I'm one of those people.

When I buy a computer, I intend to use it for at least 2 years.

The last laptop I bought served me for 5 years until I built this beast.

So this MacBook review will be from the perspective of an actual long-term user.

Now, I bought this Mac 2 years ago, and for me, the laptop experience isn't just about what's on the outside, like the speakers or the screen, which I'll talk about later.

What's sometimes more important is the software, the operating system.

So let's talk about macOS first.

Now, I'm the type of person who likes tinkering with their operating system and toggling every single setting to see what it does.

If I don't like something, instead of learning to live with it, I look for ways to fix it.

So learning to use macOS initially instead of Windows wasn't a big deal for me.

It was actually a fun experience, and after using it for 2 years, there are a lot of things that I like about it and a lot of things I hate, or that I hated and then found a way to fix later.

Let's start with the things I like.

The design consistency.

If you turn on dark mode on Windows, most things become dark, but not this panel, or this, or this top bar.

Also, these are mouse settings, but so are these.

Why are they separate, and why is one 10 years older than the other one?

This is a lot rarer on macOS.

If you turn on dark mode, you won't get randomly flash-banged browsing through settings, even most third-party apps support it.

The way that macOS renders fonts.

It's a personal preference, but I like how text looks on macOS.

Obviously, the resolution of the display and its scaling play a massive role, but here's the same text on the same monitor and similar display scaling.

Numbers, pages, and keynote.

Those are a nice touch.

It's essentially Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but amplified.

Of course, you can still use Microsoft Word or Excel on Mac, Apple's and Google's alternatives are just free.

No random updates forcefully restarting your PC.

I didn't realize how annoying this was until I built my first PC and tried editing video on Windows.

I left my PC to get some food for 5 minutes, and when I came back, I saw this.

Great.

Way less bugs compared to Windows.

I was also brutally reminded of what a buggy mess Windows actually is.

For example, here's a random white square on my desktop that stays above all the apps.

The only way to get rid of it was to log out and back in, which of course closed all the apps that I had opened, or your device is running low on memory.

My PC has twice as much memory as my MacBook, yet I'm always surprised at how good my Mac is at managing it.

No, 16 gigabytes of RAM on Mac isn't the same as 32 on Windows, as Apple would like you to think, but no matter how many apps I have open, it always blows my mind that the app I'm using doesn't slow down or crash because I'm exporting a video in the background.

There is this weird bug that happens after a heavy workload where dragging apps around becomes weirdly delayed.

Strangely, it also happens when using the screen sharing app and controlling someone else's MacBook.

You can see how the mouse cursor is not on the app's window, but I can count on my fingers the number of times something crashed because it was using too much memory.

It happened though.

Speaking of crashing, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, they just crash continuously when I'm using them on Windows.

It's probably not only Windows' fault, but it just happens a lot less on Mac.

Actually, I don't remember when was the last time Premiere quit unexpectedly on my Mac.

I had so many bugs with OBS as well on Windows.

It's a screen recording software, like it getting stuck on stopping recording, or whatever this is.

Then there's the taskbar.

Sometimes apps randomly decide jumping on each other.

What's this gap on the taskbar?

Why is it not in the cen- oh.

Very interesting.

And sometimes all icons go blank, just for fun.

I'm not saying that there aren't bugs on macOS, but over the two years of using it, I had to deal with a lot fewer of them.

Finder is much faster and crashes less than File Explorer.

For some reason, File Explorer gets insanely slow when there are a lot of big files in a folder.

This is on an SSD, by the way.

It also keeps crashing.

If I go back and go back in, it takes the same amount of time.

This doesn't make any sense.

And I don't think I've had Finder crash once.

Also searching for something on Windows without third-party apps is annoyingly slow.

AirDrop is very convenient.

And the other Apple ecosystem features, like being able to message someone from your Mac or copy things on your iPhone and paste them on your Mac.

The Notes app syncing everywhere.

If you have an iPhone and a Mac, they synergize so well.

And the final thing I'm going to mention is the mouse cursor.

I like it.

Onto the things I dislike about the operating system.

Everything on an external monitor will look garbage if you're using macOS, especially if you have a 1440p monitor.

This is because macOS only likes very specific screen resolutions that it scales nicely with.

They're called high DPI resolutions.

And I have a 1440p external monitor.

But thankfully, a while back, I discovered this free app called Better Display.

Essentially what it does is it adds a bunch of these high DPI resolutions to your Mac that you can then choose from on your external monitor.

And everything goes from looking like this to this.

Very nice. macOS hates external mice.

I made an entire video talking about mice and macOS.

You will find it in the description right under the like button.

Not long ago, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration on Mac without third-party software.

Then they added it here under advanced.

But getting your mouse to work as you want isn't that hard by using an app called LinearMouse.

It's free and it lets you do things like change your scrolling speed per application.

This is very useful for me.

It lets you enable the back and forward buttons if your mouse has them and even enable the Which, for those of you that don't know, is when you press down the scroll wheel.

It will let you close tabs without clicking on the little X and open links in new tabs.

Now your life is changed.

Also, I've tried using many mice with my Mac, including the infamous MX Master 3S and the even more infamous Magic Mouse.

But this was the only mouse that worked the best for me.

It's called the Keychron M3.

I'll leave a link in the description.

It connects via USB-C, unlike other mice, and there's also a Bluetooth mode that has the least amount of Bluetooth latency out of all the Bluetooth mice I've tested.

Back to software issues.

The next thing I absolutely hate is related to full-screen apps.

On Mac, just like on Windows, you have virtual desktops.

