I've made it no secret that I love the Mac Mini and generally prefer macOS to Windows in many ways. But that's not to say macOS is perfect — in fact, it's far from it. There are some aspects of the operating system that just make no sense for a desktop device.

If Apple truly wants macOS to be better than Windows, something has to change, and I have some ideas. Here are just a few things that will go a long way in making macOS better than Windows.

6 More permissive security

Stop asking for my password

One of the many things I don't really understand with macOS is its overzealous approach to security. I mean, to some extent, yes, more security is great. But one thing that always rubs me the wrong way is the fact that I constantly have to enter my password to do totally mundane things. If I want to install a free app from the App Store, I need a password. If I need to install a system update, the same thing.

There are too many little things that require me to enter my password on macOS, and what's even weirder is that sometimes you need your Mac's password, and sometimes you need the Apple ID password, which are different things. The examples I just mentioned require a different password for each thing, and if you have a MacBook that supports Touch ID, it feels even weirder considering some things work with Touch ID and others still require you to type your password.

5 More seamless permissions

Do I really need to restart an app to share my screen?

Another problem I occasionally run into with macOS is that apps that require certain permissions need to be restarted in order for those permissions to work, and that can be frustrating when we're talking about permissions like sharing your screen. No one wants to get in a meeting, try to share their screen, and then realize they have to first leave the meeting in order to be able to do it.

This is a fairly small issue considering it should only happen once for each app, and I imagine most people will use the same apps almost all the time, but it's still annoying at times. Just make it easier to grant permissions to apps without needing to restart them, please.

4 Improved image editing tools

Some basics are missing

Editing screenshots on macOS is a mixed bag compared to Windows, but the potential is there for something really great. What's strange is that I feel like macOS fails at the more basic stuff while handling more complex tasks better.

For example, the Snipping Tool in Windows 11 offers an easy way to censor personal information such as emails and phone numbers thanks to text recognition, so when I take a screenshot, I can easily hide that kind of info. Another easy feature to use in Windows 11 is cropping images to a specific aspect ratio and then choosing a size that adheres to that ratio. I've been told multiple times Preview can also do this, but I've tried it over and over again to no avail.

These two features feel like they'd be complete no-brainers, especially the latter, so I'm very surprised it can't be done, especially when preview is so good at other editing features like drawing arrows or boxes over screenshots.

3 A proper app launcher

Launchpad is just not good

I know people love to complain about the Start menu on Windows 11, but have you ever tried using the macOS equivalent? Launchpad is an absolutely terrible app launcher for a desktop OS and it feels like it was born out of sheer laziness. It launches to take up the entire screen, similar to the home screen on an iPhone or iPad, except the screen is much bigger now and there's no touchscreen, so navigating this UI is far more time-consuming than it needs to be. It feels like Apple just ported the interface from iOS, and what makes that more obvious is that you can't even right-click anything in this menu. The only additional action available is deleting or dragging an app, and for that, you click and hold until the icons start shaking — just like on iOS.

And that's just on a laptop with a relatively standard display. On a desktop, this UI is even worse. I have a 49-inch 32:9 ultrawide monitor, and there is so much wasted space in this UI, as you can see above. Giant padding areas on each side of the app list, plus way more space between icons than there needs to be. There's no good reason why this interface needs to take over the entire screen and do as little as it does. Make it a flyout menu at the very least — even Chrome OS gets that right.

2 Better window management

It's a mess in multiple ways

Many times, it doesn't feel like macOS is designed with productivity in mind at all, and window management is a perfect example of that. There's so much wrong with managing windows on macOS that it's hard to know where to start. First, there's the dock, which shows icons of all your open apps, but it's not like on Windows where you can easily see your open windows. No, you have to right-click an app icon to see all the windows it has open, and if there is a windows you minimized, it's shown separately from the app icon.

This problem extends to the window switcher you can use with Command + Tab. Again, this only switches between apps, but if you have an app with multiple windows open, it doesn't let you choose a specific window. There's a different keyboard shortcut for moving between the open windows of your active app, which is so much more cumbersome.

But there's another aspect of window management that macOS is bad at: laying out windows on the screen. Windows has been doing multitasking better for a long time, but Windows 11 really upped the ante with Snap Layouts, which make it easy to snap up to four apps side-by-side and easily resize and arrange them on screen. macOS only recently made it possible to snap apps to half of the screen, but that's still so much more limited. Not to mention there's no way to resize both apps in one go, so if you want a split that's different from 50-50, you need to resize both windows manually. Multitasking is just a pain on macOS if you don't use any third-party apps.

1 Easily accessible menus

The menu bar isn't perfect

The menu bar is one of the core concepts of macOS, and I kind of like how it provides both a unified way to offer app menus and also include all kinds of app badges and information without taking up a lot of space. It feels very efficient in terms of space, but there is one big problem: the actual menus for apps.

See, app menus are shown in the menu bar in the top left corner of the screen, and that's always the case. On a laptop, this makes some sense since the screen is smaller and it's likely you're using apps in full screen anyway, so the menu is in the position you'd expect. But on a large screen, this leaves the menu way too far out of reach, and it requires much more time to get to the option you want.

I think Apple could solve this in a couple of ways without just copying windows. Maybe the app menus could move along the menu bar so they're always aligned with the app window. It would look awkward, but it would work a bit better. Or maybe you can set the menus to appear directly above the app window when hovering the window controls, or by holding a specific key on the keyboard. It would make things a lot easier.

macOS has some things to learn

At the end of the day, I still really enjoy using macOS, but I've modified it with third-party apps that make it work much better for me, so it's important to acknowledge the flaws the OS itself still has. I do prefer using macOS in many ways, but if Apple wants to win the hearts of more Windows users, at least these features need to change or be added soon. There's probably a lot more you can think of, but these are the most obvious picks for me.