5 key features that locked me into macOS

15 min readDec 21, 2023

I made many questionable decisions this year, chief of which was another sizeable “investment” in a MacBook (a 16-inch, 512 GB Pro model from the M2-Series released earlier in 2023).

I call it a questionable decision because Macs, and most Apple devices in general, are indisputably expensive (and arguably overpriced) products.

However, “expensive” takes on a new meaning depending on the context.

For instance, it is possible that to a thriving mid-career software engineer looking for a formidable workstation and armed with some credit payment plan of sorts, a Mac of the baseline specs I listed earlier is a sizeable but not unrealistic purchase to make.

But I’m none of those things.

In fact, where I come from, Apple devices are dead-centre in the catalogue of ostentatious goods only seen to be reasonable to the indulgent, reckless, or superficial poseurs in society (just like everywhere else right? I guess we’re all not so different).

But I think MacBooks are great.

Sure, the M-series chips are remarkable. Game-changing. A 22-hour battery life (for someone who lives in a country where day-long blackouts are as common as the blue sky) is a gem. And yes, MacBooks are among some of the most powerful, durable laptops you can get in every price category on the market.

But really, I’d be lying if I said I bought a Mac for the chip, the battery, or the raw power. Support for these chips outside of native and a select few professional software is still limited in many ways. And the M series chips are a recent development — maybe someone somewhere in the last two-three years has fallen in love with Macs because of them, but I would be dishonest to put myself in that category of users.

So, what am I really doing buying a Mac again?

I had a chance to get into a cheaper ecosystem with a nice specced out unit and more support for software and more creative options and — Yet I chose this grind all over again.

Why?

Well, obviously because I’m reckless, indulgent and superficial.

And also for the usual reasons — build quality, great native apps, ecosystem tax, screen size, workload (hence the Pro version) — they all matter.

But I think the main reason was probably macOS.

Now, there’s a lot of stuff I hate about MacOS (sometimes I still find myself pining for a friendlier file manager and elite window management).

But there’s a lot of stuff that I love.

And while I always keep an eye open for the latest Windows updates (Co-Pilot sounds so good on paper to be frank), I still don’t regret sticking it up for the Mac for the following simple, no-big-deal features.

Lookup

I would say the Lookup feature was an early comfort when I switched to MacOS.

Now, I don’t know if this feature has come to Windows yet, but at the time I left (Windows 10), I couldn’t just tap the spacebar when my highlight cursor was on a file or document and have it do this:

Simply tapping the spacebar of my device opens up the file for me to see what it is without actually launching the file in a file managing application, word processor or video player. Really quick way to scan through documents.

This feature has probably saved me a ton of bare hours already, especially when you’re trying to open unnamed files or trying to see which version of which document is the most updated kind without having to check the file properties or something. Also, sometimes I play entire videos through the lookup window without opening a video player.

But this is the part where the Lookup really shines.

Sometimes, when I want to illustrate an article or work on a design, I download photos. These photos very often, however, need editing before they can be used — whether minor work like cropping to fit the right aspect ratio or additional annotation for illustrative purposes — like drawing arrows and writing text here and there.

On MacOS, I can do all that right from Preview.

When my highlight cursor is on a photo, I tap the spacebar, which “opens” the photo up in a preview window, and the first button from the left in the top right corner is an edit button. When I tap it, it brings up a bunch of tools, which I can use to add text, arrows, drawings, sign, redact, crop — all without opening any photo or document editor. And because of another feature that I’ll be mentioning in more detail later, I can even tap a button that lets the photos show up on my phone for additional editing that might not have been achievable from the laptop.

Here’s a photo describing what I wrote earlier. Here, I tapped the spacebar to bring up the Lookup of the image my cursor was on. Then I clicked the edit button in the lookup view and started adjusting the image.

Like I shared earlier, I used the continuity feature to continue editing the image from my Mac on my iPhone, all without having to “Airdop” the picture to myself or even send it via email.

It’s a neat feature.

My favourite application of the lookup feature is for words or finding synonyms of words. I just hover over the particular word, force click on my touchpad (which is basically like a harder press than a normal touchpad click), and it pops up a dictionary view like so:

Force-clicking on a word (basically pressing hard on your trackpad) opens a lookup view showing dictionary results, wikipedia results and even other Siri suggestions

From here, I can see the meaning of the word and also view a thesaurus to find synonyms of the word. This has become somewhat invaluable for a user like me — a writer who works and reads on the Mac daily.

