But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.
I’d argue that their hardware is middling, but they make up for the shortcomings with decent software. Sort of the opposite of Windows, where you might have some nice hardware that gets held back by bad software (especially with the disastrous windows updates lately). Hence there being a really nice period of time where you could squeeze Mac OSX onto better hardware and ideally get the best of both worlds.
Apple has historically not been the value pick in pure hardware specs alone, and I don’t doubt that you could absolutely shop around and get a computer that, on paper, would be more powerful. Before the RAM price hike, they were the subject of mockery because they charge exorbitant prices for increasing the amount of memory in a machine you wanted to be (it was in the region of +$300 for another 16GB to get it to 32GB).
djdarren@piefed.social 1 week ago
I’m not an expert on non-Apple hardware by any means, but the Apple stuff I’ve had over the past 20 years has all be incredibly well built. The lone exception was the white plastic MacBook I got in 2007 which was broadly good, but designed in such a way that the palm rest would always chip where the little standoffs at the top of the screen pushed against it when it was closed. But other than that, iPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple TV, all of them have been very, very well put together.
Whether the components inside were good value for what I paid is a different matter, but the build quality was always exceptional. I never had a MacBook released between 2016 and 2019 though. We don’t talk of those.
But yeah, the software - even with all the current shortcomings - has always been good. Moving from iOS to Graphene was one hell of a learning curve in working out that it was always easy to do stuff on my phone because Apple had put the work into making software that did what their customers needed it to. And for whatever reason, most folks who make apps for iOS/iPadOS put a lot of effort into making their apps really nice to use. The same isn’t always true of Android.