![]() With a simple cmd+arrow key, I can move any window from being full screen to one half of my screen and back. Recent converts rejoice, there is finally a way to snap your windows in macOS to distinct parts of your screen. Plus, I don’t need my system tray to do more than hide icons anyway. Yes, there are other apps out there with way more features like Bartender, but those are paid, and Dozer is free (and open-source). It makes for an infinitely cleaner menu bar. All it does is lets you hide those icons behind a simple dot that you can press to see what’s running in the background, and press again to close that away. All icons are out there in the open, cluttering up your menu bar. Well, with macOS, there really isn’t an equivalent baked into the OS. In the Windows taskbar, next to your time, battery, and Wi-Fi icons, is a little system tray icon. ![]() No, what I want to talk about instead is the five free, well mostly free, apps that I’ve found to make the transition from Windows to macOS effectively seamless. It’s not to dunk on Windows or x86, nor is it a tour of how I’ve set up my machine - there are videos a plenty on that. ![]() That being said, having been a Windows user for so long, there were definitely things about that platform that I had taken for granted for so long, that I was genuinely shocked to see weren’t included with macOS right out of the box. On my work provided, spec’d to the max, Surface Laptop 3, the fans would kick in if I had more than five Chrome tabs and Slack open, sounding as if the laptop was going to launch itself into space. This means that I can have upwards of 20 tabs open, be watching a movie on Netflix, and chatting away with friends on Signal and this thing is still cool to the touch. Really, the only chip that could potentially compare is the new 12th gen SoC from Intel, but that’s only now being released in a handful of laptops that cost almost twice as much as the base model Air does, and those offerings look to have significant issues with thermal throttling.Īnd a week into using this machine, I think this might be the best computing experience I’ve had in a long time.īecause of how efficient and tightly integrated the M1 chip is, the Air can operate truly fan-less. Currently, the M1 chipset is more performant than anything on the x86 side of things. So, wanting to try something new, and knowing that I could expense a large chunk of the $1,300 CAD cost via my work benefits, I bit the bullet and picked up the entry-level 2020 M1 MacBook Air. And after nearly 16 years of using strictly Windows machines, I decided it was time to try something else.Īll kidding aside, my partner has been a macOS user for as long as I’ve known her, and she swears by it. While the Surface is a great machine, I’ve been wanting to fully separate my work from my personal life for a while now. However, for the last year and a half now, I’ve primarily been using a Surface Laptop 3 that was provided to me by my company for both work and personal use, relegating my old ASUS to printer duty. All fairly decent laptops for their time (with the exception maybe of the Eee PC perhaps) for their time with less than stellar names. My first real personal laptop was an Acer Aspire 5270z, followed by an ASUS Eee PC 1005PEM (remember netbooks?), and finally, an ASUS UX35CA. I’ve been a Windows user for as long as I can remember.
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