*for a corporation. For a single user who knows their way around a Windows machine, they are not.
About a year ago my employer forced me to use a Windows machine. Fortunately, I have complete control of it (it's not managed by my employer); unfortunately, that doesn't matter. It's a complete cesspit: updates are horrible; the pre-installed crapware from the manufacturer is horrible; the pre-installed crapware from Microsoft is horrible; the interface is horrible (just trying to navigate around prompts and windows is … miserable). There is literally only one good thing I can say about Windows: the background and lock screen images are really, really nice (awesome, really; just beautiful).
In every other way using it has made my life measurably worse.
Meanwhile, I continue to use Linux on my personal machines. It Just Works™, and really well. It's reliable, fast, easy to use, pleasant to use: every time I log onto my personal Linux machine I breathe a sigh of relief.
Yes, some of that delta is due to greater familiarity with Linux, but a huge amount is due to this simple truth: the Linux interface is better than the modern Windows interface (which is, itself, worse than Windows 7 was). Linux feels like it was built by developers who use what they develop; Windows feels like it was built by a marketing department who use Macs.
You can have that in Linux too[1]. You can configure it to pull fresh images from your favourite sources, including Bing.
[1] https://vrty.org/ seems to be down at the moment
The only reason I keep the PC is because I still find macs to be suboptimal for gaming, and PCs to be easier to keep current by switching out the GPU or adding more storage or RAM. Given a mac with a more open-ended upgrade path, I would probably throw it out.
Perhaps, but that's just the best case situation. I know my way around Linux, and that's cheaper than Windows on the individual level, and far far far cheaper than Windows on the enterprise level. All it takes is users that know their way around Linux, right?
The real determinant though will be the cost averaged out over skill levels and prevalence of skill levels.
How are Chromebooks for people who have to deal with "family / friends" support issues?
Thousands of 2011 Macbook Pro owners had the same, now infamaous, problem, and Apple pretty much pretended the problem did not exist (until after my AppleCare expired and forced me to buy another laptop, which was not a Mac).
Sure, but I doubt it cancels out the other 10,000+ owners of defective early 2011 Macbook Pros.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/petition-demands-apple-fi...
I'm citing a fairly well publicized incident that affected a significant number of Macbook owners - and these models were the top end 15" MBPs with quad core i7s with discrete GPU models - among the most expensive of Apple laptops, I might add - that Apple completely dropped the ball on. And this is coming from someone who recognizes that Apple historically has the best build quality and customer service.
There was a massive thread on the official Apple support forums on this problem that spanned a couple of years and a few hundred pages. Tens of thousands of posts without a single official peep from Apple. There were plenty of articles written about it on Mac sites and other tech sites like Ars Technica. It took Apple over a year to even acknowledge the issue. By the time Apple did issue the Repair Order (recall), a lot of people wrote off or sold their laptops at a loss and had no recourse.
So this is a little different from other laptop manufacturers having issues with a specific model. Before the Repair Order was issued, the official fix was to replace the logic board with a fresh logic board that had the same defect (most of the people who had their logic boards replaced got the same problem within a few months, including myself). Great if you had AppleCare, but a $500+ fix if the AppleCare had lapsed or if you didn't have AppleCare.
Am I bitter? Of course I am. I bought a relatively top end laptop from a company that had a reputation for treating their customers way better than their competitors. And I happily paid the premium (maybe 1K more than a similarly spec'ed Windows laptop at the time) with the expectation that I would be taken care of in the unlikely chance there was something wrong with my MBP. And that didn't happen. I was just lucky that I kept my bricked MBP around so that I could get it fixed when the recall finally came around. At least then I could get some salvage value out of it.