marurun wrote:Yes, the cost of a Mac is largely what has kept me out of the Mac OS ecosystem. And while many can and will argue that based solely on stats like CPU power and available gigabytes of storage and memory the Mac is a poor value, but I find Apple's industrial design and durability is unmatched. When looking at annual durability reports, Mac users by and large use their PCs far longer that most equivalent PC users and have fewer problems. Part is because not all Mac users can afford to replace them as readily, but another part is that Apple's hardware designs are generally very good and very high-quality. No, they're not flawless. But Apple has much tighter design tolerances, tends to source parts exclusively where they can, and therefore has much more predictable manufacturing outcomes. That means that barring some design flaw warranting a recall, you're much more likely to get a computer that will survive the years when you buy from Apple. Of course, you have to want to live in that OS ecosystem, but I do. I find OS X, on the whole, more usable than Windows. Again, not perfect. Apple stubbornly sticks to form over function for a number of UI conventions, but outside of those, Apple generally has a more human-friendly interface than Windows, IMO. Microsoft will occasionally make some strong user-focused design changes (the Office Ribbon - people complain but it was usability-tested out the wazoo) but equally often they seem to want to change stuff just to change it.
Being fair... Macs are often a good value for the money when initially introduced, and if considering the product as a whole (the new Mac Pro is kind of an exception to that). The caveat is that Apple's product lineup is small, and only consists of Nice Stuff. So, the likelihood of buying something that's not exactly what you want, and more than you wanted to pay, is high.
OS X itself though does tend to be nice. Objectively, that's 'cause Apple is both pretty consistent with it (I mean, you can go back to the 10.0, if not the beta, and not be lost relative to current macOS) while also not needing to maintain much legacy cruft. Sometimes you do lose out - Apple not happy with nVidia? Hope you didn't want to use one of their cards. Apple not care about Blu-ray or touch interface? Hope you don't either. The overall experience does tend to be stable though.
MS is just more of a mixed bag. They both push harder on new things, and leave old stuff around for a while, but it has meant that modern Windows can get fragmented a bit. The difference is that there's literally decades worth of stuff that Windows can still run (or attempt to run), where macOS is just... "nah".
All that said though, I don't really disagree with the sentiment. If I was in a situation where I was mostly just doing general computing, I'd be pretty content to just pony up for a 5k iMac and use that. As it is though, I game n' stuff too much for that to make sense.