You can create them for different tasks, like one for planning a trip and another for work.

However, if you full-screen an app, like when watching a YouTube video, that app always gets sent to the end of all your desktops.

This is horrible because if you now decide to go back and do other stuff while it's on full-screen, you will have to scroll all the way to the end when you finally want to pause the video or get to the app.

Animations.

They're nice for the most part. macOS is full of cool, smooth animations, just like iOS.

However, there's one animation that annoys me every time that I see it.

It's this one when switching virtual desktops.

Why you ask?

Because its duration increases with the refresh rate of my monitor.

If I set my display's refresh rate to 60Hz, this animation is very nice and fast.

But if I do 144Hz, it becomes much slower.

Not only that, I can't start clicking something on the space that I'm switching to until it fully finishes the animation.

It only starts registering the click once it's fully finished.

This is probably a thing that 99% of people would never notice, but it's been annoying me for so long.

Also, I love that on Linux, you can just slide a slider and increase or decrease the speed of all animations.

I would love for this slider to be in macOS.

Having two instances of the same app open.

I've gotten used to this now, but on macOS, when you have multiple instances of the same app open, like here two Chrome windows, you can't really see that in the dock unless you right-click.

On Windows, you just hover over an app and you see what you have open.

And this is just inconvenient.

At first, I kept losing all my windows because they just wouldn't show up in the dock.

By the way, if you like the wallpapers I'm using, they're from one of my wallpaper packs.

I'll leave a link in the description.

I also had an issue where the battery would drain insanely fast when my Mac was closed.

Sometimes faster than when I was using it.

But this Reddit post helped me solve it.

It had to do with changing some sleep settings through the terminal.

Okay, so far I've talked about macOS, which is the same across every Apple laptop.

But now let's talk about this laptop in particular.

Starting things off is the screen.

It's so good.

Much better than the MacBook Air model or anything else that I've seen.

First, the blacks are insane.

Once I started using it, I realized that on every other monitor I have, the blacks are grey.

But on this screen, they're really black.

Obviously, you won't see how black through this video if your monitor isn't OLED.

It's not perfect though, because if I set my screen brightness to very high, there's a slight halo around bright colors on a dark background, like the mouse cursor or subtitles when watching a movie.

But there are two more things about this screen that I love.

The first is the refresh rate.

All MacBook Air models come with a 60Hz screen, meaning that your display updates the image that you're seeing 60 times per second.

But the MacBook Pro models come with a ProMotion screen, 120Hz variable refresh rate.

Now if you've never gamed on a high refresh rate monitor, or you've never used one before, this probably won't matter to you.

But to me, a high refresh rate makes the experience so much nicer.

All the animations, the scrolling, and the cursor movement look so much smoother.

By the way, if you're on Windows, go to Display Settings, then Advanced Display, and make sure that this is set to the highest amount, because it's not by default.

You might have bought a high refresh rate monitor, and you might still be using it at 60Hz.

Double check.

And the next thing I love about this screen is the resolution.

Paired with Apple's display scaling, it makes everything look super sharp on the screen.

Screen recordings look so good on it as well.

When I do long tutorials for things like lessons for my YouTube course, I usually choose to do it on a Mac, just because the screen recordings turn out very nice.

It's also super easy to record the screen.

You hit Command-Shift-5, Enter, and there it is, it's recording.

The speakers.

Watching movies or listening to music on this thing is great.

The speakers sound nice and bassy even when you turn up the volume.

And all other laptop speakers that I've listened to are just so far behind MacBook speakers.

The microphone.

Up until I got this microphone a few months ago, I've done most of my voiceovers for videos and courses on the built-in MacBook's microphone.

It's not the most comfortable experience talking so close to the screen, but it sounds not bad for a built-in laptop microphone.

Oh look, there's a spider on the wall.

Oh look, there's a spider on the wall.

Oh look, there's a spider on the wall.

The MacBook's microphone sounds a bit more muffled than the dedicated one, obviously it's not as good, but it managed to carry me through most of my YouTube videos.

This is the quietest computer I've ever owned.

I never appreciated the silence until I tried using a Mac and then came back to my Windows laptop.

It's night and day difference, in terms of noise levels, because everyone's asleep at night.

The battery life.

It's great.

Although I have to say that I mostly use my Mac with a cable plugged in, or a cable nearby that I can use to juice back up.

I haven't benchmarked the battery, but it lasts enough for my needs, even when I'm editing videos.

After 2 years of use, mostly with a cable, my battery is at 90% of its original capacity.

I also use an app called Aldente that lets me limit how much my battery can charge up to.

Just FYI, they've been a channel sponsor in the past.

But I genuinely use this app and I would definitely recommend it.

I'll leave a link in the description.

I also love that I never have to shut the MacBook down and I can trust that when I close it and open it back up again, everything will be exactly the same as I left it.

All the apps still open and I can resume doing whatever I was doing before.

Using Windows always gives me anxiety when I try waking it up from sleep.

The trackpad is simply amazing.

I haven't used the newest Windows laptops with apparently good trackpads to compare them, but I can say that even for me, who's a heavy mouse enjoyer, this trackpad is great.

But stuff, sorry, but stuff like video editing in Premiere or very long work sessions are just better suited for a mouse because your finger gets tired and it's faster doing it with a mouse.

However, if I need to make a quick thumbnail or if I'm too lazy to get up from the bed and move to the table, I might not even bother connecting a mouse and use a trackpad.

It doesn't have any buttons and you can click on it anywhere to get this satisfying haptic feedback when it registers a click.