They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.

So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.

By comparison, the other options aren’t nearly as seamless. I’d need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.

The file management remains atrocious over USB (it’s basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they’ve basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.

Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?

At least from my personal perspective, I’ve never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they’re currently using.

With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac’s software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.

The closest thing seems to be more that if you’re on a device that Apple hasn’t released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn’t work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.

On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn’t actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn’t let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.

My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence’s settings, and that’s not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.