Did I Just Switch Back to Windows?

I've been a MacBook user for many years, but the pandemic and work-from-home has shifted almost all of my personal usage to a desktop workstation with Windows. Whenever you compare Mac and Windows there's always a mention of the "smoothness"/"feel"/"polish" - A new Mac has a smoothness and responsiveness in its interface that I found Windows previously struggled to match.

That recently changed when I switched to a 144Hz, 1440p display connected to a Windows desktop and a docked MacBook. The MacBook can only do 60fps on the display (It's just a laptop, so not entirely fair), but the desktop easily handles 144Hz and the experience is great. Everything is so smooth - scrolling, typing code, moving around windows. It's an incredible delight and the 60Hz -> 144Hz transition gives the same feeling as upgrading to Mac did back in the day.

I feel like my personal impressions have been distorted from years of running Windows on old, crusty hardware loaded with bloatware and all the quirks of a long-running system. Of course, the fresh MacBook felt fantastic in comparison. This article aligns with my suspicions -- Running modern Windows on next-gen hardware and an empty hard drive evens the comparison a bit, and with that perspective the differences aren't so huge!

> The Gateway machine was, for the most part, clean. It came with a Norton virus checker, but it was probably a good thing to keep.

_Ew_