I think most people who haven't used an Apple laptop extensively are not aware that the touchpad actually works, and you do not need to carry an external mouse to use the device comfortably.

The power of gestures is incredible. Managing macOS windows without a touchpad is awful. With a touchpad it is the best.

We have those at my work, and we also have an iMac with a magic trackpad, and several of us have macbook pros.

It's a huge improvement, but it's maybe 75% of the way there. And the points at which it's NOT there are very noticeable and annoying. There's still regularly times where the trackpad just gets totally confused and you can't move the cursor for 1-2 seconds. Mehhhhhh

* Drag-and-drop automation, scripting and workflow tools. I love folder actions.

* Built-in screen recording in QuickTime Player, which also works with attached iOS devices

* Time Machine backups. So easy to use and has saved my bacon over and over

* iMovie and Photos. I don't use the rest of the bundled apps, both those two are essentials for me.

Use the Alt key.

For example, open Word and press Alt to show the keyboard commands. If you want the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press H as shown.

Alternatively, to open the Ribbon and show the keyboard commands for the Home tab, press Alt-H.

So, if you want to center some selected text in Word, press Alt, H, then AC

If you want to insert an image, press Alt, N, P and so on.

The Ribbon makes Office programs much easier to use, so you probably won't want to learn many of these key sequences. However, the ones you already know will almost certainly work.

For the record, I much prefer Windows 10. However, the fact is that Apple doesn't sell any of the hardware I use. It doesn't make a proper tower desktop and it doesn't make a small rotating-screen laptop that doubles as a touch tablet.

Even if I was willing to compromise on hardware, less-functional Apple products would cost 2x to 4x more.

Please note that I still do consider Windows Office the best version nevertheless, but for different reasons.

Of course, there's also personal taste, and you are perfectly entitled to prefer whichever menu system you like. However, the Ribbon won a decade ago, so at this stage, it would probably be more useful to learn how to make better use of it. My Alt tip is just one example.

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/13/table-of...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2008/03/12/the-stor...

[3] https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX08/UX09

Windows has WSL which gets better in the new Creator's update.

>* Touchpad support.

I don't use laptops, but I've heard good things about the touchpad in the Surface line, and Dell XPS.

>* Superb discoverability of power user features with in-app help system and hotkeys displayed in the menu.

Windows has had hotkeys in menus as long as I can remember. I know they where there in 3.1. If you press Alt in Explorer you'll get overlays with hotkeys over the buttons and menus.

>* A consistent menu system.

I'm guessing you mean that the ribbon is inconsistent. Most programs use the regular menus, and the ribbon is just a glorified toolbar with tabs. I don't see the big deal.

>* Powerful and system wide screenshots.

Windows 10 has Win+Print screen to save fullscreen screenshots as a file. For more control, there's the snipping tool that's been included for years now.

>* Cmd-C / V work everywhere, including the Terminal.

Ctrl+C/V works in Windows terminal too.

>* Very good terminal with good color schemes, tabs, unicode and even emoji support.

I usually use ConEmu. I just tested, it does support emoji, but I don't see the point. I just tried "mkdir " (edit: seems like HN eats my emoji, but that's supposed to be a directory with an emoji in the name), and it worked as expected. If I use the built in terminal in VSCode it even looks nice, with colors, but it's just two blank rectangles in both cmd and powershell.

The built in terminal supports 24-bit color now though: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/09/22/24-b...

If you mean Command Prompt by "Windows Terminal", this is not the case (if not, I'd really like to know what "Windows Terminal" is - I use Command Prompt for DOS/Windows things and Kitty for *nix related things). At least I have had to turn it on explicitly in the Command Prompt options (quick edit mode), and it's one of the first things I do on a Windows machine after setup.

alt key in windows does nowhere near what the help on macs does. you're looking for a command or forgot where it was in the menu or want some documentation -> open up help, type a query in the unified search and you're presented with docs as well as commands. Highlighting a command shows you the full path in the menu by opening it up and now you can even sed the hotkey. That's what I mean with discoverability. Every provrammer who uses GUIs should have a look at how that works, I consider that mandatory homework.

> screenshots

Obviously windows has screenshots, but you overlooked the word powerful. MacOS has all the features of the snipping tool right there on system wide hotkeys, no need to open up an app first - including delayed shots and area selections. It's not a big deal, but it saves enough time that it's a total no brainer for me to provide screenshots fo whatever question someone has (even when it's just a distraction from my actual task) while on Windows it takes a crucial 10-15 secs longer to do the same per shot and would disrupt my workflow.

> WSL / Terminal

I do acknowledge that things are getting better there and this is a great development - if/when it gets there I'll consider windows among my primary PC choices again.

Btw. it's telling that Windows-only users always overlook my point about the registry in these discussions. I use all three desktops and I can tell you, not having a central registry in an OS is a huge productivity win. With windows I spend days every 2 years getting a fresh state again while on Mac I can just copy over the file system (using automated tools that support thunderbolt cables, copy half a TB in 30min and are again built in) and start working after a coffee break. Yes there's imaging in Windows, but then you have to regularly keep those up to date and in the end you spend even more time if you only manage a handful of PCs.

And I say this as Mac user.

Btw. in what way is NTFS ahead of APFS?

The MFT is very helpful in that it is on the disk itself, as opposed to Apple's solution of getting a separate utility to index the disk (Spotlight) and generating a giant database file on the filesystem in your hidden Spotlight-V100 directory. Spotlight is on the filesystem, not IN the filesystem.

The NTFS page on Wikipedia lists all of the wonderful features of NTFS. Also Windows Internals 6 details some in wonderous detail.

In any case, APFS is far better than HFS+ (which has to flip all metadata's endianness as it is stored in big-endian format). It also has single-threaded access to this metadata, from what I recall. John Siracusa's review 6 years ago of OSX 10.7 Lion detailed the poor state of HFS+: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/

Makes for sad reading.

To be fair, the built in Terminal.app sucks, you have to get iTerm2, which is a 3rd-party app, but at least it's not another $40 replacement app that shouldn't suck by default, (the same cannot be said for Finder and its replacements).

That said, almost identical behaviour can be had in fullscreen with two Terminal windows sharing a full screen desktop space.

I also enjoy having my terminal be a slightly-transparent black rectangular slate, with no title bars, corner curving, etc., but that's purely preference and has no impact on functionality.

[1] https://www.iterm2.com/features.html