You can make the dock any size, or hide it, and you can hide the top menu bar if you don't like it.
I've got a Surface laptop supplied by work, and it's an absolute turd of a machine. Probably not the highest spec, but the battery lasts 5-6 hours and the trackpad is nasty - too stiff to press at the top where the hinge is. Screen is very high res though.
The dock doesn't go all the way to the bottom now, Apple has it floating, which is stupid, it also doesn't cover left to right like the windows taskbar, I don't like it. I also hate the menu bar at the top always and needed to fully close each application. Having - enlarge - X on the left is fine, no problem with that. I hate the keyboard shortcut stuff that it's so different from PC. Comman, option, control and the fn key. I hate that Mac doesn't have the snap to the corner, left side, right side, top of screen to go full screen easiness like Windows does. Sure I like iMovie and photobooth on Mac, but that's it. I just don't like the environment of Mac anymore at all. It's disturbing, it's odd, it's not as easy to use as Windows is. It's overall confusing. Windows is just a lot easier to me.
OMFG. I already went over this earlier in this post. Yeah a Mac is a PC. Personal Computer. You know people just say Mac vs PC as it's a shorter way of saying Mac vs Windows. And again I already said that earlier in this post.
I'm still using a laptop from 2012.
Windows Phone Link is indeed terrible. It might even somehow be worse for messaging than the Xbox app was. Neither one of those would consistently deliver or receive messages. It's fucking crazy.
It just depends on what you're most used to. For me, after 25 years using a Mac I find it annoying when I close what I think is a window on PC and the whole application disappears.
Well that's vendor lock-in for you. WhatsApp and Telegram work well.
Apple was going to have a deal with Dell back then. But Micheal Dell said to Steve Jobs we would just get rid of it, there is no use for it. But for myself I've switched between the iMac M3 and the HP computer I have about 3 freaking times now. Can you imagine all the re-setting up all that stuff? It takes a while and every time takes about 15 to 20 minutes to do all that unpackaging, repackaging. But overall I've learned that I'm a basic Windows user and I do love some of the Mac applications. So therefor I like both of course. So the only possible way to run both is to keep my iMac M3 and buy Parallels and run Windows 11 Pro ARM version on it. I'm a basic user, I use consoles for gaming, I just never liked gaming on PC because of all the install stuff and the changing graphics stuff. So overall I will finally finally be good and done with it all when I buy Parallels. I use to run bootcamp with Intel Macs, and I always ran Mac and Windows as well back then when Apple was on Intel. So now I can just go back to my old self and run Windows on Mac with Parallels. That's it, that way I don't have to go back and forth at all anymore. Like I said I'm just a basic user, so I won't have any trouble with Windows 11 Pro ARM version at all. In fact I already ran a 14 day trial of Parallels 19 a month ago and I don't have any problems or slow downs on my iMac M3 with 8GB ram and 256GB SSD. Overall parallels with Windows 11 only uses about 3GB of ram which leaves Mac with 5GB of ram and it worked great, no slow downs at all for me.
So have you learned OpenGL and the newest platform Vulkan? For Windows it's DirectX of course. There's also GNM and GNMX I have heard of that UNIX FreeBSD, Orbis OS that Sony uses on PS4 and PS5, and open to Linux and Windows as well. So do you know all of graphics design programs or just one of them?
I like consoles more for ease of use and 100% controller support. On PC a lot of games don't have controller support and Steam has a program to use to put in keyboard inputs into a controller, but it's still a hassle to do anyway. Therefore I only game on consoles because of the super ease of use.
I find the controller support to go both ways. Sometimes it can be a pain, and one solution doesn't cover all bases if you want to do more advanced stuff. What's worse is that earlier this year some updates completely broke my DS4's ability to work wirelessly and I've not been able to fix it even with a clean install. I'm back to either wired or alternatives.
The 2 years old or older ones are cheaper like $250 which is great. But it's still old. The Mac Mini is also very affordable at $500 now. I think everything else is way skyrocketed over priced from Apple. But hey what do you know, I still have and am using right now the iMac M3 $1500 model with the 4 USB-C ports on the back. I like Apple and will continue to use them until I can't afford them anymore. I have Parallels 19 and Windows 11 Pro ARM right now on the Mac as well. So therefore I no longer have any ordeal to buy anything anymore. Other than video games and food and rent of course.
David B
If I may, and I hope you don't mind me saying this, I used to buy a lot of stuff I didn't need and would regularly have debt on a credit card or an overdraft.
I can tell you from working with software engineers of many kinds--and on the cutting edge in particular (generative AI etc)--that Mac dominates high-end engineering of many kinds. There are obviously still PC niches as well, but it's extremely inaccurate to say that Mac is only used in design-adjacent work. Not at all, by a mile.
Indeed, I also work in heavy data/AI engineering and Macs are everywhere. The one advantage of a PC (which you also also hint at) is to set up a local PC with a high-end GPU on your network and just connect to that remotely for AI tasks; but increasingly, using the M3 chip for local prototyping works quite well and then deploying to TPUs when it's time for real heavy processing.
I just sold the iMac M3 I had. I bought it last year. I just hate the whole menu bar, dock, command + Q to quit an app or menu bar name of app, drop down menu quit, the way the settings look, no snaping for the windows like in Windows OS. So now I have Dell Inspiron All in One with Intel core i7 13th gen 10 cores CPU, 32GB ram, 1TB NVME SSD, and Nvidia MX 550. Like I said before, I'm not a PC gamer, it just isn't my way, gaming is always a console thing and I've always been loyal to Sony in TVs and consoles.
Amen.
