Obviously there are people who do genuinely prefer it having experience with a variety of platforms, but the ones who seem the most convinced of how superior Windows is always do seem to be the ones who’ve never actually spent time with anything else.

I’ll grant that a cheap Windows laptop was the right call up until recently if price—not ease of use and maintenance—was the overwhelmingly dominant factor and a laptop was absolutely necessary. But the answer for a cheap device for a non-technical person with aspecific needs (email, browsing, media consumption) has been an iPad for a long time at this point.