Because of its flawless interaction with other Apple devices and services, speedy performance, elegant appearance, and intuitive design, macOS—Apple’s operating system for Mac computers—has amassed a devoted user following.
All of that contributes to what is still widely regarded as a premium user experience, although the operating system still has several shortcomings. While this isn’t exclusive to macOS, there are still several places in which the operating system might be strengthened. Apple doesn’t even need to search very far for ideas; it can simply borrow a few ideas from Microsoft’s Windows platform.
Here, we talk about three features and capabilities that we’d love to see in a future macOS release that are present in Windows, Microsoft’s desktop operating system: window snapping, a clipboard history, and (a very important one) further development of Apple’s gaming support, where Microsoft is still clearly in the lead.
Window snapping for better organization
Many Windows users have grown accustomed to window snapping because it makes it simple to organise and control open windows on the desktop. You can utilise one of several predefined grid patterns that Microsoft’s OS offers, which allow windows to “snap” into place. Among them are:
1.Side-by-side, making it easier to compare the contents of two windows
2.Quarter-view, separating your screen into four quadrants that you can populate
3.Custom layouts, in which you can customize how you divide up the screen
Other features include Snap Groups, which organise content based on several open windows from the same app, and Snap Assist, which lets you move a window to the edge of the screen to see where it will snap to. This eliminates the need to manually resize windows, making it simpler to swiftly arrange them.
Because it lets you view the last 25 items you’ve copied—regardless of whether you pasted or saved them elsewhere—Clipboard History is quite popular among Windows users. It keeps track of every text, HTML, and image that you’ve lately copied. Newer entries are pushed to the front, and older entries are eventually removed. Moreover, Clipboard History resets every time your computer restarts unless you pin an entry, in which case it remains pinned at the top of the list and is always accessible.
It is necessary to enable Clipboard History, which you may access by pressing Windows Key + V on your keyboard.
It’s available for Windows 10 and Windows 11, and once it’s enabled, you can interact with the items in the list, and select any item to paste it into an open application. You can also manually delete items you don’t want in your Clipboard History.
Although it’s less than Windows’, macOS does have its own clipboard memory. The only thing macOS has to provide in terms of clipboard memory capability is the ability to read the text that was most recently copied or the file name of a recently copied file.
For further functionality, there are workarounds and third-party apps, but it would be great if macOS could do this automatically.
Making Macs better gaming machines
Apple can do more to help catch up with the better gaming experience available on Windows, even though Macs already come with a feature called Game Mode that helps to make gaming more fluid by optimising your Mac’s performance.
The fact that there are less games accessible than on Windows is a typical complaint because many game companies will either not build a version for Mac at all or will make one much later due to the difficulty of adapting to Mac hardware. With the availability of M3 and even M4 Apple silicon (found in iPads and likely coming soon to Macs), Apple and game developers may be more inclined to improve the gaming experience.
I hope Apple embraces this strategy more fully because it has been making hardware and software changes that may make it simpler for game creators to port their games to the Mac. Furthermore, as previously indicated, the M4 chip for Macs is on the horizon, so we should expect even greater emulation performance for games that support it.
The Vision Pro was greatly anticipated when the firm unveiled it, and many were pleased with its capabilities. If Apple continues to enhance the Vision Pro’s gaming capabilities—which I think would be a lost opportunity—it might increase its experience in creating gaming devices, which it might then use to improve other Apple products, such as Macs.
Driving macOS momentum
Although there are good reasons for the devoted users of Apple products and macOS, there is still opportunity for development that may significantly improve the macOS user experience—something that Apple takes great pride in.
With gaming becoming a staple form of entertainment on par with anything else, I hope Apple will step up its efforts to improve the Mac gaming experience, which seems entirely possible.
Apple can do more to entice users of other operating systems, like Windows, to switch to macOS and further accelerate its momentum, even if it has achieved impressive progress in both software and hardware.
