Mac vs. Windows PC: Switching Back

I love technology, and have switched back and forth between Windows and Mac computer operating systems over the last few decades.  I recently enjoyed the new M2 Mac Mini for about a year, and was reminded of some of the things Macs do so well, and some areas that aren't as great for me.

On the pro-Mac side:

• MacOS integration with your iPhone's Messages app (text messaging) is amazing -- it's so nice to be able to respond to text messages from a computer, pasting links in, etc.  Windows has PhoneLink (which is relatively new and tries do to this), which so far has been very flaky/inconsistent (I'd say not operational) for me
• I appreciate Apple's privacy posture, things like Safari's built-in VPN-like Private Relay is nice and the lack of feeling like I have to keep checking my Windows 11 settings on what data Microsoft is collecting and selling
• The Apple Pay integration, to be able to buy something on a website using your fingerprint is nice, but I find with modern password managers being able to paste credit card info in, this isn't a significant advantage (I'm a fan of the Dell XPS 13, which also has a fingerprint reader)
• I thought I'd love the Apple News integration to be able to read newspapers and magazines on my computer, since that doesn't work on Windows computers, but I found I rarely used this feature

On the pro-Windows side:

• Windows, based on my love of lots of browser tabs (I currently have about 90 open on a 16GB machine) seems so much better at memory (RAM) management.  On Mac, I was using Safari, as it seemed the best at RAM management and it really struggled with more than a handful of tabs -- now I'm back on Windows, and enjoying using MS Edge (which is Chromium-based, so very similar to Google Chrome), along with some nice Chrome browser plug-ins like OneTab to help with tab management.  My Mac Mini M2 Pro with 16GB RAM was frequently unusable based on trying to keep 30-50 tabs open and a few applications like Zoom and Slack, while my Win11 computer with 16GB runs smoothly with a similar load, including more tabs
• I have a few go-to apps on Windows, like Paint.NET, which I wasn't able to replace on the Mac (Mac has plenty of nice photo/image editing apps, but Paint.NET is so nicely positioned as more capable than Microsoft Paint but so much simpler to use than a Pixelmator or Photoshop Elements)
• I'm more familiar with Windows (even though I've been enjoying Macs since the OS 7.5 days), so keyboard shortcuts (like F2 to rename a file or folder) and other little details like taking screenshots is easier for me in Windows (I did learn the Mac screenshot keyboard shortcuts, but it took a while, and I enjoy the Snipping Tool)
• Windows computers are dramatically cheaper
• Surprisingly, 1Password, which is a Mac-central password management service, seemed to struggle when I'd update information in the Mac app, and then try to access the credential through the Safari plug-in -- it would sometimes take more than a few hours/days to sync backup, while on the Windows side, the app and plug-in updates were seamless (sync in under a minute)

I'm open to paying more for a luxury experience, especially with computers, but I don't think I can justify buying a $3K Mac computer to get 32GB of RAM, just to get text message integration (the only super-attractive feature above), so I'm back to Windows 11 life, at least for now.