I would say 90% of mac users strictly use it to browse the internet and do very little productivity work on them. Their macbook can last 8 hrs on battery and thats all they need. That same laptop would cost $600-$800 less running windows. People buy trash equipment with old hard drives (not ssd's) and wonder why their best buy special runs like shit.
This. I've found that when I take the time to ask MacOS users what they prefer about it to Windows, today, ultimately what comes back reveals that they'd be just as happy with ChromeOS. Even better, if it existed, would be iOS with a keyboard. That's what they really want. The golden years of OS X supremacy are long gone.
The frequency of updates to the Mac Mini and Mac Pro indicate how much of a priority this OS is to Apple. I genuinely believe they're trying to figure out how to transition away from it, but so far this isn't cutting it:
https://www.apple.com/smart-keyboard/
Windows Surface products >>>> the above solution
I've spoken before about how much I hate the lengths MacOS goes to in order to hide your raw files from
yourself, but the thing that broke me was when I tried setting up an always-on server for a friend a few years ago. He had a brand new MacBook Pro with some external hard drives and a Time Capsule. He also had an iPhone 6 + LTE iPad 2017 with what is probably the most desirable cellular plan in the world: a grandfathered unlimited (and non-throttling) LTE Verizon plan.
Thinking he was the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow, I decided I would set up a server for him so that whenever he took a photo anywhere in the world, his iPhone/iPad would upload them to his iCloud, automatically, as soon as he was within range of the cellular network, and then download them to the external hard drives. The idea was they would be automatically backed up to the external hard drive via the Time Capsule. He didn't have a data concern in the world, after all.
Long story short, it was impossible to make it work unless he purchased a Mac Mini (cheapest solution) on top of all that to be his always-on brain. No amount of wizardry could solve this. It was freaking ridiculous. The guy was already fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem, but it wasn't enough.
My first thought was I could back it up to the Time Capsule, which has its own processor and storage space, by partitioning its native storage: leaving one partition for Time Machine, and creating another in the Journaled HFS+ format as native "external" storage. Turned out that solution was nonviable, so then I cleared out his biggest external hard drive in order that I could format it as Journaled HFS+, which is an undesirable solution for
any external storage since it is so lacking in universality, and then plugged that directly into the Time Capsule. The idea was his photos would automatically upload to his iCloud out in the world; the Time Capsule would detect a change to his iCloud; it would spin up to sync the new content; download to the external hard drive attached to it; then when he got home, he could easily browse the external hard drive via his MacBook without even having to unplug it from the Time Capsule, and plug it directly into the MacBook. The Time Capsule was designed to always be on, and it ran his network, after all. He should have been able to browse the contents of the external hard drive from his WLAN.
Couldn't do it even like that-- with the additional external hard drive formatted natively for Macs. Additionally, even if he left his MacBook at home, which defeats the purpose of having a laptop, I would have had to calibrate the MacBook to never go to sleep like it was a Mac Mini designed for that. It was incapable of being woken up remotely by the network. Time Capsule couldn't do it despite that it was designed to never go to sleep. Meanwhile, all of this would have been easily achieved with any NAS Box using Dropbox (or iCloud!) with a Windows PC environment at home. I spent quite a bit of spiritual energy managing my frustration with that whole affair.
Otherwise, it's like anything else. They're just machines-- toolboxes-- so it's a matter of whether or not it can hold the tools you need. Some know or prefer software that only exists on Macs. Some know or prefer software that only exists on PCs. If you need to go between both worlds, you're almost always going to end up needing a PC.
