 Welcome to the long-awaited, I hope, part three of I Switched to the iMac, the software experience. I'll still be doing at least one more look at the hardware with a focus on thermal throttling and gaming performance of the R9 295X mobile GPU, but this is really the meat and potatoes of what it was like for me as a long time Windows-only guy to use a Mac for over a month as my daily driver. It is by no means comprehensive, I used the machine like I'd expect a mostly normal person to do it without registry edits and add-ons up the wazoo, but I feel like it gave me a good feel for what the Mac experience is supposed to be like, and I'm hoping to get that across to you guys, so here we go. The Cooler Master Neptune 240M features an exclusive pump design and their new Silencio fans to provide impressive near-silent performance. Click now to learn more. Let's jump right in, shall we? Instead of 9night.com, I used GetMac apps, which generates a string of text you paste into terminal.app that installs all your stuff for you, and then started setting up all my network shares and whatnot. Then I spent a fair bit of time in the system preferences menu, discovering really cool stuff, like the ability to log into my Gmail and social media accounts within the OS using an application-specific password, just like on a phone, to effortlessly set up the messaging client for my Hangouts chat, though it was hard to use because my messages sent through other devices wouldn't show up on the Mac, the default email client so that notifications popped up on my desktop just like that, and the calendar, so all the stuff I need to do is at my fingertips. And struggling to understand some of the truly asinine stuff, like the inability to disable scroll wheel acceleration, something that makes using a physical wheel mouse extremely unpleasant in OS X Yosemite, and that ultimately, along with the very convenient two-fingered swipes to change spaces or virtual desktops, forced me to keep using the phenomenally unergonomic Magic Mouse, although for a couple bucks you can fix that with a third-party application, I am told. Expose, now called Mission Control, access is another thing that I changed. By default, you reach it by double two-finger tapping the mouse, very unnatural and obviously a touchpad design gesture, or by moving the mouse to any of the four corners of the screen, but I found myself doing that accidentally pretty often, so I was extremely pleased to find that on each corner, this functionality can be disabled outright, or it can even be reassigned to other useful things like peek at the desktop, put the display to sleep, and open up Launchpad. Okay, mostly useful. Microsoft deserves the crap that we gave them over the charms menu, replacing functionality that used to be in Start, but it amazes me that they got so much flack for modern UI when Apple seems to have completely snuck under the radar with Launchpad. How is it different, except that it's icons instead of live tiles? It's worse. It's okay though, because just like on Windows, you never have to use it. I kept all my frequently used stuff in the dock, and then for everything else, Apple plus Spacebar brings up Spotlight. Did I say Apple? I think I meant Command. Whatever, you get the point. And Spotlight, whose ability to guess what you were looking for and push the more relevant results to the top, is worlds ahead of Windows' built-in search functionality that has improved to the point where it actually returns results for, for example, Windows Update or Uninstall, but still presents them in no particular order. But before the Mac users start nodding their heads knowingly about how silly Windows is, there is some boneheaded and confusing Mac stuff too, especially if you haven't used OS X before. While I was in Preferences trying to learn keyboard shortcuts and turn on Repeat for letters when I hold them down, I still couldn't figure out what was going on without doing some Googling. I mean, the symbol for Alt slash Option and Control are confusing as heck, and Brightness Control is F14 and F15. I mean, where are those? And while we're at it, in Preferences, why are the keyboard shortcuts for Mission Control within Keyboard, but not within the Mission Control menu when the mouse gestures for Mission Control are within Mission Control and not within Mouse? Ah! And why do I need a third-party plug-in to see favicons in my Safari tabs? How am I supposed to know what's what? Chrome me up, Scotty. But there's also some usability stuff that made the Mac a total pleasure to use. Having the option when you reboot to open all your crap when you log back in is freaking awesome. Yay for little time savers. Spaces is awesome and supernatural to use. Not as good as dual monitors or an ultra-wide, but a surprisingly excellent compromise as a space saver. And the way OS X manages updates is just nicer than Windows. I can ignore it without being bothered if I want, but there's no need to because I can tell it to do it automatically when I know I won't be working, and thanks to OS X's ability to open up everything I was doing when I logged back in, I know I won't miss a beat. I also like that downloads go to a handy little dedicated manager pop-up on the taskbar, excuse me, dock, instead of being managed within each browser or forcing me to dig through explorer, excuse me, sorry, finder to track them down, but that leads well into what I think is my biggest OS X complaint. It is no wonder to me that Apple spent so much time making Spotlight awesome because finder is horrendous. Here are some complaints about it in no particular order. Sort by is system-wide instead of folder by folder, so it's almost never right when I open a particular folder to help me find the most relevant items at the top. Instead of having a root directory for