Apple convinced me I needed to buy a MacBook, iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, and an iPad with all its expensive accoutrements.
A laptop seems obvious.
An iPhone seems fine. And Airpods are genuinely marvelous.
I like my Apple Watch because it does keep me honest on filling my rings every day (1560+ and counting!).
But the iPad…well, that’s annoying. This isn’t the early 2000s anymore where it felt like supporting some scrappy upstart by buying their stuff.
I sold my M4 iPad Pro and its Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro and sold my MacBook Pro recently because I found the Surface Pro 11 works for my needs. But it’s been a whole lot easier now that I stumbled into ways of getting pretty good replacements for a lot of Apple-centric apps, like Apple Reminders, Overcast, Day One, and Fantastical.
About the Surface Pro 11 as an iPad/Mac replacement
I’ve been impressed enough with the Snapdragon processors that it brings about 10% battery loss per hour. That is in-line with my iPad Pro experience when doing some “real work”. The problem of course is the iPad’s file handling is so piss-poor it’s almost impossible to move a Photoshop layer to Illustrator or back and forth. “Real work” on an iPad is fundamentally broken if you need to do the kind of heavy file management I do. I finally had enough when I had to do a mail merge and thought Affinity Publisher might be able to, only to realize that function is not in the iPad version because it’s impossible for them to implement within iPad OS.
- My Surface Pro can run the full Creative Suite.
- Beta versions of InDesign and Illustrator work well and are ARM-native.
- Photoshop and Lightroom are ARM-native.
- Windows Hello is just as fast and reliable as Face ID, but unlike the Mac, comes standard with the Surface.
- Fantastical now has a Windows version. An ARM-native version is coming, but the current x86 version is serviceable. I trust it will get better, cause the current version is basically a beta in all but name.
- Notion, browsers, and a bunch of other apps have come along to ARM. Dropbox is another big one for me.
- And my reason for switching: I can have one super light device with an excellent keyboard, trackpad, and Pen all-in-one with an OLED screen, more memory for less money, and upgradeable SSD. I moved from a 512GB disk to 1TB with nothing but a T3 Torx screwdriver and a $60 SSD.
Struggles with iPhone – Windows sync when switching to a PC
Old notions about inherent instability within Windows is no longer the case. In 2024 there just isn’t that big a difference between Windows and MacOS when it comes to most features. We’re talking about comfort, ease of use, and a lot of other “squishy” factors when we talk about differences.
But I struggled mightily with a few things:
- Cmd is a better, more natural keystroke than Ctrl. Luckily, the excellent SharpKeys app lets me switch Ctrl/Alt keys like this in the Registry so every keyboard I use works the same. Works perfect.
- I used Apple Mail for a while with Fastmail, and I liked that, but I also do like HEY. And HEY has a workflow I like so I’m with it full-time since it’s cross-platform. Outlook and other email clients on Windows are terrible.
- Browsers on Windows are fine. Chrome is there. Edge is genuinely good (split screen, tab grouping, some nice YouTube-centric features, and you can install just about any site as a standalone PWA). Brave is just as good as it is on a Mac. Safari is absent and I think Apple should have a Windows version still for devs to test against, but as much as I liked Safari it sucked with extensions — including 1Password which fails constantly in there. You know what I use now? Firefox. Cause I like Firefox’s mission. But there are plenty of ARM-native options here.
- I liked CleanShot X on the Mac, but I set the same screen capture shortcut to ShareX. ShareX is ugly, but it is powerful and it works for my needs. Though the built-in Snipping tool is also pretty solid and more attractive. I keep playing around with these.
- I lived in Things but this is the hardest problem: there is no chance Things comes to Windows. This truly was hard for me. But I’ve got a workflow that runs Apple Reminders on Windows. (Wait…what?)
The excellent Web Catalog app is ARM-native and a game changer
Web Catalog works by wrapping websites in highly-configurable Electron wrappers and are ARM-native.
“Justin, Electron apps suck.” That’s what I thought, but darned if they don’t work great here. I think it’s more like “Electron apps suck on the Mac.” Cause they do.
But on Windows, the Web Catalog wrappers barely ding my processor. I run all these apps at about a .1-.5% CPU hit each when idle or in use:
- Apple Reminders via iCloud.com
- Apple Photos via iCloud.com
- Day One via their web interface, though this lacks location data for new posts
- Overcast via the website
- Google Docs, Brain.fm, and a bunch of others I was always using via the web on any platform
Web Catalog is highly configurable, down to how it treats links, how the app frame looks, and it all syncs and backups up in the cloud. I’m a fan.
