Believing that an expensive iMac clone with a touch screen running Windows is the thing that will draw creative professionals to Microsoft products kind of demonstrates that you don’t really get it.

Professionals performing pro work for pro clients don’t want large touch screens with pens and dials. They don’t want iMac clones running Windows 10. They don’t want iMacs either, for that matter. They want high-end upgradeable hardware with lots of ports, pro GPUs, and ECC RAM that allows them to crank through tasks like rendering digital cinema masters without encoding errors that are unacceptable at a certain level and might show up on typical consumer hardware. Fortunately for Microsoft, Apple’s biggest fuckup in this space was ditching their beloved cheese grater Mac Pro tower and replacing it with the cylinder we have today.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, Apple fans with $3K to spend aren’t buying this thing if they need a PC for pro work. They’re buying workstations from PC manufacturers that — surprise! — cost the same as the Mac Pros they’re replacing. And if an iMac or MacBook Pro will do the job, they’ll buy the Mac to avoid Windows. Nobody must use a Mac for creative endeavors, but it should tell you something that so many creative people choose to. And saying it’s because they don’t know any better and you do is pretty condescending.

Here’s my favorite recent PC vs. Mac article. Hard numbers based on tens of thousands of deployed computers at one of the largest companies in the world. And it reflects my experience at every company I’ve worked for in the last decade. Macs are cheaper than PCs to deploy and maintain over a typical hardware lifecycle.

All that said, I applaud Microsoft’s latest efforts across all fronts because they’ve really stepped up their game. Let’s not forget who forced them to do that, though.