It works almost universally on the Mac (the only set of apps I’ve used so far where looking up words like this isn’t enabled is the Microsoft Office Suite).

Lookup also works in other cases too. Force-clicking a link opens a large preview of the webpage it links to, and so on.

Spotlight

When I first started using Spotlight, I admit that it felt far inferior to the start button on Windows. Over time, though, it grew on me, and it’s only gotten better ever since. First off, it became a faster way to find documents or images, or anything really, than the start button was for me. Of course, Windows really brought a lot of innovation to that button over the years (Windows 11’s search taskbar looks a lot like spotlight now even), but at some point, it became a bit distracting. But perhaps that’s just a personal taste issue.

Also, Lookup works in Spotlight.

Say I search up a phrase, and it has multiple results across multiple formats. I can preview every one of them without opening them. I just have to use my move cursor to scroll down to the result in question and tap the space bar. It opens a lookup version of the results, where I can scroll through even folders and websites. For example.

This is a lookup demonstration in Spotlight. I just searched up the word “Medium”, and it brought out results across web, mail, photos and so on. Too look up the results, I just scroll to the particular result and tap the space bar, which opens up the content without launching the file.

Continuity

The continuity feature is just one of those “magical” (bleh) features that ties into most of the other things that I have grown accustomed to on MacOS.

For instance, I particularly enjoy this on Notes.

Sure, using a Google Doc probably solves this pretty well too, but I’ve been using Notes for nearly a decade now, and I enjoy the comfort of having my entire collection of writings available everywhere I’m at.

Sometimes I’m writing something on my laptop, and I have to run an errand and leave the bulk behind. So on my way I just open my phone app and continue writing from the last comma I stopped at. The synchronisation is almost seamless, to the extent that if you leave the notes app on your laptop open and you type on the notes app on your phone, you can literally see it update on a word-by-word basis in real-time.

Okay, maybe not word by word. But certainly line by line.

Continuity also lets me use my phone to sign documents on my Mac and use my Camera on my iPhone as a webcam for my laptop, etc.

There’s even a cool continuity feature where your phone camera uses its ultrawide lens to give you a bird’s eye view of your desk while you’re on a video call. Like in the photo above. Seems gimmicky but I’ve tried it before and it works really well.

Sometimes, I put my phone on a small tripod and face it to my work station if I want to use it to demonstrate something in an online meeting that I’m attending from my laptop. I can also use my phone to record audio for a project I’m working on with my laptop.

There’s also the handoff feature, which allows you to continue whatever you were doing on a native app on another Apple device. For example, say you’re browsing the internet on Safari using your phone and you want to switch to your laptop. The safari browser window from your phone will hover on the dock of your Mac and you can just click on it an continue from the exact webpage you were on when you were using your phone.

At a time when my old laptop screen was having issues, I was able to use an iPad as a display due to the Sidecar feature, which allows you to use the iPad as a secondary display for your Mac. You can also have the iPad show the same apps and windows as your laptop or extend your workspace by showing different apps and windows.

My favourite continuity feature, which I use daily, is the Universal Clipboard feature. It gives you the ability to copy something from one device and paste it on another. This means, I can copy something on my iPhone, and simply “Paste” (or Command + V) on my Mac, and the text or link I copied from my phone is pasted on my Mac.

Airplay—I use my Mac as a larger screen for playing media from my iPhone (in events where I don’t just simply airdrop the media to myself anyway). I use my laptop as an external speaker sometimes when I’m playing stuff out from my phone (due to a new improvement on the Airplay feature). It’s an endless treasure.

There’s no magic going on here. Apple’s continuity and handoff features are possible because of the ecosystem they’ve built that lets them communicate nearly seamlessly on a network because they are all running essentially the same operating system and working with the same cloud provider. Today, most of these features are also available outside of MacOS due to app suites like Google’s and Microsoft’s.

Airdrop

Technically, Airdrop is listed as a Continuity feature. Still, I separated it all by itself because it helps you share files and information not only within your ecosystem but also with other people. So that feels different compared to the rest of the Continuity features (for your devices to interact with each other with Handoff, Universal Clipboard and so on, they must be signed into the same Apple ID).

