My mother-in-law asked for my help seting up a new laptop, a Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, and for the first time in a long time I was sat with a Windows laptop in front of me.

My intial impressions using her machine was that it wasn’t all bad.

And having used a new 16" MacBook Pro for the past few weeks, and finding more and more that MacOS wasn’t the JesusOS I thought it was, I wanted to give Windows 10 a go.

So Boot Camp was run, Windows 10 was installed, and I’m a few hours into the experiment.

A few thoughts: Microsoft Edge is a silent achiever; Windows is a mostly ok operating system these days; mouse/trackpad in Windows still sucks; the 16" Macbook Pro trackpad is very large and Windows doesn’t have palm-rejection so I hate it and want to throw the laptop away everytime my right hand’s palm graces the bottom right of the trackpad; there’s many cross-platform apps available, but apparently I love a lot of Mac-only apps (like Drafts, Tot, Spark); Touch ID on MacOS is a missed feature; Preview.app is a silent achiever on MacOS and is dearly missed; Apple’s Windows software is pretty good on first look; remapping some keys on the keyboard will make life easier; 1Password on Windows is actually a better experience than on Mac … how did Windows get a better 1Password than Mac?; I need to remap the Apple Command key to the Windows CTRL key immediatly after publishing this post (use Sharp Keys for this one); who knew that Windows had a built-in clipboard manager?!

One takeaway anyone should have reading this is that Microsoft Edge is actually a really good web browser, a non-Google but Chromium-based web browser, and it’s worth you trying.

The biggest thing I’m missing today … iMessage. That little “social network” is a powerful ecosystem lock-in.