My first attempt at moving to the MacOS platform.

The last time I used a Mac was back in the early OSX days with a white iBook. Now, I’m using a coworker’s old MacBook Pro (Late 2013). It has a dual-core i5 4th Gen CPU, a 13” screen, 8GB of memory, and 256GB of storage. It’s a well-kept machine. The screen and keyboard are in good condition, the battery is ok for a seven year old battery, and it’s running the latest MacOS, Big Sur. This is the oldest model to be supported.

After only a day, I’m enjoying the integration with my iPhone. iMessage, Wi-Fi password sharing, and iCloud are all nice. I’m staying in the iPhone ecosystem and I’m thinking of getting a Mac to help support my parents with their stuff, but let’s see how well this works out…

So let’s list my observations and gripes:

  • No ‘delete’ key, only Backspace labeled as Delete. (Altho’ I just learned it is Fn-Delete.)
  • Different keyboard shortcuts. (I know it’s muscle memory that I’ll have to overcome.)
  • All these options keys! Control, Option, Alt, Curly-thing, Command, and a Function key. It’s too much much. I’d rather see something along the lines of CTRL+x for shortcuts inside programs, and a Meta+x for OS shortcuts.
  • Some KB shortcuts are the same: i.e. CTRL+z and Curly+z are both undo. CTRL+s and Curly+s are Save. That’s very nice. And Cut, Copy, Paste are all the same too.
  • Safari has no inspect feature. I found it.
  • I immediately started looking for Homebrew to install things from outside the App Store. I would have thought things like VSCode and Github would be there. I’m surprised at how much stuff isn’t in the AppStore.