the forbidden apple

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I was an Android user growing up, much to the chagrin of all of my friends.

Yes, it was me. I was the Bringer of Green Bubbles, Root Cause of All Problems with the Group Chat, Warden of the Stupid "Liked this message" Messages, and Harbinger of I Can't Tell Whether You've Read My Messages. (This were only a few of my many fearsome titles).

But I was destined to be stuck outside the walled Garden of Eden with the forbidden Apple inside, because my mom did not — and still does not — like Apple devices. Apple won't let you use your devices how you want, she would preach, and my role was clear: I was to understand the deficits of Apple and their devices, and to be a bastion of technological freedom in our increasingly Apple-fied world.

So I trudged onward with the green bubbles at my side. I got on my soapbox and said, "Apple is the reason why the bubbles are green, actually!" (which mostly fell on deaf ears). And when I needed a laptop for college, I didn't even consider getting a MacBook.

But a year or two later, I wanted to get a tablet for making digital art and taking handwritten digital notes. At that point, my young, impressionable self had been listening to lot of the podcast Cortex, where they often sang praises of Apple devices, and the amazing apps available on Apple devices, and the next cool thing Apple was doing with their devices. So when I was choosing a tablet, the siren song of the Apple Pencil was simply irresistable, and I found myself with an iPad mini. I told myself that I was just trying it, that this one a one-off purchase just for drawing and note-taking. It was only the baby iPad, after all, the smallest and cheapest one! I wasn't converting to Apple, right?

Alas, dear Reader, this was the beginning of the end. The floodgates had opened, and there was no going back.

I got an iPhone, waving my poor Pixel 6 goodbye. I gave away my customized file-syncing solution, yes, but in exchange, I gained AirDrop and Focus Modes and Word Hunt. Word Hunt!

I got AirPods, and I was blown away by all the shiny features. Active noise cancelling! Find My! And most importantly, perfect integration with my iPhone.

But until now, my mom's anti-Apple sentiment lived on in my personal laptop, the Windows machine anchoring me to the world outside of the Apple ecosystem…and also the one not playing nice with my AirPods. And also not working with AirDrop. And also forcing me to find cross-platform solutions to everything. Argh.

Despite the inconveniences, despite the fact that my Apple-fied life was much better than before, I was wary of fully giving in. In principle, I didn't like that the garden is walled, no matter how wonderful it may be. A part of me simply did not want to lose to Apple's vendor lock-in tactics.

But that was until now.

You see, I recently got a new job — a nice job at a tech startup. But the thing about tech startup jobs is that they usually happen at a computer. Which means they set you up with a work laptop. And this work laptop happens to be a MacBook.

…and I was like, oh no. Because now I'm stuck between operating systems.

Does anyone want to tell me why

+ puts your computer to sleep? I — and my poor Windows laptop repeatedly getting put to sleep and woken up — would very much like to know. Does anyone want to tell me why I hit + at all? I intended to hit +, which totally exists on a Mac keyboard, why didn't I just do that? It's not even like I'm hitting + (or its equivalent in physical space) — I'm hitting the key, which is the same position as the key on a Mac keyboard. ???????

My mental models are as tangled as my fingers. I was previously a joyful

+-er on Windows, but now I am so very lost. On MacOS, I flail as I try to switch windows, hitting along with some combination of modifier keys and hoping for the best. My go-to choice, the muscle-memory-supported +, never does what I think it will, and even worse, I am left hesitating to + when I swap back to Windows.¹

Every time I switch between the two laptops, it's like someone has moved everything in the house three inches in the maximally awkward direction. In trying to orient myself, I am stubbing my toe all. The. Time. Things are never quite where I think they are, and when I open a cabinet to find something, I bonk my head into the cabinet door (and then also get bonked by all the Tupperware falling out of said cabinet). That is to say, dear Reader, I am losing my mind.

I guess my Apple conversion is complete. The next laptop I buy will be a MacBook, simply to avoid this nonsense.

But until then, I'll just keep — oops, accidentally put my laptop to sleep again.

footnotes

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1. 1

   Why don't you just…Stop that, I know you can rebind all the keyboard shortcuts. It still doesn't change the fact that Windows and MacOS clearly think about tabs and applications and everything else in different ways.