Yeah, I always hear "Mac is great for writers/artists/video editors/etc" but I never have been able to find out exactly why.
Mac OS doesn't bother users with alerts and notifications [0]. There is no busy start menu with distracting ads and Apple doesn't push ...gems... such as Candy Crush to everyone's computers without asking.
It just quietly works and lets users focus on their jobs.
Windows has come a long way but they're not there yet. For people who aren't interested in tinkering with technology, spending a bit more to get a nicer experience is a no-brainer.
[0] except for the software update prompts
I could go into details, but the audio APIs for Windows and Linux were complete hot garbage in the 1990s and 2000s. Not so big a deal for games or web browsing but a pain in the ass for audio production.
In the same era, the software for working with video on the Mac was just miles better. QuickTime was really amazing. Everything was super editable. If you had iMovie and iDVD you could easily create an amateur movie and hand people DVDs. Famously, there’s an email from Bill Gates in 2003 where he just rips into the terrible experience he had with Windows Movie Maker.
Desktop publishing is a similar story. Installing fonts and working with printers sucked on Windows in an era when it was super easy on the Mac. The desktop publishing apps on Mac had a much better UI when it came to integration. You could just drag and drop images however you wanted between applications and it just worked.
This is no longer true but people still remember it.
Scrivener and Microsoft Word are my primary tools. There is no Scrivener for linux and there is no acceptable alternative for native MS Word when it comes to working with publishers. That means macOS or Windows.
Here is why I use macOS over Windows:
- Windows version of Scrivener is missing a lot of features, some that I frequently use. (The Mac version of Word is also missing features, but not critical ones.)
- OS-integrated dictionary (three finger tap)
- OS-integrated dictation (tap fn twice to start, tap fn to stop) I use this to speak words I can't remember how to spell. I don't know if Dragon on Windows is usable like this.
- Preview (tap spacebar when any file is selected)
- OS configurable keyboard shortcuts. Any item in any application's menu bar can have a custom keyboard shortcut. I have green, red, and blue highlighting in Scrivener tied to keyboard shortcuts. This is a critical part of my editing workflow.
- Time Machine backup. Easy, seamless backup. If my computer goes down, I can be fully up and running on any Mac hardware with Catalina in two hours. I started using Time Machine in 2008. Since then, every new machine has been restored from a backup of an old one. I've never started with a clean Mac.
- Reliability. Only my linux servers have better uptime. Every single Mac I have is more reliable than any windows machine I've worked with.
- It Just Works. Actually, no it doesn't. There's fewer bugs but when you hit them, they are absolutely infuriating to workaround.
- Unix terminal. Built in to the operating system. Homebrew adds okay package management on top of that.
- Built in apps. macOS comes with significantly better default applications than Windows does. Preview alone is a thousand times better than anything I've seen on windows.
- App install/removal. Almost every Mac application uses one of three install methods. App store, disk image, or package. Removing an application is as simple as deleting the executable from /Applications. If you want the configuration gone too, you can remove its associated folders from /Library and ~/Library.
If I had to pick one thing, it would be Time Machine. It's easy to setup and forget it's there until you need it. Nothing else has saved me so much time and aggravation. It's allow me to effectively work on the same machine for twelve years while periodically upgrading the hardware and operating system.