I’m also a thirty year Mac user and also not happy about the keyboard and waiting for a new one (using pre 2016s) - but I’m not going to throw away three decades of my own knowledge and tooling over it. Yes it sucks, but that seems like blowing it out of proportion.
> I'm curious what losses there are to be cut? Isn't it as simple as just buying a different product and using that instead?
Chances are they have software installed on their machine. OSX has a vibrant ecosystem of independent developer and thus a pretty large number of bespoke good-quality software which might / would have to be replaced. Especially as cross-platform software tends to integrate less than well with the platform.
That goes double for older mac users, which have a higher tendency to use native software.
And of course one needs the time to adapt to different paradigms, shortcuts, facilities, … once again especially for older users of the platform for whom this becomes second nature.
Incidentally the points mix, the second one drives the first, I regularly notice cross-platform software which doesn't respond properly to Cocoa's text-movement shortcuts (even a simple C-a / C-e).
For me, these are non trivial to replace on Linux or windows: 3 years of randomly generated passwords conveniently stored, a purchased movie collection on iTunes, tab syncing between phone and laptop, touchId login, and probably most importantly iMessage sync between laptop and phone.
Not sure I understand this. Apple means both hardware and software, are you cutting software and using linux on a macbook, or cutting hardware too and using on a windows machine?