Microsoft, all Microsoft ecosystem. I even have my HP Omen right here. It's massive. Uh this is what I've been using for the past like uh 5 years, right, for all my video editing. And funny enough, I have another HBO. This is a different one. And that kind of gets into some of the issues that I've been having and why I eventually switched over. So I'm going to kind of walk through why I made the switch and kind of what my experience has been so far. Now, I have lived through a lot of Microsoft operating systems. That's what you use when I was a kid. Like I remember Microsoft like 1998. I remember using it and I've kind of grown up with it. But in recent years, I have just become a lot more aware, especially of the limitations that the Microsoft operating system has. More specifically, it's just really, really slowed down my workflow and it's come with a lot of issues. I think if you use Microsoft right now, you know that Windows 11 is basically bloatware at this point. Most of it is unnecessary. They're adding all these AI things that I don't even want into the systems and just slows everything down. And it's honestly really infuriating because if they had done that and kept up the performance, I would have been okay with that. I've been like, "Hey, listen, you know, okay, great. It's not perfect. " But at least my stuff is still running really quickly. Uh, but it's not. It's getting really slowed down. And in every single laptop, whether it is a super powerful laptop or just, you know, a regular laptop like what my wife might have, we have always had issues with things like glitches. It'll turn off and it just won't turn back on for like a day until all of a sudden it's like, "Okay, I'm ready to reboot. " And then we always have issues with the hardware. And so things like on this HP Omen, and this is why I had to get a different one, is I started having keyboards come off. You can see the keyboard, which I, you know, Whoops. that's actually turned on. I use the keyboard a lot. I can't have missing keys. And so that one like completely broke off. I couldn't even reattach it. And you know, I know how to put a key back on. This is not my first rodeo. But this one is just like broken. So like I can't even use the keyboard. And so there just been issues stacking up over the years. And I finally had my most recent HP and it's getting glitchy with the monitor. It's not connecting right. The one of the ports stopped working. And that's all hardware. But then just the software was getting really overloaded. All of my RAM was always taking a long time. I would have maybe 15 tabs open on the internet and it's getting super bogged down. And even when I was using AI tools like Claude Co-work or Claude Code, it just couldn't keep up. It was moving very, very slowly. Now, the thing that kept me from switching for so long was my work, right? I use a lot of Microsoft applications. I use PowerBI, I use Excel, I use OneNote, I use all these things within the Microsoft ecosystem. They've just been ingrained into my workflow for so many years. I was like, I don't think I can ever switch. I just don't think I can. But about two years ago, one of my consulting clients said,"Hey, I need you to be using Mac. Here's why. " They explained it, made perfect sense. I bought a Mac for that job because they were paying me well and why not, right? I get a new laptop out of it. Over these last two years, I've used it on and off, and I've liked it, right? It's a great machine, but I never really dove into it because I just didn't think I could do everything I needed to do on it. About a month ago, my main driver, which is my HP right here, just basically stopped working. I mean, it was usable, but it was just really taking a long time to do everything and it was infuriating. And so, I was like, I am not going to buy another laptop. I bought this one 2 years ago. This is insane, right? It's not even just the hardware, it's also the software. It was just everything was coming to like this pinnacle point of me breaking. And so, I was like, I'm just going to try the MacBook. Let me just try it. And so I said, "Let me transfer over everything. Let me see what apps I can get to fill in these gaps. " And I started doing it. And I made the switch. And I don't think I'm going to go back. Now, I'm switching over to a 14-in MacBook Pro, which has the M3 chips cuz this is from, I think, 2 or 3 years ago. So, I'm not upgrading to the latest and greatest, but what I've noticed is that I can basically get all of the same apps. May not be 100% of the exact same thing, but I can get basically the same setup. I just had to get a lot of the apps that I was using. Another thing I

noticed, and this is purely hardware, right, is that this laptop is incredibly quiet. Whereas my HBomen always had a fan running. It was always running because it was trying to process what I was doing and it just couldn't keep up. Whereas my Mac has absolutely no problem keeping up with my video editing and my recording and, you know, my AI stuff and all my data stuff. It can keep up with everything very easily. Another thing, and this is just personal to me, is I record stuff on my phone, right? I record shorts and different stuff, and when I had to transfer them, I would have to send them to myself on Google Drive, download them onto my Mac. But now I can just connect to my Mac and drop it off via AirDrop, and it's super seamless and really easy. And that makes my life a lot better. When it comes to coding, I still use VS Code and Git just like I did in my Microsoft machine, and I'm now I'm doing it in a Mac. It's basically the same workflow. And really over the past month or so, I've only noticed a few very small downsides. And one of them I actually kind of have fixed with just an app. And that is when I need to put two screens on one screen at the same time. I have this natural click and it goes on both sides of the computer screen. Whereas in Mac that just is not native to it. But I downloaded an app that does it for me and it kind of fixed that issue. The other big thing is I work in PowerBI for some of my clients as well as just making videos and stuff. And I was like, I'll never be able to do that on a Mac, but I can do that. I just have to use Parallels or I just go into Azure and I use PowerBI in Azure. So, I still have access to PowerBI for my work. Now, it might not be the exact same setup that I had within my Microsoft machine, but it is essentially the same software. And so all these barriers for switching that I've had in the past, I feel like in recent years, they've just gotten a lot better. The one other thing, this is really small, is that within Excel on Mac, which is a Microsoft product on Mac, you just don't get every single functionality, but you get like 98 99% of it. There's just some small differences between the Mac and how it handles Excel and how Microsoft handles Excel. With all that being said, I will make a video on kind of my workflow within Mac and how that compares to Microsoft. the things I like, the things I don't like, because this is a big conversation, especially within, you know, the data analyst community or the data professional community as a whole. So, what you're going to see in future tutorials when I start rolling out a ton of stuff on like DBT and Snowflake and a ton of other tools is that it's going to be now on Mac and it's not going to be on Microsoft. And I'm not going to make two separate tutorials for, you know, each user. I'm just going to make one on Mac. And so for all the Mac people who have been messaging me for years saying it's not exactly the same, now I'm going to be doing it for you. And all the Microsoft people are going to be, you know, getting mad at me because it doesn't look the same on their Microsoft machine. So after many, many years of being a very devout Microsoft fan, I think I'm moving away. I really don't see myself going back. But who knows? Maybe Microsoft is going to come out and just make a much better operating system than Apple and everyone's going to switch and then I'll be like, "Hey, let me try that again. " I just don't see that happening anytime in the near future. With that being said, thank you guys for watching. If you like this video, be sure to like and subscribe, and I will see you in the next video.