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?
Most of the time, using an iPhone, Mac, etc., does not “just work”. Maybe the UI is simply not very usable (not just Liquid Glass, see MacOS’s terrible implementation of a settings app, iOS not having an option to combine the quick settings and notifications), third-party devices (headphones, chargers, tablets, etc.) simply do not work well (no, “get the iDevice” is not helpful!), iOS having the most ass file management that may as well not exist, all the different bugs poking around everywhere (through my own experiences with iOS* and my friend’s with MacOS), etc. “Give more money to Apple to fix it” is not good advice and does not help to solve anything.
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware, everybody seems to put up with it? On their Macs, you have 60 Hz LCD displays on a $1000+ laptop, no good ports selection unless you spend thousands more, ridiculously priced memory and storage upgrades that would be a death sentence to any other company, very shallow key travel that feels terrible to type on compared to other options, etc. As for their iPads, you have similarly not so great displays on a relatively high end tablet unless you spend thousands on a tablet with an uber-fancy M5 chip (why would anyone need that???), a keyboard case that is so expensive despite feeling like a cheap membrane keyboard you got on Aliexpress and being so top-heavy, etc. Who in their right mind would purchase a $550 set of headphones made of ridiculously heavy metal, with uncomfortable cushions, terrible battery life, mid ANC, and several year old innards?
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing? I don’t really see anything quite like it in other product segments. What is the secret apple sauce?
*note that I currently run an Android phone, but I have my issues with them too that I won’t get into. My particular device is very bloated and incredibly annoying to work with sometimes, but it’s what I’ve got. On my laptop I happily run Linux, where the device simply listens to me which is a nice change of pace
edit: Actually, no, I think something similar occurs with Nintendo (in video games) and Disney (for films)
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).
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.