The 5 Mac apps that keep me from moving to Windows

This year will long be remembered as the year Windows PC makers fought back. Qualcomm first kicked off the AI PC era with the Snapdragon X Elite, and then Intel responded with the Lunar Lake platform.

For the first time nearly a decade, I’ve found myself tempted to return to Windows. But there’s still one problem: the app gap.

While Windows now offers many of my favorite apps, there are a few of the best Mac apps left that I use every day that keep me from fully embracing Windows.

PDF Expert

One of my favorite app makers is Readdle, which makes the popular Spark Mailbox desktop app. I formerly used Spark — until I started paying for Superhuman. But I still use one Readdle app every day: PDF Expert. As the name suggests, it provides expert tools to manipular PDFs.

It syncs across your iPad, iPhone, and Mac so you can use saved signatures on any device. This means it’s easy to add a signature using the Apple Pencil on an iPad and then use the same signature on your iPhone or Mac. It’s also effortless to edit the contents of a PDF, annotate it, or fill out a form.

I fill in and sign a lot of PDFs, and for the most part, I do these on my iPhone faster than I can on a PC. However, there are times that I need a bigger display, and while I can use Acrobat on a PC, it doesn’t save all my signatures and settings, or have a cloud library for me to access later. As far as utility goes, it’s one of the first apps I installed on my Mac, and it’s the one that I’ve been missing the most on PCs.

Parcel

Closely following is Parcel, another Apple-only app — although this one also has a web interface. Simply put, it’s the best way to track any parcel, anywhere in the world. I’ve tracked thousands of parcels since buying the app a decade ago, and it’s one of the reasons I also use an iPhone every day.

For a PC user, the web interface provides many of the same features but misses the key parts. Instead of needing to navigate to a website, the native app for Mac brings all the information to you, allows you to get notifications with updates, and offers desktop widgets. It’s a very simple app, but it works near-flawlessly, making it the ideal background resource.

While I understand why some Mac apps aren’t launched as Windows apps, I think there’s a strong opportunity here for the developer to expand its user base.

There’s also automatic tracking of your Amazon deliveries, which instantly increases its appeal for hundreds of millions of potential customers. Unlike most apps, it doesn’t require many resources either.

Alfred

One of the other first things I do on a new Mac is disable Spotlight in favor of Alfred. I’ve been using Alfred for almost a decade, and it’s an integral part of my workflow. It’s the ideal way to perform quick actions, look up information, open an app, or even put my Mac to sleep, all with a couple of taps on the keyboard.

Alfred can be best described as a feature-rich version of Windows Search on a PC or Spotlight on the Mac. It features a simple UI with a ton of options to customize the results or actions, and it learns your usage to ensure that the shortcut recommendations it provides are the ones you use most frequently.

Unlike many apps, I love that there’s no recurring charge. It costs $10 as a one-off fee, and it’s the best app you can buy. Imagine having shortcuts to virtually everything on a Mac, and you have Alfred. This one will likely never come to Windows, which is a shame.

MindNode

I like to build spider diagrams to help visualize complex relationships, especially when I’m evaluating a business and the various paths it can take. I’ve tested numerous different apps, but the one that I always come back to is MindNode.

There are lots of alternatives for Windows, but given that I also use a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad, I would much rather that MindNode was cross-platform. This is particularly true for the iPad and Mac integration, as I often build a mind map on the Mac and then edit it on the go on the iPad.

MindNode isn’t the easiest app to use, and there are a lot of alternatives. Many of these may be better in some ways, especially as MindNode has switched to an annual subscription model. That said, it’s still my platform of choice for building these complex diagrams.

Final Cut Pro

I saved the best for last; I’m so invested in the Mac ecosystem that I use Final Cut Pro X for editing videos. Crucially, while alternatives exist for Windows — like DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro — my Final Cut Pro library contains thousands of motion graphics, templates, and fonts that I would need to rebuy for Windows.

Both of those programs are also available on the Mac, but as I’ve never switched over, Final Cut Pro has me locked into using a Mac, at least for editing videos while docked at my Mac. The integration of iCloud Drive is also better on a Mac — although it is very good on a PC — and features like AirDrop make it hard to give up a Mac, at least for part of my usage.

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