I frequently leave my trusty iPhone when a new Android phone pops up. I ditch my iPad and grab the latest Android model. I ditch my Mac when a sexy new Surface product is released. However, I keep coming back to the Mac/iOS world every time. Most recently, I switched my phone to a Google Pixel XL and swapped the 2015 rMBP 15" and iPad combo for a Surface Book. Here is what caused me to quickly come crawling back to Mac.
1) The trackpad - the Surface Book has a phenomenal trackpad complete with gestures that actually work and all. However, there is one thing that the Mac does that Windows has NEVER been able to master. It's the algorithm of acceleration versus accuracy of the mouse pointer. Drag your finger slowly across the entire trackpad and the cursor will move from one edge to about a 1/3 of the way across the screen. Swipe quickly across the trackpad from edge to edge, and the cursor will will cover the entire width of the screen. This allows me to quickly move the cursor to the general area I need it to be, then seamlessly switch to more fine control, precise mode when I need to click on a small item on the screen all without having to change how I am moving my finger on the trackpad. On windows, the correlation between trackpad movement and screen cursor movement is directly one to one. I have used the Dell XPS 13, all the Yoga laptops, the Surface Pro, the Surface Book and many others. None got this right. The closest anyone every got was the Thinkpad Pointing Stick (not the trackpad). This little, seemingly trivial, change makes all the difference for me.
2) iMessages/Facetime/Phone integration - I love being able to reply to text messages from my Mac. With text/SMS forwarding, I can reply to ALL text messages from the Mac, iPad and iPhone interchangeably. When a normal phone call comes in, I can answer it from my Mac, from my iPad, from my Apple Watch or from the phone itself. It just simply works every single time. It frees me from being tethered to my phone at all times. I can leave it on the charger and move freely throughout the home without fear of missing an important call or text.
3) Standby Battery Life- this has improved greatly over the years with Windows but there is something so satisfying about pulling my laptop out of my bag after a long weekend of zero user to see it has dropped from 100% to 98%. I could never achieve this with the Surface Book. The best I ever got was a 15-20% drop. And that was with turning off all the Connected Standby nonsense and putting it into hibernate mode.
4) Safari bookmark/tab syncing - I know Chrome does this too but then I'd have to use Chrome on my phone which I don't like as much as Safari. And I'm not switching from iPhone to Android.
5) OpemEMU - I don't do any gaming anymore aside from a quick game of 8 Ball Pool on my phone but, on the Mac, I love playing some old school games via emulation. On Windows, I have to install several different emulator software packages to play NES, SNES, Genesis, etc. On the Mac, I simply install OpenEMU and pop in my ROM's. One app that emulates all of my different consoles in a sweet looking package. It makes the world of emulation much easier.
I am sure there are more but these are the top five that pop to mind when I think about the pains I felt when I left the Mac platform. That isn't to say Windows doesn't have its strengths. There are MANY! But these few items outweigh the strengths as these are all features and strengths that I use very regularly. I don't want to sacrifice things I benefit from and utilize daily (see list above) for strengths of Windows that I actually don't use (like the Surface Pen, detachable tablet and the touchscreen of the Surface Book).