Memory usage for each is in line with what a native app would surely take, around 100-300 MB each. Apple Reminders, for instance, consumes about 100 MB which is probably what it was doing natively on MacOS.
Because Web Catalog is ARM-native, I can use non-optimized web apps like HEY and Basecamp at native speed and efficiency, too.
Apple Reminders solves my “How do I add a reminder with Siri or my Watch and see this later on the machine where I work?” I still miss Things, but despite trying to use TickTick and Todoist, Apple Reminders has that sweet cross-platform sync engine in a way that makes sense (enough) to me.
What about iMessage on Windows?
This was a sticking point for me for a long time, but the Phone Link app does work pretty well at keeping phone notifications around. It’s not great and you can tell Microsoft is not totally to blame here. It can’t display photos or attachments, and it can’t do group chats at all because Apple won’t let it. But for 2FA pins and occasional messages it does work. And I don’t mind that it keeps iMessages away from me a little bit more during the day. It’s not bad. Not great. But not bad.
The result is I’ve got a single device.
- I pay for one device.
- It runs all my Pro apps with the same battery life as an iPad Pro offered me.
- IT HAS CELLULAR !! An eSIM and physical SIM slot are available! I run it with T-mobile for the same $20/mo. I was always paying for my iPad. Works exactly the same. I’ve never had a problem with this.
- I have a single device that always has my work exactly as I left it. Same tabs, same windows, same spot.
- Works with my existing Apple Cinema Display, including the camera, mics, and audio. No Center Stage support, but the built-in Surface Pro camera is better and does have an auto-framing feature for that camera.
The battery life in a Surface Pro 11 is not MacBook quality. Not even close. But it’s also not fair to compare because the MacBook has so much more room for more battery. The Surface Pro has iPad Pro-level battery life with a crap ton more features.
What about using the Surface Pro as a tablet?
People rag on the Surface and Windows in general as a tablet. That’s probably deserved. But you know what I spent most of my time doing on my iPad? Browsing websites in Safari. There are no differences between a webpage on an iPad vs. a Surface Pro 11. None. There are no touch optimizations or differences. For 90% of my “tablet use”, it is precisely the same.
I don’t know why Microsoft isn’t bludgeoning Apple over the head with marketing about how good this is as a single device, with cellular, with a pen, with a detachable keyboard that works attached or not! This is game-changing for artists because you can set the keyboard to the left, the kickstand holds the Surface like you wish an iPad could, and you can have the pen and a mouse that behaves like a good mouse should. This enables lots of Photoshop keyboard shortcuts and all the perks of a pen stylus and mouse.
I put my keyboard on the left, Surface in “draft mode” in the middle, mouse on the right, and pen in my hand it works great. Battery life isn’t a problem any more than it was with my iPad Pro.
Some issues remain
I still struggle with a few things.
- Preview.app on the Mac is great and Windows has no solution of worth. But iPad has nothing like it either.
- Drawboard PDF is pretty good, but you’ve gotta be prepared to spend some money on it.
- Typora is better than iA Writer on Windows (there is a Windows version of iA, but it’s not great). Again, a software license to buy and some people won’t like that.
- Arc Browser sucks on Windows, but who knows what’s happening with that.
- I miss some of the Mac visual styles. Lots of Windows app just downright suck to look at. But I’m navigating these waters thanks to Reddit and cursory research.
- ChatGPT works better than Copilot, though Copilot is more eager to cite sources. Luckily, on Windows, you can change a Copilot key to whatever app you want.
- Video recording apps are a little weak for the iMovie-style work I sometimes want to do.
- Office is better on Windows, no surprise there. But it’s prettier on the Mac.
- Some apps require a little babying. I like the Files app in lieu of Explorer, but Files is fussy about CPU usage for me.
- There are no good RSS reader apps for Windows. I’ve tried Feedmill but it can’t handle images. So I use Feedbin via Web Catalog. Again, money fixes this. But it’s still cheaper than buying a whole other device.
- Grammarly is a laggard in my workflow and sucks battery life. Their support team has made some changes to my account that are testing new efficiency improvements, however. It is better, but not excellent yet.
