[EricE]

One thing that more than balances it out for me - my Mac's have a lot longer of a lifespan than my Windows machines. I have a larger up front cost, but get far more out of them over time. I average at least 7 years without having to do anything with my Mac's (and used my last two for just under 10 years) - Windows has improved dramatically since the 2000's, but I seem to either need to reload Windows from scratch on the same hardware to maintain decent performance, or upgrade hardware a lot more frequently than I have with my Mac's. Also when setting up a new machine I have found Apple's migration assistant to be flawless in moving everything from my old machine to my new one. I only deviated with my current M1 MacBook Pro because of the CPU architecture change - and friends overwhelmingly positive experiences with using migration assistant to move from Intel to AS Mac's indicate I probably wasted a bunch of time needlessly in setting everything up fresh.