Apple's value is absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And as compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)
replyAgreed. In the creative space there is no equal. Macs have provided consistency and stability from the 90s.
replyNot when comparing classical Mac OS to Windows 9X/NT, which is why they were into trouble during the 1990's.
replyIt definitely was in the MacOS 9 days. That OS was a joy to use. 3rd party Mac apps were incredible too.
replyYou can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.
You mean the OS they failed to find a replacement for and almost went bankrupt, had it not been for the NeXT reverse acquisition?
replyIt’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two
replythe software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.
replyI worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.
replyOf course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.
It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.
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