I was implying that the money saved on the laptop is pretty small, so this 'benefit' to laptop owners is pretty insignificant and totally outweighed by the extra hassle or loss in performance / reliability of the computer.

And I'd recommend to anyone doing tech support for parents that they carefully guide them into purchasing a decent, maintainable machine. It's not up to me to tell OP how that gets paid for. (I've ended up buying my dad a computer to avoid him picking up a 'bargain' machine from the supermarket, just because it'd be me that ends up fixing/reinstalling that crap and recovering data...)

Your observation is true for techies but not the general population. Understand that if there was no benefit to putting bloatware no company would have spent their resources on it. For me the benefit of saving $20 is small but not for many people out there. I know many people who think Macbooks are just white colored laptops.

If I were him then I think I'd be suggesting that people tend to ignore externalities when praising markets.

Certainly he or his parents should value his time at something other than zero, and maybe be willing to pay a little more for a computer that is identical but demands fewer hours of AIDS removal.