&gt; 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else&#x27;s now.<p>That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.<p>To each their own.<p>&gt; 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don&#x27;t believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it&#x27;s straightforward to disable them.<p>The article is fairly light on comments regarding retention policy.<p>&gt; 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.<p>The surface book is intriguing to me due to having the built-in pen support. I love my Wacom but I hate lugging it around.<p>Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.<p>&gt; 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.<p>&gt; 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle&#x27;s java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.<p>This is an interesting turn of events. It&#x27;s also the new black it seems: Apple with Swift, CLR.<p>I mainly want it because hardware vendors support it. You most likely can&#x27;t get better than OpenGL 4.1 until the next major update to OSX even if your hardware supports 4.5!