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PC users who switched from Mac. Any regrets?

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I'm about to take the leap to a PC laptop. I have a hackintosh desktop as well as an older MacBook ill hold onto for ProRes etc. Has anyone regretted doing something similar? Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of besides ProRes compatibility? I'm mainly Adobe these days, if that helps. Looking at the 8th gen Dell XPS. Projects are all high end commercial and agency based work. Thanks!
 
Windows 10 runs like a charm from my experience. The only real downside in my opinion is its update behavior (especially on the home version) … there are a lot of updates compared to macOS and you cannot delay them unless you turn off the update service for example. Sometimes privacy settings are reverted after updates so you have to reapply them using tools like „o&o shutup“.

One feature I always miss using a Windows system is the ability to colortag files like you can do in finder - extremely useful I think.

As for Adobe apps, most off the settings (if not all?) are compatible on both platforms (like color management settings, photoshop actions, color profiles, ttf and open type fonts. Only system specific fonts like old postscript ones aren’t platform interchangeable.
 
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I went from 100% Windows to 100% Mac. I was using Windows Phone, Surface tablet and Windows 10 PC. It worked like a charm. Then I got an iPhone. Then I switched to Hackintosh, same W10 PC is now running Mojave and now I also have MacBook. I don't regret it one bit. I used to, when I didn't have those .exe files for most software I wanted. My work does demand me to install many Windows only software but the whole ecosystem works for me on either Mac or PC. I would gladly select Mac in place of W10 because of how easy it is to do trivial things and how intuitive it feels. I like the whole tile concept with W8. It was beautiful. Now with W10, it feels like a butchered version that is functional but not pretty. It annoys me to look at the start menu now. It is either too jumpy or too dull. The dock on the other hand, is not a bother. It is there when I want it. If I don't want it, I don't even realise it is there.
 
I'm both happy and unsatisfied.

Make a good Hackintosh (clean, silent, with a good look) costs a lot and it's never perfect (now for example DRM contents aren't displayed and it's not 100% silent). Handoff, Continuity, hardware acceleration etc. are 100% working.
Considering the hours spent and the others I'll needed for the next macOS updates, the few hundred of money saved from buying the hardware (compared to a real Mac) aren't worth.
But since I'm a tech guy and I like experimenting and gaming (so I also need Windows), this is OK for me. When I need to work outside, I take my MBP with me.

If one day I'll have enough money of course I'll buy a real desktop Mac and I'll make a Windows-only PC. The recent Macs aren't unable to guarantee a good experience with Windows (I had personal experiences and even LinusTechTips complains about it when he talked about the iMac Pro).



Also it depends on what you need. If you don't work with FCPX or need Apple software or eco-system, you can switch to PC without any problem. Talking about video editing it doesn't have sense to use macOS/buy a real Mac if you then plan to use DaVinci Resolve, Premiere or other software that aren't FCPX (or if you then don't provide it a good hardware acceleration).
 
