Its odd, I just posted in another thread the trend of folks giving up the Apple ecosystem for the sake of hardware. I couldn't fathom switching out of the OS to go to another platform at this point -- and yes I fully understand Apple has me were they want me. ;-)
It was surprisingly easy, despite being an Apple "fanboy" for over 10 years. I bought a laptop from "ibuypower" - it's thick, it's heavy, it has crap battery life. But I can run the software and games I like, I never had to learn anything about windows 10 (it has a search bar, so I haven't had to mess with a new directory structure; it's crashed only once in the three months I've had it, though I reboot more frequently,) and it had 4x the graphics performance and an updated processor MONTHS before Apple finally released their latest rMBP. I payed extra for an M2.sata SSD, and I paid an extra $10 for ibuypower to wipe the hard drive and do a clean install of windows so I wouldn't have any bloatware. I paid
less than half of what I would have paid for one of the new rMBPs after upgrades I would have taken.
So, thin + light + good battery life + fast HDD + macOS, but weak ass graphics + wait three years between updated processors (for the 15") = an extra $1400 per computer. for $1400, I can carry a power brick. And, unlike my colleagues at work, my laptop plugs in to the projectors all over. How many times have I heard someone say "anyone got a dongle?" and then watched 5 people huddle around a macbook's screen ... while sitting next to a $2500 projector that won't be upgraded to usb c for a decade?
So far, the biggest irritations with Windows have been that my bookmarks aren't synced with my work iMac or my iPhone, and the control key isn't where the command key was, so ally my fingers still go to the wrong key, even after three months.
I bought a Kindle Fire 8" tablet on black friday for $60. It has access to my Amazon Prime free music and video content, and it works well enough for me. $60 freakin' dollars. Another $15 bought me 64GB of storage. For less than the cost of a memory upgrade for an iPad mini, I got a full machine with 70GB of ram. Freakin' insane, since I have 2 iPad airs at home.
Leaving Apple was really easy, and so far it's turning out really well. I'll probably buy one more iPhone next year, but after that, I will probably try an android phone for 1/2 the price. All my photos are going to slowly go to Amazon, since they provide free unlimited storage to Prime members...I'm currently paying $1/month to Apple, once I move a bunch of photos, I can stop giving them that, too.
all they had to do was update the rMBP six months earlier, and I would have stayed with Apple. But they didn't.