<i>“Ultimately I needed to use Word, the Windows version, for page layout, indexing, etc. Nothing else does the job (I’ve tried, and keep trying the alternatives). The waterfall model of “first finish the book with one program, then do layout with a different program” just doesn’t work”</i><p>The entire publishing industry would beg to differ. While MS Word (but preferably InCopy) is fine for copy, you won’t use it to lay out a cookbook and directly send it to a printer. If you supply a Word file to a printer, they will likely convert it to an InDesign file and charge you for it.<p>Source: I publish books for a living and have been since 1996.<p><i>“an equivalent-horsepower Mac is 3 times the cost of a Windows 8 machine”</i><p>I thought OP was trolling, until I read the following passage:<p><i>“I also wanted something with at least 4 cores, in order to do more concurrency programming experiments with languages like Scala and Go.”</i><p>Not exactly typical use, but if the highest clock frequency and cores is what the author wants, then sure, he can get more bang for his buck with a Windows box than Apple’s offerings. Macs are made for small size, low weight, and power preservation.<p>Many consumers won’t look at just clock frequency or the number of cores to make their purchasing decision. I bought a new notebook 3 months a go, a MacBook Air. It has a 512GB SSD, a fast CPU, and a decent GPU. I mainly use it for image and video editing, but because of Apple’s choices, I get battery use of 6-8 hours, while it’s not much larger than my tablet. That’s what I care about. Ten years a go, to do the same work, I had to lug around a notebook that weighed twice as much and had half as much battery life. With many Windows notebooks, that’s still the case.