macOS
Moving to a MacBook Pro: What I Liked and What Took Time to Get Used To
Years of Windows muscle memory fought me for weeks. The Unix-based terminal, Homebrew, and battery life that lasts a full day are what actually won me over.
I'd only ever used Windows before I switched to a MacBook Pro. Every computer I'd touched ran Windows 10 or 11, and my whole mental model of using a computer was built around File Explorer, Ctrl+C, and Command Prompt. Switching felt like a real risk at the time, not just a preference.
The first weeks fought my muscle memory
Years of Windows habits actively worked against me at first. I kept hitting Ctrl+C out of habit and wondering why nothing pasted, or reaching for a shortcut that snapped windows to the corner of the screen and finding nothing happened, because macOS doesn't do that by default. Finder took a while to click too. I kept looking for a C: drive that didn't exist, before it clicked that everything on a Unix-based system runs from a single root instead.
What eventually won me over
The terminal is what changed my mind first. It's built in and Unix-based, so the commands I needed for git and other command-line tools just worked, without setting up WSL or a virtual machine the way a lot of the Windows-based tutorials assumed I'd need to. Homebrew made installing anything simpler too, one command in the terminal instead of hunting down an installer and clicking through it manually. The battery life lasted through a full day in a way none of my Windows laptops ever had, and I stopped bringing a charger with me most days.
What actually helped the adjustment
Installing Rectangle got window snapping back, which fixed the one habit I missed the most from Windows. Past that, most of the adjustment was just time and repetition, doing the same shortcuts wrong enough times that the new ones finally stuck. I still use Rider as my main IDE on it now, and it runs well on Apple Silicon without any extra setup.
Looking back
The first couple of weeks were frustrating, closer to relearning how to use a computer than adjusting to a new laptop. Once that period was over, the Unix-based terminal and not having to babysit a charger all day were the two things I ended up caring about most.