Why I ditched my Apple MacBook and went back to Windows

I am the owner of a heterogeneous IT landscape. Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux and even the good old Symbian are all still in the house and I'm perfectly fine with that.

About three years ago I bought my first MacBook Pro and I was assuming I would be very happy with it. Sure, it would take a bit of time to get used to the specifics of OSX but hey, that would make it just a bit more interesting.

And coming from a corporate laptop running Windows XP, completely bogged down by all the crapware running on it and suffering from the dreaded 'things are getting slower and slooower and slooooower' Windows problem, I was delighted by the speed and stability of OSX.

Rebooting? (Hardly) no need for it. Waking up? Almost instantly. Searching: Spectacularly useful and responsive. Hardware: Rock solid.

And still, after a while I noticed I still didn't feel entirely comfortable with it, which was strange given the wide range of OSes I am usually exposed to. The most used part of the OS is the interface to the file system, and the Finder turned out to be a big disappointment. It works clumsy, and is really no match for the Windows counterpart. Cutting and pasting a file? Forget about it (I know, you can buy an extension, but still). Create a new file when you have navigated to a particular directory? Nope. Minor things, but simply doesn't help in the overall experience.

The other thing I am using a lot (and who isn't?) is Office. I'd really liked to use something like Open Office, but given the fact that 99.99% of the world is using Microsoft Office that's what I settled with, trying to avoid conversion problems. Well, Office on the Mac is really rubbish when you compare it to the Windows counterpart. Obviously this is not Apple's fault, but still: it doesn't help getting comfortable on it.

Maximizing a screen: let OSX decide how big is big enough? Except that it doesn't work properly. (I know, I didn't upgrade from 10.6 and things were supposed to be better after that).

Making a print screen of a Windows: Command+Shift+4, then spacebar, then click a window. Are you kidding me? This is supposed to be simple and intuitive? I can go on, but I think you get the point.

But OSX is great as a development box, as it has SVN, SSH, Apache and all these kind of things out of the box. Yeah, I like the bash shell, and having native access to SSH but this is pretty much compensated by a lack of tools which are available on Windows only, like Tortoise SVN and VMWare Player (much better than VirtualBox). And the fact that if you sometimes need Windows only tools (e.g. SQL Server, Enterprise Architect and so on) which obviously requires a Virtual Machine on OSX, while it wouldn't on a Windows box doesn't help either.

After having worked only on my MacBook for almost three years, I started working on an assignment and got a Windows desktop which was (still) fast, running MS Office and the likes. And after a few weeks, using  my laptop and this Windows desktop sort of side by side, I just couldn't do anything than admit: I simply like Windows better. OSX is rock solid but is still not there yet from a user experience perspective. And that's not only me, since I spoke the unspeakable, I ran into quite a few people that had to admit that they were struggling with their shiny MacBooks and didn't like it either.

So that's why I ended up back in the Windows world. I bought myself a new, flashy ultrabook and I am delighted that I'm rid of OSX. I do miss the hardware though, the three year old MacBook pro is still an excellent piece of equipment, outshining this new (Asus) ultrabook in many ways (as a matter of fact I am typing this on my MacBook running Windows 7 with bootcamp).

If a MacBook would ship natively with Windows, that would be my option, but as this never will happen I don't see myself buying a new MacBook anytime soon. Windows it is then, just need to find a way to keep it fast.