I actually find it kind of interesting.

Historically, Apple absolutely would have been the risky platform to go for (I waited until their Intel laptops, using Boot Camp as an insurance policy). But these days people have iPhones, iPads, some even have Apple TVs... the Apple hardware ecosystem is actually far stronger than Microsoft's. You absolutely are risking that syncing with your iPhone etc will be worse.

Why are people trying to bend over backwards here? Let's step outside the startup world for some facts:

iPhone market share in the US is 43%. Macbook market share is 12%. So the vast majority of iPhone users are "risking" this.

Which is really not a risk at all, because if it really were a risk Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot. They would be killing one of their most successful products for the sake of some of their least.

I don't know for sure how many iPhone users have ever plugged their device into a computer for anything other than a quick battery top up, but my hunch is most people just don't sync phones with computers any more, they sync them with iCloud or Google. I don't own an iPhone, but I've never even attempted to synchronise my phone with my laptop - contacts, calendar, and email come from Google, music from Spotify, and video from Netflix or Amazon. The closest I've come is copying some photos off the SD card.

But that is on Apple. Copying music to an iPhone is about as cumbersome as Apple can make it without destroying their music business.

You just add it to playlist in iTunes

The only people that need to worry are professionals. Developers and so on. And they can decide themselves whether switching is a risk without a journalist saying that a good product isn't an alternative because of this risk.

The Microsoft hardware product line is arguably more complete than Apple's at this point, when you factor in the Xbox. There's minimal risk to casual users in switching.

For one thing, you'll have to use Windows iTunes, which is notoriously bad.

I find it very interesting that Apple is now the "default" laptop and Windows is the strange alternative that people are worried about switching to.

> I find it very interesting that Apple is now the "default" laptop and Windows is the strange alternative that people are worried about switching to.

Only in a tiny minority of wealthy dev/artist types.

Also, it's much easier to get a MacBook to run Windows than it is to get a Windows laptop to run OS X.

I’m old enough to remember when people said things just like this about Apple products: “It’s very nice, but switching ecosystems away from Windows s risky.”

But it still is. As another comment said, only 12% of laptops are Macbooks; it'll remain very hard to replace PC's and Windows in the large corporate and government worlds, thanks to Windows-specific software. A lot of software is moving to a more OS-agnostic platform (i.e. web), and cross-platform applications (like MS Office) are becoming more and more the norm, but there's still a long way to go.

It'd help a lot if Microsoft manages to get .NET applications to become popular on OSX. That's only possible since this year, and it'll probably take a few more years for applications to become properly crossplatform.

You don't need to switch ecosystems when you buy an Apple product. Macs run Windows just fine, either as a VM or dual-boot. They also ship with a full Unix shell. Macs are popular in part because they are very flexible computers.

The Surface line is not as flexible. It's perfect for people who are immersed in the Windows world, but a lot of people are not anymore.

Exactly, not only is it irrelevant in a discussion about specific hardware, it's also subjective. I've found the transition to Windows easy (and well worth it) and I'm sure that my demands are more thorough than the average user's.

Except that exactly the same criticism was said about moving to mac back in the day.

But with a Mac, if I find I don't like the OS X ecosystem, I can always install Windows and be done. I get to enjoy my laptop and the ecosystem I want. I can't do the opposite with a Surface.

How about installing Linux on it? (I am curious to know if that's possible because I'm considering to buy the Surface to put Linux).

I wouldn't recommend it, the Desktop Environments lack decent HDPI support, and Touch feels cumbersome.