On the Dell side the touch screen is basically useless. I have a docking station at work and 3k monitor / USB keyboard at home. The Windows 8.1 is subpar but I mostly ignore that using native compilers, bash and the VM. I use Office on both and it is similar on both.
I think the most important distinction is that Apple is native Unix. It can be a little painful using brew, but I have more success than on Windows. Any serious Unix work goes into the VM on either platform. But having native Unix on the Mac means I also get a native shell with color terminal to log into the VM, and into the cloud servers and work seamlessly and natively. Whereas on the PC I pretty much have to open a shell in the VM.
Native Unix is probably the biggest plus for the Mac... Yes I use VM’s and K8s and Docker etc.. but Windows was always painful as a development platform.
Find, sed, awk, etc all built in without any additional installs...
MS showed how completely arrogant and out of touch they were with their userbase when they forced windows 8 on the world... Mac IMHO did the same thing with the 2016 Macbook pro “update”.
Seriously, I have tons of problems with this, but just at a base line, who releases a product calling it pro, that can have its entire keyboard fail by a piece of dust or crumb?
Apple has lost its way.... I remember the days whe Apple as development machine was laughable... and I watched them work their way, deservedly to dominance in the developer space... now I feel I have watched them get so full of themselves, they have shot themselves in the foot.
From what I understand sounds like the 2018 is not a major redesign either, just probably faster processors, meaning they are Tripling down on only USBC, and doubling down on the ridiculous monster touchpad and no external monitor port, sd card, or standard USB....
Apple is like the political establishment, unwilling to listen or understand its base... because its got a lot of folks who will buy their stuff no matter what...
I Hear rumor they are planning on ditching INTEL by 2020 and use their own CPU’s.... this makes sense if the PC and Phones are all sharing the same CPU... however, I hope we aren’t returning to the days where you had to literally compile every damn thing you wanted to run because it because there are no compiled binaries for the non Intel CPU...