I currently split time between a 15" rMBP and a few Windows 7 machines and to be honest, I prefer the time on my Windows 7 machines despite many downsides.

Every few years I'll have a go at going Mac (this is try #3) and they'll all sort of peter out and I'll end up back in Windows.

I think this current go around has been the most successful, I love my rMBP hardware. And the work that Apple has put into making touchpads actually useful (both with hardware and software) is miraculous. The keyboards are nice typing experiences (I'm more mixed on the magic mouse). It's also an awesome portable virtualization platform that I've had 4 or 5 Linux VMs all up and running like a champ on it. Multiple workspaces are usually awesome, I keep several workspaces for different semantic parts of my day and the flow is really nice. Airdrop is magic.

For the most part things just work.

To try and make it really stick, I went cold turkey for the better part of 9 months and didn't touch a Windows machine.

But then, small frustrations and irritations finally built up and I recently just built myself a new Windows 7 computer and pretty much use it for all of my day-to-day with my Mac sitting in a travel bag for when I need to go on the road. What is it that keeps pushing me back? I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is and sorta have it narrowed down to a few user scenarios: Here's 1 line of reasoning:

1. When I'm using my Mac, I find I try and avoid actually interacting with OS X as much as possible. I spend all of my time in Office, a web browser, a console window or a virtualized linux machine and that gets me through 95% of my day.

2. Digging in deeper and I find that OS X, while having some nice bits here and there (as discussed above), is so full of so many clumsy frustrations that I've never really been able to get over the feeling of reduced productivity when I'm dealing with it. I've realized that I deal with this by simply avoiding doing the things that frustrate or irritate me. Some of this probably stems from me not wanting to do things the prescribed "Apple way" and wanting to do it my own way. But it's irritating enough that I want to get away from the entire system after any extended interaction with the OS bits.

3. By and large this is focused on Finder (there's other issues, but Finder is the biggest problem I have), which is probably the single worst file manager I've used in 30 years of computing, and no amount of "getting used to it" seems to alleviate the simple fact that it sucks. I've tried a couple replacements, but they all seem to scratch some small itch and nothing really comes close to the magical file management wonderland that is the Windows 7 Explorer. It's so bad that even after a solid year with my Mac I still can't reliably predict where a new folder is going to be created. I know this makes me sound impossibly dumb, but these kinds of simple file management interface problems have been solved everywhere else. Even the various Linux file managers work better and more reliably. I would be so much more interested in staying on my Mac if I knew I could manage files without feeling like I was poking around a dark damp hole trying to sort through and pick up grains of rice with my elbows. I could go on for pages ranting about the abortion of ideas that is Finder, but let's just conclude that I hate it.

4. I realized that one of the reasons I spend so much time in a terminal then is because managing files form the command line is better! (the other reason I'm in the command line is so I can ssh into my linux VMs)

5. so if most of what I'm doing is Chrome, Office, ssh and Linux via VirtualBox, which are essentially equivalent experiences in OS X or Windows, and then doing OS things like moving files around works better in Windows, why should I still use my Mac?

I've come up with other lines of reasoning:

- all of the media production tools I personally work with have emphasized Windows development over Mac development for a while or no Mac equivalent exists at all.

- retrocomputing and retrogaming, which I have a deep personal interest in, has a far richer ecosystem under Windows and the tools that have version for both OSs tend to work better in Windows. Also moving around and organizing tens of thousands of files related to this hobby is much better under Windows

- another hobby, photography, I shoot thousands upon thousands of photos and haven't met an photo organizing tool I like, so I manage everything on the filesystem, which again means I'm avoiding finder

- Until Mavericks, multi-monitor support with full-screen apps was broken, and there's no excuse for it. None. Maximize was solved in Windows 3.0. 23 years ago

- OS X seems to keep growing interface hair, meaning what started as simple elegant design slowly accumulated feature cruft until the design is no longer simple or elegant and the design wasn't really flexible enough to accommodate this growing interface hair. Witness the madness around the resizing window buttons in OS X. But all the various crap that shows up in my menubar vs. sometimes in my dock vs. sometimes nowhere but ps, etc. Or the haphazard combinations of modifier hotkey combinations that don't really carryover between apps, a legacy of the one-button mouse movement which is now just vestigial, but now means I have to keep track of which combination of shift, fn, control, option and command to use in some combination before I even think about what button I need to push to modify some other key to do some menial task that's standard and two buttons in Windows.

