I have a Mac now, use Windows regularly, and used a Surface a while back. I can't comment on modern Surface hardware, but I can comment on my feeling bouncing b

I have a Mac now, use Windows regularly, and used a Surface a while back. I can't comment on modern Surface hardware, but I can comment on my feeling bouncing between ecosystems. I use Windows because it can do more: it can play games, it can do VR stuff, it can run almost any program. However I prefer using a Mac when I can because it feels like the people who made it actually care about attention to details and design (even when they fail). With Windows it feels like elegance and great design is never a core priority until it measurably begins to damage metrics. Popups will constantly be telling you about the newest feature with no thought for how that might be distracting you or interrupting your flow as a user. You can turn off most of these popups, but it's on a case by case basis and they're always introducing more. Something like "settings" in Windows is a convoluted mess of generations of settings pages, presumably kept this way under a "If it's not broke, don't fix it" mindset. Windows gradually is peeling control away from the user, and not in an Apple "we know best" kind of way. Things like the login screen default to an image chosen by Microsoft each day, which is actually kind of cool! The lame thing is that there are popups explaining the newest thing they want to advertise, or how to use some Windows feature. I virtually always ignore these, but they certainly don't make me excited about buying a $1,000+ Surface just to see ads on the lock screen of my premium device each day. Updates in Windows have lately felt as if you're dealing with a pushy negotiator and you never know what the terms you agreed to actually are. The updates feel like they serve Microsoft's purposes, not yours, if only because of how they try to trick you into agreeing to them. Meanwhile the language of the updates attempts to sound friendly, but it comes across as insultingly disingenuous because of the actual behavior of the UX. They've slowly improved this experience, but only after countless negative news articles. And then the computer comes with a bunch of bloatware preinstalled. Sure it's not as bad as buying a laptop used to be, but it's discouraging because Surfaces are meant to feel like premium products. Now Windows 10 comes with a bunch of lame games installed and by default put on your start menu. You have to cleanup the start menu when you get the computer. There are dozens of further examples I can cite, but what I'm getting at here is Windows as an operating system doesn't feel like a personal elegant operating system to be paired with a premium device.