5 native Windows features I desperately miss on my Mac

Published Jul 25, 2026, 8:30 AM EDT Adam has a degree in Engineering and has a life-long interest in technology. He has been writing for over a decade for various print and online publications, with a focus on consumer tech. He joined How-To Geek in 2024 while working at Pocket-lint. As well as being a long-term fan of Apple products, he also has a strong interest in smart home tech, running a Home Assistant server at home to automate all his smart home devices. He believes that the ideal smart home should work with minimal interaction from the user, with automations running as if by magic rather than requiring you to push buttons on a control panel. You can find more of his work on Muck Rack. I used Windows for many years before switching to macOS, and I still regularly use Windows on a laptop and in virtual machines. Switching between the two often makes me wish that my Mac had some of the native features of Windows. Volume controls per app macOS still lacks a proper volume mixer This is such a useful feature, and it's something that's still sorely lacking on macOS. There's no reason why you should necessarily want the sound level for all your apps to be the same. If you're listening to Spotify while on a Zoom call, for example, you might want to lower the Spotify volume a little and increase the Zoom volume, so you can hear what's being said but still be able to enjoy the music. On Windows, it's trivial, since a system-wide volume mixer has been a thing since Vista. Open the mixer from the taskbar, move a couple of sliders, and you have the exact volume you want for each app. On macOS, there's no such luck. The volume control changes the volume for every app, and you can't modify the volume on a per-app basis. If an app doesn't have its own volume controls, the system-wide volume is the only thing you can change. There are utilities you can install that solve the problem. Having to install third-party apps to reproduce a feature that's been native in Windows for nearly 20 years is a little annoying. Alt+Tab for windows, not just apps Getting to the window you want is more work Switching between windows is something I do a lot, especially on my MacBook Air. I'm surprised my Cmd and Tab keys haven't worn through. Using Cmd+Tab is far more annoying than using Alt+Tab on Windows. The difference is that Cmd+Tab on macOS switches between apps, while Alt+Tab on Windows switches between windows. If I have five Finder windows open, for example, Cmd+Tab lets me select Finder, but it doesn’t let me choose which Finder window I want. I then have to select the window using Cmd+`. On Windows, Alt+Tab takes me through all the available windows. If I have five File Explorer windows open, Alt+Tab lets me go through them and select the exact window I need using a single key combination. Having to switch from Cmd+Tab to Cmd+` on macOS is just annoying, especially since Cmd+` is far more awkward to reach. Customizable window management Anywhere you want as long as it's a half or quarter To be fair to macOS, window tiling has gotten much better in recent years. You can now snap windows to a handful of preset positions without having to rely on third-party solutions. It's still miles behind Windows, however. With macOS, you can drag windows to the edges or corners of the screen to position them, but the built-in options are largely limited to halves, quarters, and filling the screen. With Windows, you get a lot more predefined layouts that you can use without having to make any adjustments yourself. Even more useful is the ability to define your own reusable zones using Microsoft’s free PowerToys utility, so that you can have your windows exactly where you want them. This is at least a Microsoft solution; macOS requires a third-party tool to offer this level of customization. Clipboard history If I want it, I have to put up with the awful design Before you dash to the comments to point out that macOS does now have native clipboard history, read the title of this article again. These are all features "my Mac" still can't do natively, because I'm still running macOS Sequoia. It's the first time I can remember that I haven't updated to the current version of macOS, but the whole Liquid Glass debacle was enough to put me off. So, while macOS Tahoe did finally add clipboard history to the Mac, I still don't have it. Instead, I have to rely on third-party solutions, and while using Raycast makes accessing clipboard history a breeze, it's still annoying that it took Apple so long to add it. In comparison, Windows has had native clipboard history since 2018. At some point I will update my Mac's OS, but for now, I'm still lacking it. NTFS write support My Mac still can't write one of the most popular filesystems Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek Okay, so this one is a little mean. Apple has its own native filesystem, and Windows can't write that, so why am I complaining about macOS not being able to write NTFS, the default filesystem for Windows? The reason is that NTFS is one of the most widely used filesystems, and it's commonly used on external drives as well as Windows computers. If someone hands me a Windows-formatted external hard drive, it's likely to be NTFS. My Mac can read that hard drive just fine, but if I want to add some files to it and hand it back, I can't do it without additional tools. While exFAT is supported by both Windows and macOS, there are still times when I want to write to a drive in NTFS format, and my Mac just can't do it. Windows isn't perfect This isn't to say that macOS sucks, and Windows is ideal. There's a lot to love about macOS. If you only ever use a Mac, you probably wouldn't miss these features at all. It's only when you've used them on Windows that the lack of similar features in macOS really becomes obvious.