I just helped a friend who is a lifetime windows user set up her new MBP M1. I was reminded how un-intuitive things are and how useful UI elements are hidden in the name of "simplicity". A lot of it for her is centered around the finder and accessing files in general.
The two biggest issues she had was:
1) finder not easily acting as an image viewer. Eg, she had an SD card from her camera, and wanted to quickly scan through the photos and decide what to keep and what to throw away. The problem was that it took a while to find a view where finder showed images ( think it was called "icon view") and once we found that, it took a while to expose a hidden ui element that we could use to make the images larger.
2) "open file" dialog boxes don't show your home directory by default. She'd have a file in /Users/name/folder and the open file dialog would only show Documents, Pictures, etc, and not her home directory. I finally helped her make symlinks from folders that the file dialog deigned to show her to where she really wanted to go. But why is there no "home" view?
1) Just use [spacebar] on any view to open up the image in spotlight?
The problem with the mac is that much has been done on top of older patterns, etc....
If you're a hardcore user though, I'd take Mac over windows or linux any day.
I've used Macs since 1988, and had no idea this hidden feature existed!
UI features don't just need to work well, they also need to be discoverable, or they might as well not exist. The old school Apple was good at that stuff. Recent decades, not so much.
PS Thanks for teaching me this trick!