Airdrop does what other solutions like Near Field Communications (NFCs) and Bluetooth help other devices achieve. For example, when you want to send a friend a video, a photo or a document, and you don’t want to email, you just “bluetooth” it to them. But AirDrop, for people who’ve used both (or all), is noticeably a far better solution because it uses a proprietary peer-to-peer Wi-Fi protocol (combined with Bluetooth) to transmit over a TLS encryption. The key difference from other native mobile wireless transfer solutions is its use of WiFi because that helps it send files faster and increases the file sizes that can be sent over a wireless connection — essentially like how Xender works.

Airdrop makes it easy to share movies, documents, photos, contacts, websites, playlists — whatever, really — to another iOS/watchOS/iPadOS/macOS-enabled device.

I’ve often been saved from the misery of forgetting to carry a hard drive or physical memory drive simply because of Airdrop. It’s not perfect, of course (even though Apple does not say there is a size limit on the files Airdrop can transfer, it still does fail when you try to transfer too many things at once or too many varieties of files in one go). But it is still incredibly useful. I don’t count against other companies creating their solutions (and I’m guessing there are already some existing native solutions across other OSs. Forgive me, research is tiring). However, as of 2016, when I really got myself into this whole Apple mess, AirDrop was still a game-changing feature and remains influential to my decision to own an Apple-produced laptop.

Security/Protection

It is extremely important to point out that the notion that MacBooks can never be affected by computer viruses is a hoax.

That said, it is no secret that macOS is, alongside Linux (and Chrome OS maybe, which not many people use), among the most secure desktop operating systems in the world. And this is for a couple reasons.

MacOS is, firstly, an operating system only available to a specific brand of devices created by one company. As such, running a tight ship, for Apple, is easier. And so is delivering security OS updates quicker and rolling out security features like FileVault, Time Machine and Keychain, which all work across their ecosystem.

Secondly, macOS is not popular enough to be considered a worthwhile target for virus makers, compared to an OS like Windows, which has about 70% of the market share of OSs worldwide. Despite gains over the last decade, Mac only accounts for about 1/5 of the desktop OS market share — about 20 per cent of the market.

Making viruses can be a lot of work, and writing a good one takes some effort. So, it doesn’t help that, at least before the recent spike in popularity of Hackintosh devices (computers that aren’t Macs but run MacOS), people who didn’t own or use Macs were probably not familiar enough with the architecture to write viruses for the OS.

Also considering that not all attempts will be successful, to target an operating system as secure (and on top of that, not popular) as MacOS is just not a good enough deal compared to doing so for Windows.

This, alongside Apple’s plethora of proprietary security features, has translated to a fairly impenetrable OS — but you STILL need an antivirus. I only mentioned this as a feature that “locked me in” because I remember how stressed I used to be about system health and just the constant thought that every hard drive that had a high body count probably had an STD hiding in it somewhere, just waiting to latch unto my computer.

Getting an antivirus when I wasn’t using a Mac was not something you had to be convinced to do. But I didn’t have malware protection on my Mac until maybe like a year ago, and I’ve been using Macs for 5 years.

So yeah, macOS is secure. Perhaps the only reason it is not the most secure is because each user has root-level administrative access to their drives (unlike OSs like Linux).

And there you have it.

My 5 irreplaceable features from the Mac that have not necessarily locked me in, but I undoubtedly miss whenever I have to work from a laptop that is not running macOS.

But there’s one more thing. It’s not exactly a “bonus” feature, but it’s also something I miss when I’m not on the Mac.

Setapp

Now granted, this probably has nothing to do with Apple or, by extension, macOS. But the truth remains that Setapp has been a lifesaver for me as a tool and is unfortunately not available for Windows users (perhaps not “unfortunate”, but we’ll get to that).

A simple definition of Setapp is that it is a collection of premium applications that are all available at a single subscription fee. Essentially most of these applications can be procured or subscribed for outside of Setapp, but Setapp makes them all available for you to use at a single monthly subscription fee — in this case, about $10 monthly.

Now, whether Setapp is a good deal for you or not is entirely dependent on your workflow or your intended use. If the apps you pay for already don’t have cheaper alternatives on Setapp, it might not be worth it. If the collection of apps you find valuable on the platform are all available as one-time purchases elsewhere for a small fee, then you might be better off purchasing them outright instead of entering an endless recurring payment cycle that will most certainly eclipse that one-time cost in no time.