- Even after taking hundreds of screen shots over the last year, I still have to lookup the madness of screen capture in OS X every single time I sit down to take more screen shots. Here's a 3 page article on it. http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/13/print-screen-mac/ Sure I don't get a "prt scr" key on the keyboard, but I get half a dozen key modifier keys and an eject key. I'll sometimes just put off the task till I get home and just do it in Windows it's so irritating.

- There's no paint program that ships with OS X. Boggles the mind.

- Having to buy and install tons of little apps to "fix" some broken or poorly designed behavior in the default apps that ship with the OS. This isn't like buying photoshop because it fixed paint. Photoshop is a different level entirely to paint. This is like iTerm2 which is almost exactly like, but just fixes a few things and adds a couple things to iTerm. And this kind of drop-in replacement cancer permeates the entire Mac experience. There's entire ecosystems of slightly different replacements for the default apps, and it's entirely expected that setting up a new mac will involve hunting these down and installing them to replace the broken stuff that the OS ships with. I'm really just exhausted of both this process and the attitude that this is a perfectly normal and sane thing to do. It's not, the OS is shipped broken and Apple needs to fix this stuff.

- Video performance is noticeably better in Windows. I'm not sure what it is, but I find my Mac has lots of little screen-tearing issues, and watching full-screen video on it just isn't as snappy (using VLC on both) as it was on my 6 year old Windows box (before I built my current one).

- Things usually just work in OS X. But when they don't you enter a world of mystery that goes as deep as a computer science degree can take you. In Windows, these days things also more or less just work, but when they don't, there's a kind of expectation in the design that you're likely to have an issue so there's all sorts of good error reporting and resolution paths to try and exhaust before even having to start searching forums for advice.

- I need to read NTFS volumes frequently and OS X's default NTFS compatibility sucks and the fixes are out of date and don't work very well either. In contrast, I've never had to read an HFS (or whatever Apple journaled blah blah file system) volume.

- no dedicated page up/down home or end keys. I use those keys all the time. Why are they gone? It's irritating having to hunt down a modifier key and an arrow and hope that you figured out the magic combination that's "home".

- I can't multi-tab drag in Chrome. I drag groups of tabs around in Windows all the time. Doesn't work in OS X.

- minimized windows are a pain to bring up. Therefore I don't minimize in OS X. The dock (especially when auto-hid) is flaky and won't show up half the time. The delay for when it does feel like popping up when my mouse is down at the bottom of the screen feels entirely random.

- I don't like any of the text editors I've tried. I just end up in vi in iterm. But I really want a good text editor.

- VNC is not a suitable remote desktop solution compared to RDP. It's just not. I Remote into half a dozen machines over the course of a day and wish I had a decent way to remote into my Mac that wasn't VNC.

- and more and more and more

I'm sure there are built in solutions I'm overlooking, or some app I can install that fixes this or modifies that, or some setting that makes something behave better than the default. But the point is that outside of applications that exist on both platforms equally, I'm avoiding or annoyed with everything else on the platform. I'm committed to sticking it out and have even resolved to spend more time on my mac - especially post-Mavericks. But it's just not a better computing experience for me. It's interesting and it's different, and it makes me yearn for certain things that windows doesn't have (multiple workspaces), but when the equivalent functions work better in Windows I'm forced to choose the easier and less frustrating environment to spend time in.