My parents have had an iMac in their living room sitting quietly doing stuff (web apps, mainly) for 9 years now. Still works fine for all their use cases and the 5k screen remains a delight to behold.
i know a few people who have an iMac in their living room like that, with the same logic as the people who still have landlines - the laptops and cell phones get put away when you get home (or stay in the home office), so you can be present with your family. but sometimes you still need a computer for stuff, like controlling the music or quickly looking something up on google. but if it's not your computer, and it's not signed in to all your stuff, you're going to quickly do the thing you need doing and then get off it again.
iMac is perfect for that. it looks pretty, it's small enough that it can be put in a corner, and it's powerful enough that you can buy it, leave it there, and not think about having to upgrade it for a decade.
It's surreal for me how something so expensive can be thought as "perfect" for this usecase.
I'd say in cases like this having a cheap laptop or even a cheap all in one desktop computer is good enough. Why spend $2000 to browse the internet?
The long support length lowers the effective cost. We only upgraded my parents' computer after ten years due to software support. It was so old it was soon going to lose even Google Chrome updates. But it ran like new.
The total carrying cost over ten years is quite low. And my parents have needed much less tech help with a mac. The day to day ease matters and is worth money.
Being honest, I would bet the archetypical family that can prioritize "putting the phone away and being present" definitely skews more affluent than you may expect.
Eh, they start at $1300 (I suspect pretty much all non-commercial purchases are the base-line one) and last roughly forever (like, a decade is not an exaggeration; you see old ones around a fair bit). There’s a market, there.
Not sure what it’s like these days, but last time I checked cheap PC laptops were basically disposable; in an old job we had plastic Dell laptops for non-eng roles, and I’d be surprised if the median lifespan was much more than a year. They just broke _all the time_. Possibly things have come on, I suppose; this was a while back.
Sorry for the 2000 price mark, seems like the base version costs 1300$.
In my personal experience, my parents (not super tech savvy) always had a windows laptop and never had a specific windows issue due to updates and whatever. If they did, it's more app specific, not necessarily os specific.
In general, I (personally) disagree with the statement that macs require less maintenance than windows or Linux, I use a mac for work, and I have a fair share of app related issues just like I would on a Windows or Linux machine. It's just my opinion.
