I’m back to Windows and here is why
I’m currently working (on my rare spare time) on redesigning how I position myself on the web and that also means I’m working on a new web site (two actually). As I was thinking on some of the contents of this new site, I decided it would be a better idea to detail one decision ahead (late?) that I took last year: to switch back to Windows/PC.
For those who do not know me, I have been a macOS user since 2005, when I bought my very first MacBook. For work I was lucky to be able to use any Linux flavour I wanted and so I have been out of touch with the Windows world for about 10 years. I was heavily tempted by Windows 8 (yes, I loved it and I know I stand mostly alone in this) but yet I stood with my Mac.
So what has changed?
There is actually nothing wrong with the Mac or macOS. What is wrong is the country I live in. The cost of having a brand new Mac in Brazil is at least four times more expensive than a PC with the very same configuration. The same goes for the iPhone. Early last year mine (a 2016 iPhone 8) went dead and needed to be repaired and it costed me R$1,500 (for the sake of this post, I’m not converting values to US$, do your own math). Then right after New Year it felt and broke the screen glass. It still works but it would cost me another R$1,500 to fix, the very same value of a brand new Motorola One that is sitting on my desk as I write these lines. Just for comparison, a brand new iPhone Xr would cost no less than R$5,200.
The Mac around here goes the same way, with a brand new MacBook costing no less than R$10,000 (more than R$19,000 with the configuration I need). Fortunately, the very last one I had costed me only R$7,000 some two years ago. I never took the time to start writing a single app on either of the Mac I ever had (liar! I tried writing a Jekyll clone and a wallpaper changer — for reasons — in Swift but they never took off) so there was no code to be lost in this transition.
Meanwhile I started revisiting C#, which was my preferred programming language before switching to the Mac, and started creating new small apps for some of my needs and of some close to me and, while that gained some traction, I decided I wanted to go for a new undergraduate degree in architecture (yes, real architecture, not software architecture or hardware architecture, and that is why I did not post any of this in the past six months) and it would require from me a computer my MacBook was not so it would be either a new one or a new PC. Due to costs, I chose the PC (I could have bought three of the same with the cost of the MacBook that would suit my needs).
Lucky for me Windows 10 also became a lot more stable (almost a year and no BSODs so far) and more visually appealing and Visual Studio now also has a free version I can use on my apps so it is not such a great pain going back. Also most of the apps I used on the Mac have versions for Windows and allowed me to migrate to them but I will be missing Pixelmator and Sketch.
Xcode not so much as it could not be less intuitive. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to remain on the Mac working my way through Swift (as I spent some time on the group working on the evolution of the language, mostly between versions 3 and 4) and would love to explore Swift 5 and SwiftUI but it is currently taking a lot to work with Apple in Brazil.
Edit, on Oct 9th, 2023: It’s been so long since I posted this and most of the impressions on this post remain the same. Only Macs became even more expensive in Brazil, Windows has been updated to 11 and I don’t miss Pixelmator and Sketch anymore. I found better suitable replacements in the Affinity suite by Serif, which even allowed me to ditch AutoCAD at all.
