y2s
Forerunner
Parallels on an Intel Mac. You can run just about everything from any OS.Question for Mac users:
Is there any Apple application (except maybe iTunes) that you find better than its Microsoft or open-source equivalent?
I bought my first Mac in 2005 because I wanted a unix machine that was a little easier to use than Linux. While it served my purpose, I wasn't impressed with any of the bundled software. I had to replace Safari with firefox, mail with Thunderbird and quicktime with VLC before I could use the machine properly. There was also a web page authoring application that I tried to use once. After a few hours, I abandoned it and wrote HTML using vi.
Maybe things are better now. I haven't used Macs since 2013 when my second one died. I still sometimes get the urge to buy one. I am trying to figure out if there are any upsides other than its looks and the bash shell (and maybe not having to constantly worry about viruses). My friends who use macs at work have all paid their microsoft tax (for Office).
I still prefer Chrome to Safari, but have been thinking of making the switch. Adobe/Autocad/Office is pretty much at par with its windows counterparts. Lately I am noticing that iOS/Android have higher quality apps in certain categories than windows/mac. An M1 mac gives you access to iOS's extensive library of apps but takes away x86 virtualization.
With a mac you get something that just works and don't have to really worry about software breaking or drivers being incompatible. The trade off is you loose all future expandability of your system -
But in all honesty aside from the OS itself, I don't know if there's very many mac exclusive pieces of software that would warrant a switch -
Look at it this way (from some thread i saw on reddit a while ago)
Windows - Same 3rd party apps, not unix (3rd Party Apps Here Being stuff like Adobe/Office or Sketch etc)
Linux - unix, but not same 3rd party apps
macOS - both, and nice hardware
+1 to preview & garageband. Wish windows had a good good alternatives for these. Final Cut is also universally acclaimed-The entire former iWork suite is free, it's definitely not as powerful as Microsoft office, but I had no problem using them ( specially keynote and Pages) for a ton of presentations and papers for journals.
However there were some occasional font issues with Keynote and MS PowerPoint ( specially if someone made part of a slide in PP on Windows and I edited them in Keynote)
Preview is a pretty good pdf reader ( not editor)
I absolutely loved Aperture ( not free but inexpensive) but Apple killed it, their Photo app is getting matured gradually, but definitely not as powerful as LR with huge number of photos, but it could manage my collection of arount 10-15 thousand photos rather easily. It's not a bad free RAW importer, basic editor and photo management software.
GarageBand is BRILLIANT!! It's easy and pretty powerful for a beginner. Commercial sucessful albums have been made entirely in GB.
Don't know much about video editing, but for me iMovie was more than sufficient. I haven't used many video editors except the free ones and FCPX.
Tried DaVinci Resolve ( free version) but found it extremely complicated.
Strangely iTunes is the only SW in Mac I really hate...and it's getting worse with every update.
The mail app worked ok for me, but now I can't live without Outlook.
Mac really shines in one department, the brilliant core audio. Almost all audio interfaces work straightway without any other complicated audio drivers like ASIO4all or the Magix version of it ( comes with Samplitude) with minimal audio latency.
Aperture has been out of development since 2014, and there is no such thing as iTunes on a mac anymore! Are you still on a really old build of mac os?