I buy a product or, more often than not nowadays, pay for a service for the features.

I keep using the product/service if it's stable. I have no use for a service with loads of nice features that don't work.

Only that you only pay once for an OS, so by the time you realise many features are buggy, you can't just unpay.

I pay twice the price of the hardware to be able to use Mac OS X, which is stable. Except, since 10.10, it kernel-panics once a week. I'd pay 100-200€ per year for a good OS.

It's a very, very long shot, but could it be that you have virtualbox 4 installed?

With 10.10 and 10.11 I had the same issue, caused by the kext from virtualbox. Removing it and installing version 5 solved everything and haven't had a kernel panic since then.

If not virtualbox, I'd look at other kext you might have there.

End users have (mostly) never paid for operating systems. I use Windows mostly because that's what the applications I use require. There's nothing about Windows itself that is compelling and frankly, Windows has been good enough for a long, long time.

I really wish Microsoft had stayed the course and maintained separate desktop and mobile operating systems. Windows CE had problems, but they could have fixed that without messing with Windows.

Yeah. Everyone needs to justify their existence. While quite a lot of people thought Win7 was great and that Microsoft should just stop there, maybe with a few minor improvements (e.g. fix CMD.EXE), they decided to completely change it in response to the tablet "threat".

I have a cheap Win8 tablet. It's weird. Quite slick in a lot of ways, but you can go back to the old UI and see where all the bodges are.

If I have a choice of buying Windows 7 or Windows 10, I will pick Windows 7. Does that mean I'm paying for stability?

I develop daily on Windows and Visual Studio. The latest versions of both are so horribly unstable and buggy that our team's productivity is being seriously damaged. What the hell happened to Microsoft's quality control? In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Visual Studio you didn't feel like you were walking on thin ice all the time.

One has to wonder if maybe all those laid-off STEs and SDETs were actually adding value after all....

Not buying your argument.

Mac is a much more viable choice today than in the past, and I think the Mac's slowly but steadily increasing market share has something to do with the perceived reliability and stability of the platform.

I'm only basing this off of personal experience. I have Windows at work and Mac at home.

I'm sorry, if we're talking about features being buggy, OS X is not something you exactly what to point a finger at as a good example of an OS that has features implemented in a stable way.

Thankfully, OS X is cheap/free. I use OS X, Windows, and Arch literally every day of my life, both at work and home.

To be quite honest, I blame consumers for all this non-sense. No one wants to actually pay for software. I can go into this in a more nuanced fashion, but I seriously think software across the board is a good bit cheaper than it needs to be. From OS's to games and everything in between.

I have personally found OS X to be extremely buggy, but I agree that the perception of stability (and security!) have increased its adoption.

I would definitely agree with that as well.

OS X is not cheap, and definitely not free. The price is factored into the laptop.

This is not some pedantic arm-chair econ101 argument; they are able to charge a higher price due to having OS X as part of the product, and they do.

Arch is actually for free.

>they are able to charge a higher price due to having OS X as part of the product, and they do.

That's a suspect claim. I am not saying the cost isn't accounted for, but claiming that they charge a premium simply because they have OS X is dubious at best. I don't consider OS X a selling point in any regard and I'm not sure even Apple could. Of course this is largely my opinion. I would find it kind of funny if they really considered it a selling point.

I always thought that having OSX sorta was the selling point. If I'm only comparing computers just based on the parts inside them and their capability then there's little to no reason for me to buy an Apple computer because other than some sorta neat things like the hybrid drives or some of the Thunderbolt integration, they're generally much more expensive than building or buying another computer.

But for people who value specific software that is OSX-only or some of the features only found in OSX (like CoreAudio for music stuff) or the general interface polish and perceived stability, it doesn't matter if the Apple option costs $2000 and the other brand/build with similar core components costs $1000. If it doesn't run the platform you want/need then it doesn't matter that it's more bang for the buck.

