The problem with MacOS is that much of its refinements for power users are so different from Windows (and Linux desktops modeled after it), that people don't expect they can do things the easy way.
Suppose you have a document open. You want to attach it to an email you started writing. In MacOS, you drag the icon from the window's title bar into the email. That's it. No need to browse to the same thing you already have on the screen, because your desktop is a set of objects you interact with... Not a window manager.
If you want to open a file browser, you can right click the title bar on any document, and it will give you a breadcrumb of all the parent directories.
If you move a document you have open in an application, the application will notice, and save further changes to that new location too when you go back to it and press cmd-S.
These are just a few little things in one aspect of the OS. But macOS is full of them. Like consistent keyboard shortcuts.
Or multi touch gestures that act while you perform them, not just trigger an action after. There is a commitment to making the computer work like it should, instead of making the human adapt.
Meanwhile in Windows land, even the official apps can't figure out how they want to look or how they want to work. And this is what Linux desktops based themselves on.
There are of course signs that Apple has also lost its magic, and that a new generation raised on touch and web and cloud has no idea how this stuff works. The idea that you can e.g. scroll casually through a decade worth of emails with one flick, offline, is a pipe dream in Gmail land. It boggles my mind that basic conveniences like sortable, resizable and customizable tables are now a luxury in many apps.
But there still is an insane amount of design thought that went into macOS, and everyone else is years behind. That's just a fact.
Suppose you have a document open. You want to attach it to an email you started writing. In MacOS, you drag the icon from the window's title bar into the email. That's it. No need to browse to the same thing you already have on the screen, because your desktop is a set of objects you interact with... Not a window manager.
If you want to open a file browser, you can right click the title bar on any document, and it will give you a breadcrumb of all the parent directories.
If you move a document you have open in an application, the application will notice, and save further changes to that new location too when you go back to it and press cmd-S.
These are just a few little things in one aspect of the OS. But macOS is full of them. Like consistent keyboard shortcuts.
Or multi touch gestures that act while you perform them, not just trigger an action after. There is a commitment to making the computer work like it should, instead of making the human adapt.
Meanwhile in Windows land, even the official apps can't figure out how they want to look or how they want to work. And this is what Linux desktops based themselves on.
There are of course signs that Apple has also lost its magic, and that a new generation raised on touch and web and cloud has no idea how this stuff works. The idea that you can e.g. scroll casually through a decade worth of emails with one flick, offline, is a pipe dream in Gmail land. It boggles my mind that basic conveniences like sortable, resizable and customizable tables are now a luxury in many apps.
But there still is an insane amount of design thought that went into macOS, and everyone else is years behind. That's just a fact.