When comparing Elementary OS vs macOS, the Slant community recommends Elementary OS for most people. In the question“What is the best laptop OS?” Elementary OS is ranked 17th while macOS is ranked 25th. The most important reason people chose Elementary OS is:
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Pro Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
Pro Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
Pro If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
Pro Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
Pro Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
Pro Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
Pro Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Pro A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
Pro With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
Pro Polished UI
The UI of Mac OS is rather unrivaled. The smooth, responsive, and cohesive UI makes the system quite joyous to use.
Pro Based on Unix
macOS being a UNIX certified system means that you can install a lot more stuff with a lot fewer headaches than if you were on Windows.
Pro Easy access to lots of great dev tools
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Pro Powerful terminal
It's very similar to a Linux terminal.
Pro Best support for Objective-C
Pro More commercial software and gaming support compared to other Unix systems
Adobe CC, MS Office, Steam games.
Pro Has many special tools for developers
Has support for multiple IDEs.
Pro Lots of open-source software available
Because it's Unix under the fancy GUI, most open source ports easily to it.
Pro Ideal setup, out of the box
Next to no custom configuration is necessary.
Pro Great Git GUI tools
Tower, Kaleidoscope, SourceTree.
Pro Has software that only runs on Mac
For example, Sketch.
Pro Streamlined workflow between devices
Because this is an Apple product, there is a streamlined workflow between your computer and all mobile devices. For example, if you type an a Pages document, once you save, you can open the updated document just moments later on your iPad, and vice versa. The same goes for iMessage, (yes, you can text people with your phone number from your computer. Actually, you can text other people with apple devices with just your Apple ID, with or without a phone number, for free!) Numbers, Notes, Reminders, Contacts, and just about any other Apple workflow application.
Pro Great modifier key layout
Pro Using VMware you can also run Windows 10 on the Mac
This is useful for testing and some development tools that are Windows-only (XML Spy, MapForce).
Pro You need it to compile macOS or iOS apps
Cons
Con UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
Con Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
Con Outdated or bad default applications
Con Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
Con Quite buggy
Con Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
Con Not very configurable
Con The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
Con Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
Con Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
Con Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
Con Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
Con Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
Con Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
Con No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
Con Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
Con Boring UI
It can be very boring.
Con Expensive
OSX is tied Apple hardware and Apple hardware tends to be expensive for what it gives.
Con Limited hardware
Usually, the hardware that can run this can't be upgraded.
Con Most software is closed source
For people who like to use open source tools for their development work, this may be a problem. There's plenty of advantages to open source software, one of which is the ability to tinker with and customize the tools themselves that you are using. Although there's plenty of FOSS tools available for Mac, especially through Homebrew, the number of packages available is much lower than the number of packages available for any Linux distribution.
Con Closed source
Mac OS is closed source itself, which means that it is developed more slowly and has more problems.
Con No native package management
A comparison of package managers available for OSX can be found here.
Con Poor application support
Fewer apps run on Mac OS than on Windows or Linux.
Con Bash version is obsolete
macOS comes with an obsolete version of Bash, due to licensing issues.
Con Vendor-Lock-in
You are now forced to use the Apple services.
Con Silly modifier keys layout
The Command key is strange, Alt is where Super should be.
Con Poor X11 integration
The most open source software does work but is very poorly integrated due apples ancient version of the X-server.