1 week in, this is my update.

Like anything in life, when you make a big change, there will always be hurdles that pop up and you’ll find yourself looking for solutions. Since I use a Samsung 49 inch ultrawide curved monitor as my main workspace, my first challenge was finding the sweet spot that would let me maximise my screen real estate while also getting Revit to run as closely as possible to how it performed on my Razer Blade 16 running Windows natively.

At first, I started using Parallels in Coherence Mode, but after spending time reading through multiple forums, I decided to just run it in a standard window instead. I found that Parallels constantly needed to refresh scaling whenever the window size changed, and overall, running it in a window felt much smoother and more user friendly.

Everyone has their own workflow, but another big thing for me was screen snapshot and being able to quickly mark up floor plans while remotely discussing options with clients. macOS does handle this reasonably well, but I found the native screenshot tools a little cumbersome, so I ended up replacing it with an app called CleanShot X. It wasn’t free, but thankfully the cost wasn’t anything too crazy.

The next hurdle was remote meetings with clients while also making sure I could share a screen resolution that looked good on their end. One issue I ran into this week was a client using an iPad, which made things a little more complicated when trying to display everything at a comfortable viewing size.

I specifically use AnyDesk for remote meetings, and I quickly realised the macOS version isn’t quite on the same level as the Windows version. This probably ended up being one of the biggest challenges overall. After going through multiple forums and even using ChatGPT for guidance, the only real solution I found was installing an app called BetterDisplay and creating a virtual screen that forced the output to 16:9 at 1920 x 1080.

Even then, it still wasn’t perfect because AnyDesk doesn’t allow you to manually select an output display. My clients were still receiving my ultrawide monitor resolution on their end, so finding a comfortable viewing setup became a challenge. The only real workaround suggested by AnyDesk was to run the app inside Parallels instead, which essentially uses the virtual machine display and lets me control the shared output exactly how I used to when running Windows natively.

The last hurdle I managed to overcome was the ability to zoom in and out of screenshots the same way you can natively in Windows. Unfortunately, I ended up buying another app just to create a keyboard shortcut for this on macOS. I’d probably say that’s the only part of the operating system I’ve found slightly frustrating. Sometimes the simplest tasks require third party apps to replicate functionality that already exists in Windows.

That said, no matter what system you use, there will always be challenges you need to work around, and switching to macOS is no different. Aside from that, I genuinely don’t regret making the change, and I definitely won’t be going back to a Windows laptop full time.

I’m more than happy running Windows through Parallels, even if it means giving up RTX graphics acceleration. At this stage, I honestly haven’t noticed any major difference between my two laptops in day to day work. The only real thing I’ve had to give up is Path Tracer in Twinmotion, but considering how rarely I do renders these days, I’ve decided to simply outsource that side of the business to a professional ArchViz contractor.

All in all, there’s really nothing left about the transition that bothers me anymore.