The hardware/software integration is a big part of it, it's not just the software.

Linux attempts a much harder task than MacOS, in trying to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware. That it's even considered remotely comparable to a product that's sold only on a few supported platforms at a time is impressive. (In fairness, Windows manages this too, although it does it by forcing most of the work on hardware vendors and OEMs to do driver development and integration, respectively.)

Although a few companies have tried over the years to do Linux preinstalled on private-label hardware, thus taking the hardware-compatibility and installation issues out of the picture, there's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue with doing it at scale. Apple has managed to always have just enough volume to compete with commodity systems (even if just barely compete, particularly on price) but present a tightly-coupled hardware/software package.

When i read about the "hardware integration" of OSX/macOS/whatever I really have to wonder.

Power 32 bit is dead. Apple never ventured into other architectures. macOS (and OSX 10.whatever plus since the mid 2000s) are running on x86 and stumbling towards ARM; iOS runs on ARM. It's still commodity hardware, just like Windows and Linux.

I understand that Apple supports a much smaller set of hardware and drivers, but in my mind it's not really 'integration' the way, say, dinosaurs like SPARC + Solaris or POWER virtualization under AIX is integrated hardware with software. I'm really just being cranky here and splitting hairs.

This isn't HW integration at the CPU level, but the whole damned device chipset. Apple know what network, WiFi, video, audio, network, camera, USB, FireWire, or whatever else device(s) are going to be on the system. They can buy out entire production runs of hardware if need be. And if there are changes to spec, they can stay on top of that as well.

Linux ... takes what you throw at it. It does this pretty damned well most of the time, but I've lived and seen the challenges.

Broadcom chipsets. Nvidia. Dell's so-called RAID controllers (PERC). WiFi.

Audio, trackpad (at least for single-touch), networking, and WiFi not so much any more, though bootloaders and telco kit remain issues.

The fact that sometimes things in the Linux ecosystem just break is pretty daunting for any company that wants to make money selling Linux boxes. For example sound was good for a while and then PulseAudio happened and it was terrible; these days PulseAudio is supposed to be okay, but if you were selling laptops in 2007 and the sound on those laptops broke in 2010 you've got a big problem on your hands as a vendor. It's difficult to insulate yourself from because you don't know which hardware is going to break tomorrow and you might not be able to fix it but your customers probably quite reasonably want to upgrade their computers. Even PC-BSD is not immune when, for example, KDE 4 is released.

Apple owns the software that runs on their computers. None of these problems will ever happen to Apple. This has been around:

https://endlessos.com/home/

> Apple owns the software that runs on their computers. None of these problems will ever happen to Apple.

None of my Classic software runs on a modern Mac. No PowerPC software runs on a modern Mac. I think those problems do happen to Apple's users.

The one company which does take this sort of thing seriously is … Microsoft. I hate using their OS, and so I don't, but I gotta respect them for that.

That's entirely beside the point. I was 't talking about what happens to you, as a user. I was talking about what happens to Apple. Apple knows when its stuff is going to break. System76, in some ways, may not always know. That makes it hard for them to provide guarantees.

The last 90% of polish is what makes the difference however.

You meant the last 10% of polish which requires 90% of effort makes the difference?

Yeah, seriously; I think it all really comes down to willingness/ability to learn. My grandfather came to computers very late in life and has since managed to pick up every Windows iteration since 95, Ubuntu, ChromeOS, and OS X with aplomb. He loves his iPad best, though (mainly for Skype and FaceTime). My mother, in the meanwhile, struggles to use Word.

The user experience of an Apple laptop may be 10 times better than a Linux laptop for the types of things most people want a computer to do. Consider the out of the box battery life experience for example.