Technology

I just replaced my dying Windows machines (a laptop and later, a desktop) with Macs. Still closed source, but they're UNIX certified. I know FOSS folks love to hate on macOS, but even being smart enough to use Linux, and having used it off and on for 20-25 years, I just didn't want to. I did get away from Microsoft stuff, at least at home, except for Xbox. That was my wife's choice and we have a bunch of games for it. I'm more of a PlayStation guy, but I kinda got outvoted on that one. These days I mostly just game on the Switch anyway. And the cool thing about new Macs? They can basically run Switch games, with a bit of help (but same-ish architecture). And a lot of games going to Switch(/2) can also go to Mac (e.g. Cyberpunk).

It's a great time to get away from Microsoft. Their browser hasn't been good enough in decades. Their office suite is probably their biggest strength, followed by Xbox. Their cloud would be third, I'd say — OneDrive is underrated. I use iWork on my Macs and it's fine. And it can read/write the docx formats. For cloud I guess iCloud is fine on the Mac side, I just wish the pricing were more competitive. Don't really have a good answer for cloud. And for gaming... if you were starting from zero, I'd say look at the Steam Deck, Steam sales are unbeatable, the thing runs Linux, it emulates PC games pretty well (there's a whole certification thing), and you can do GeForce Now as well if you're near their CDN. Microsoft is arguably the easiest of the big three (vs Apple and Google) to drop.

I don't even need to know why people are going against Microsoft all of a sudden. I have my reasons. I don't hate them, and I would have stuck with Office + OneDrive (MS 365) if they didn't double the price to add AI to Office with no way to stick with the old product. They were getting $60 a year from me, now they're not getting anything.