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I'm about to take the leap to a PC laptop. I have a hackintosh desktop as well as an older MacBook ill hold onto for ProRes etc. Has anyone regretted doing something similar? Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of besides ProRes compatibility? I'm mainly Adobe these days, if that helps. Looking at the 8th gen Dell XPS. Projects are all high end commercial and agency based work. Thanks!
As someone who is using Adobe Premiere Pro on my dual-boot situation (both my Windows and macOS Mojave), there are a few considerations if you're into video editing:
  • On Windows the GPU is not fully utilized by Premiere Pro. And it's a pity, as I do a lot of color grading with high quality drone videos, that are mostly 2-3GBs each! It doesn't matter whether it's Nvidia or AMD, and it doesn't matter if you try to trick the system by disabling the iGPU entirely, it will still use that as the primary GPU and all your CPU and RAM for playback, rendering and export. Not cool.
  • On Windows, it was using around 40-50% of the Nvidia GPU (1050 ti 4GB) for color grading and export. Still the main work the iGPU was doing it.
  • With the AMD Radeon, Premiere Pro only utilized 15-20% of the RX580 8GB. At the end of the day, it used same resources on both cards (close to nothing compared how much the CPU, RAM and iGPU were being used).
  • On Mojave, the RX580 was used in full for playback and export. So much for "don't use AMD for Premiere Pro".
  • That lead to smoother playback in Mojave, than in Windows. In Windows playback was choppy etc.
  • Although the playback is a whole lot better in macOS, the export times were better in Windows: for a 15 minute 4K H265 video with music, color grading, transitions, stabilization, text etc: In Windows it took 20 minutes, in macOS it took 30. Me personally I'd rather have a smooth editing experience by having a good playback at full resolution, than fast export times.
  • Although it may seem that Hackintoshes are not always stable, Windows is even worse in that regard, despite that you get the proper hardware and drivers specifically for Windows. Even now I downloaded the new Premiere Pro 2019, and it's full of bugs on the Windows side. On Mac it works great.
  • If you're gonna be editing a lot of iPhone X type of videos, it's better to stick to macOS. Sometimes I have to convert them with Handbrake to make them readable in Windows and Premiere Pro.
Me personally, I'd prefer a Mac Pro for my work than a Windows machine. But I can't afford it, so a Hackintosh it is lol.
 
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I use an older HP 840 G2 i7, has M.2 SSD and SATA SSD, I dual boot between Mojave 10.14 and Windows 10, best of both worlds. I boot KALI from the USB 3.0 if I need any tools under Linux.
 
I was worked on mac about 8-9 years. Change a lot of hardware (macbook pro most of them). And now Im on the hackintosh. I really like it. My stuff works far more better than real mac. Sounds unreallistic, but for me that it is.
 
I'm about to take the leap to a PC laptop. I have a hackintosh desktop as well as an older MacBook ill hold onto for ProRes etc. Has anyone regretted doing something similar? Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of besides ProRes compatibility? I'm mainly Adobe these days, if that helps. Looking at the 8th gen Dell XPS. Projects are all high end commercial and agency based work. Thanks!

I primarily run my hack as a HTPC. However, Apple are years behind on graphics, so I went dual boot using Windows 10 for home theatre and PC video games. Pros: Windows 10 gives full HDR/10 bit support for my RX 580, and MPC with Madvr makes 4k Blu-ray look pristine. Also, things like HDMI audio work out of the box with no headaches. Cons: I left Windows for a reason. It is really just bloated spyware and a truly awful operating system. If it weren't for movies and games and generally better graphics capabilities, I wouldn't go near it. Don't even get me started on their updates. Unfortunately, no one OS does everything I need, so this is presently the only option. In short, no regrets. I take the best of both worlds. 90% Mac, 10% Windows.
 
In all honesty having proved to myself since Snow Leopard that color management in OSX is just another urban myth the main reason I keep up with my Hackintosh, beside all the time and effort invested, is that fonts and icons are bigger in Photoshop on a 4k monitor in OSX--I print in Windows because way too many comparison prints show the printer drivers are just better on the Windows side I assume because the OEMs actually write and update them. As of now I still could live in an all OSX world as there is no usable OSX version of certain financial program long term users hate but have no other choice to use and I might rather lose a finger than use Parallels to run it. I forced myself to use my Macbook Pro in a business environment based mostly on Web apps because true multi-tasking is just more efficient with the Win 10 GUI when lots of programs are open. I have had updates go sideways in OSX on a Macbook Pro (one of the High Sierra updates trashed the thing) but that is less common than Windows updates as we all know.
 
As a full stack developer I still find MacOS to be the best compromise as I can run most frameworks and technologies born on Linux alongside programs like Photoshop / Sketch, plus I really like the polish and UI; that said Windows 10 is evolving quite nicely, if they keep on improving the Linux subsystem I would see very little reason to keep maintaining Hackintoshes alongside my Linux machines, but I don't see that happening for at least another couple years :p
 
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