Basically I default to Windows because for the things I do on a computer, it's got the most flexibility and options for hardware and software. Linux is missing too many applications I need/want and OSX only runs on machines that cost a good deal more while offering nothing I really need enough to justify the cost. But when I've needed or wanted to run an OSX application in the past (Final Cut Pro in my case several years ago) it just wasn't a question. The stuff I wanted to run and the hardware I needed to hook up required OSX so that's the only reason I shelled out for an Apple computer. If I could have done it without OSX I'd have saved the dough and put it into something else.

I can't help but avoid but sound like an Apple marketing drone, but hardware wise quite a few the selling points for me for a MBP have been the form factor and how "it all fits together." Personally, there still isn't really a comparable windows-esque laptop from any other manufacturer that makes me not want to rip my hair out when I'm using their product. I enjoy the weight and weight distribution of the laptop, the keyboard is okay, the trackpad should be the target of corporate espionage, etc etc. And it certainly looks nice.

Admittedly, a good selling point for OS X is how well it handles the hardware -- the battery life is consistent and lasts long enough for my needs. I definitely use OS X more often when I'm traveling, and will relegate my development to that environment just to make sure the battery lasts.

The software ecosystem is definitely a selling point for some. I am not involved in multimedia production but I certainly can appreciate paying a premium amount to get the tools you want/need. Although whether this aspect can be fundamentally attributed to the OS or just a product of other things (audience, marketing, corporate deals, etc) is another conversation.

Well without OSX a macbook pro is just another Intel laptop. And I've seen them with Linux installed, and using bootcamp variations of Windows. But OSX is certainly part of the appeal.

Most of the people who own Macs got them because of OS X. It helps that the hardware is quite good, all in all, and for that you can also charge a premium. But if Apple stopped developing OS X and just sold MacBooks with Windows preinstalled, I think their sales would decline drastically; if they ported OS X to regular PCs and sold it seperately, their computer business would probably take a large hit, too.

It's non-zero, but essentially right next to zero, the number of people buying Macs who do not at all run OS X. So yes, it's bought as a whole, people want the product experience, the integration of hardware and software. That's why they buy it. If they really didn't care about OS X, or really didn't care (a lot) about industrial design they'd buy something else. And on industrial design, Dell's XPS 13 is neck and neck (bit better in some spots and not as good in others) with the Air.

> I would find it kind of funny if they really considered it a selling point.

Good point, but I'm trying to stay completely agnostic of what Apple thinks: it's not Apple's cost that determines the price of a macbook (aside from setting a lower bound), it's what people are willing to pay.

I assume that people are willing to pay significantly more for macbooks in this universe, than in the parallel one where they have no OS. At least as much more as it costs Apple to develop it in the first place.

You are right, though, that I can hardly "claim" it :)

There's got to be something that's jacking up the price of a MacBook to 2-3x the cost of an otherwise component-identical Windows box.

It's either OSX, or it's that shiny Apple logo

They most definitely do not have identical components. I am not sure why you think this is the case.

I'm always a bit shocked when I see people express this. I work in a office with roughly 100 macs and 100 windows. The macs are FAR more stable and less buggy. I've had this experience three different times at various companies. Yet online I see people saying that OS X is just as buggy but they never point what part is.

Well, for example, with the most recent updates I had problems with wifi stability and thunderbolt peripherals not working properly. They've been fixed now, but it's still kind of surprising they creep up given the limited amount of hardware the OS has to target.

Are the macs running the latest version of OSX? From what I've read and experienced, OSX declined in quality when Apple stopped charging for OSX and started using it to drive hardware upgrades. These days OSX works fine if you have the latest, greatest, most expensive Mac hardware but if you try to upgrade an existing machine, that's when you get errors.

I have the latest 15 inch MBP.

I use to love the Mac and OSX, but the whole freezing up while spinning a colored ball thing has got me too pissed off to use a Mac any more. I switched to Linux a year ago and only use Windows for playing games. As for the increasing market share, I think that's more of the perceived coolness factor of a Mac. But man, I love the MBP keyboard! I can't wait to try a Happy Hacker 2.

My mom (55 yo) always tries to get me into her computer buying arguments with my dad. She recently called me and stated "Macs never break compared to windows, so I should get a mac." I use Linux almost exclusively these days, so I can't really comment, but anecdotally speaking Apple seems to be known for it's reliability (at a cost) to at least some people.