each drive, internal storage all just gets piled together. I mean, no wonder Mac people buy all these external Thunderbolt drives to manage their files. They have no way of knowing what's where. There's legitimately no way to force refresh the contents of a folder because it should be automatic, which is great, except when it doesn't work and you wait around for 15 minutes for the file to show up, there are only two thumbnail sizes, and they're buried in some submenu and again must be changed finder-wide. You can't easily cut and paste files and folders. Yeah, seriously, Windows people watching this, Mac people need to install a plugin or must use keyboard shortcuts to cut paste. And finally, though this is a Windows complaint too these days, why is up directory missing? Why do I need to use the functionally sometimes the same back button or breadcrumbs or a drop down for this? Can we please bring that back? And there are other usability things that irk me too. Picture importing versus being allowed to just manage my videos and images with clearly thumbnail directories and drag and drop would be fine if I wasn't usually in a hurry when I was doing it. And I guess the same can be said for window management. It's fine, but it just takes longer. Full screening things takes a dog's age for some reason and is more like theater mode in a media player than maximize on Windows. Arrow snap like functionality can be added with hyperdoc, but until you do that, it's basically back to Windows XP style resizing and dragging around. And another frustrating thing for me anyway is managing multiple windows within a single application. Left clicking just vomits them all over your screen where you left them and selecting a particular one lacks a graphical preview. So you're stuck just selecting from a list which I find slower and less intuitive. I really do like the word processor pages though. Aside from the cludginess of my Windows PC using coworkers needing to rename the dot pages files to dot zip manually in order to open them whenever I forget to export a separate copy for them in dot doc, I ended up really liking it. Numbers feels like a bit of a bad joke compared to Excel and Keynote I honestly just didn't use, but pages is a pleasure to write in and I legitimately understand why writers might use Macs in order just to have it. Especially compared to Office for Mac. Yuck. The only positive thing I can say about Office for Mac is thank goodness I didn't buy it. I installed it using one of my five Office 365 installs, promptly de-licensed it and installed Parallels with Windows 8 on it so I could use Office 2013 instead. Parallels by the way is an awesome crutch for those looking to make the switch to Mac because it came in handy so many times whether I couldn't find a Mac version of an application or even just for little stupid things like installing the drivers to configure a gaming mouse and you know get the lights and the buttons programmed correctly before then switching it back to OS X. Now I feel like I could talk pros and cons for another probably 15 minutes here, but this is YouTube and I'm likely already pushing the limits of the general audience's attention span so I'm going to try and wrap things up here. There was some stuff about using a Mac for a month that drove me nuts. Changing the back shortcut in Finder and Safari from command open bracket to something faster requires a registry edit. The position of the command key for my commonly used keyboard shortcuts like copy and paste is something I've pretty much gotten used to now but still find extremely uncomfortable and little things like middle clicking to enable mouse scrolling requires a $14 app called Smart Scroll and I'll be damned if I'm buying that instead of a dozen chocolate bars. But there were things I liked. Some first party app store stuff like Twitter is awesome compared to the awful modern UI stuff on Windows 8. Add it in font installation is way better you just double click it instead of dragging it to the fonts folder which is completely unintuitive on Windows. The inclusion of functional productivity software like Pages is great instead of expecting you to buy it separately and Parallels' excellent performance with Windows applications feels very best of both worlds. But none of this was enough to even begin to tempt me to switch. Not because Windows is amazing and perfect, because it's not, but because it's fine and the Mac experience was also just fine. Not enough for me to spend $3000 on this machine. The high resolution display is beautiful but the unexceptional GPU driving it causes it to chug all the time and one of the features that I thought would actually be like a killer app. Continuity, being able to take phone calls and texts from your iPhone on the Mac honestly left a lot to be desired mostly due to the stunningly poor voice quality on the other end of the conversation thanks to the computer's top mounted microphone. What were they thinking? So I guess that's it for me then. Maybe in another 15 years I'll take another run at the Mac but by then I suspect even more of what I do will be browser based and the difference between Windows, Mac or heck even Chrome OS or Linux based machines will be even less, eliminating more of the justification that exists today for buying expensive computers just for the sake of the OS they run. Speaking of, oh I don't know, I'll just pick a random word from the last paragraph. Let's say browsers. Our sponsor for today's episode is iFixit. We, I hope, all know about their awesome picture guides over on iFixit.com that can help with difficult device repairs and upgrades for phones, tablets and even all in one computers just like this one. But did you know about their awesome line of pro tools? 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