[morley]

I'm a frontend dev who worked on Windows for 4 years, and switched to Mac in the last 2.

The biggest hurdle I had with switching was the muscle memory of cmd-[char] vs. ctrl-[char], and tangentially the Windows-specific productivity keyboard shortcuts (mainly win-[char]) and Mac-specific ones.

The second-biggest hurdle is the different mouse movement kinetics on each platform.

These are still "hurdles": I have a Macbook at work, and a Macbook Air and Windows desktop at home. I basically can't do external keyboard + mouse at work for fear of screwing up my muscle memory for when I use my Windows desktop.

All this to say, it's not the camera, graphics card, detachable screen, or whatever is highlighted on this page that makes the switch hard. It's the low level stuff.

[Meegul]

As a dev that frequently works on different linux distros, mac, and Windows, I recommend just getting used to disabling mouse acceleration. That is, if you're using a mouse. On a touchpad, I'd never recommend that, but if you're mouse-only then it makes the transition between the three os's fairly seamless.

[jacobolus]

If you want to do that you need to get a very sensitive mouse with the sensitivity cranked up (so that you can move the mouse across a large screen, something especially important on a Mac where menus are pegged to the top of the screen), and train yourself to make very careful tiny movements when you need precision. For a Mac user used to making relatively large but slow mouse movements for precision, this is definitely doable, but takes some significant retraining effort.

Personally what I’d love to do is disable acceleration on the computer side, and have my own hardware intermediary between the mouse and the computer, on which I can implement whatever sensor input -> pixel movement logic I want. For example, having a button to hold down for more precise movement, and another button to hold down to convert movement to scrolling.

[jacobolus]

External mouse movement curve differences are distracting on a desktop, but the difference 100% breaks trying to use windows laptops, for me. Doesn’t help that the PC laptop touchpads also tend to have worse hardware response and worse texture feel. It’s a similar UI gap for me as trying to type an essay on a 4 inch phone screen.

[KurtMueller]

Surface Book has a pretty good trackpad... but the Macbook Pro is still best in class.

At this point though, I don't think it's hardware - it's the ui that keeps me from really loving Windows 10 on the Surface Book. Windows 10 doesn't allow me to natively enable three-finger window drag. It's also cumbersome to full screen my apps (e.g. my editor, terminal, etc) on Windows 10 in order to swipe back and forth through them.