But for someone like myself, Setapp is a great deal.

Let me give you a personal example.

Currently, I have about 27 apps that I use from Setapp (they have over 200 different applications on the platform).

But these are some of the ones I use most often, alongside their costs if I were to subscribe to them individually outside of Setapp.

Spark — Pro version: $5 monthly or $7.99 if you’re not taking the annual payment deal.
Ulysses — About $6 per month or a little over $3/month if you’re taking the annual deal.
Tayasui Sketches, a drawing app I use on my Mac — $6 monthly.
Luminar Neo, an AI-based photo editing app — $5 monthly.
Clear VPN — $5 per month which could go down to about $3.5/month if you pay $21 on a half-year basis.
Craft, an app I use for writing (which is also part of this list (here)) — at the lowest subscription tier besides the Free, $5/month on a yearly deal and $6 on a monthly payment.

Now remember, these are just a handful of apps I use from Setapp. I still have at least 20 other apps, all of which are the Pro versions I would have been either required to purchase or subscribe monthly or yearly to get. Based on the six apps aforementioned, and calculated based on the lowest possible deals I can get for each (so I’m using the annual payment plan figures), I would need to pay at least $27.5 per month (which adds up to $330 per year) if I were using them without Setapp.

Adding Clean My Mac — the system optimisation and anti-malware software of choice for most Mac users — to this would mean that my least possible spend for these six tools alone would come up to about $360 per year (Clean My Mac X comes in at about $30 per year per device on the lowest deal).

With Setapp, paying about 100–120 dollars per year (cheaper if you’re a student or teacher), I get all these and dozens more apps— with more being added bi-weekly.

Oh, and Clean My Mac is on SetApp, too.

Now, is it possible that if Setapp didn’t exist, I would’ve found cheaper, or free versions of these apps requiring me to pay far less than 100 dollars? Probably.

But for now, it seems like a really good product for macOS users, especially when considering that it might be a solution to a problem a lot of Windows users don’t have because they might not necessarily pay for apps as much (due to rampant piracy developers building for Windows suffer. I’m not judging. If anything I’m somewhat jealous).

But another odd reason I like Setapp — and by extension, the Mac experience it gives me — is because it just helps me keep a leaner, cleaner system for app procurement outside of the Mac App Store.

Now, I’m not Tony Stark or The Batman, so I probably shouldn’t use as many tools as I do.

But the fact of the matter is, I do.

At least 60 per cent of them are core requirements that save me time, money, and energy when I work daily.

And if you’re someone who is always seeking software solutions to recurring problems, you quickly find out that the best ones aren’t always free — or at least aren’t free all the way.

But the thing with buying apps is sometimes, you don’t need them THAT much.

Sure, you may need it for some time and need to purchase it to support the developer or access the full feature set for that particular task. But then, six months pass and that whole project is done. And what eventually happens is even though you don’t need this application anymore, you keep it on your device because it feels like you’re “wasting” money by not doing so. Even though at this point it is basically bloatware that’s just taking up space and Home Screen real estate, a constant reminder that you shouldn’t have bought it outright (much like that pair of green shoes that only goes with one outfit).

With Setapp, I don’t think about this at all. Whenever I have something to achieve that needs some novel software solution, I check the platform to see if it has any such application and if it is available there, I use it. When I’m done, I uninstall it. New apps show up every other week, and when the old ones are no longer valuable, I feel no attachment to keeping them.

That, to me, is brilliant.

If you want to check Setapp out, use this link to get a month free.

Now we’re done.

For my readers who might be wondering, I love Windows, and I’m actively planning on getting a second laptop for Windows because it has its own plethora of advantages that you just can’t get from the Mac.

Also, there’s a ton more stuff I love about the Mac (shelling out thousands of dollars for airdrop on your laptop is crazy!).

There are lots of neat Terminal tricks I enjoy, and other native applications that I consider indispensable.

Also, there’s a lot more heavier-set stuff that my Mac lets me do that other OSs lack the flexibility (or incentive) to provide. But I think these are the features that will appeal to the widest spectrum of individuals. I hope you enjoyed reading it!