1. Unix-based OS
2. Outstanding battery life
3. Sturdy and long-lasting; a well-maintained Macbook will outlive any Windows laptop of equal price
4. No pre-loaded crapware
5. Best trackpad in existence
6. Secure, with patches and updates for years
This more than outweighs all the other minuses, such as the overly-obsessive focus on thinness, or the outrageous cost of dongles, adapters, memory/storage upgrades, and battery replacements.
Desktops last pretty much forever. Almost every desktop component I've had worked perfectly until it was extremely obsolete and sold or given away.
What's crazy is that although their performance remains the same over years, their prices depreciate like crazy for no reason. I am never gonna buy new computers again. I've gotten a few 2nd hand gaming desktops recently on buy and sell websites for around €300 each (often including monitor / peripherals) and they perform perfectly, they can run AAA games fine even.
Craftspeople appreciate good tools. Good tools don't make you better at craft, but bad tools can definitely make you worse.
There's also the thing where at the start of a model cycle from Apple, you generally cannot purchase an equipment with all those performance capabilities combined at any price from anyone else. This is true of phones and laptops alike.
In other words, at major new model cycles, the full combination of practical function and durable form is often not available anywhere else at any price.
When your livelihood depends on your machine, you do well to invest in good tools. And "invest" is the right word, because these hold value.
By the end of a model cycle, other vendors may catch up or pass the price perf curve, yet the Apple models are built in a way that holds value for double or quadruple the lifespan of a Windows laptop purchased around the same launch window. This means when you buy fresh and resell two years in, you can spend less for the top of the line functionality than when you stay in the shovel-wear class of machine. (You can even sometimes buy direct refurb and sell a year later for as much as you paid.)
> It will never cease to shock me.
How to say you're not open minded without saying you're not open minded? :-)
Yeah, wtf. It's not like people that build software for a living know anything about computers right?!
Sorry, but I don‘t believe anyone who says this while looking at a modern day M1 macbook. I have the pleasure to own one for software development and graphical imagery work and frankly it‘s the single best computer I have ever used. No windows or linux machine comes close. It‘s a unix system where everything just works out of the box.
I was shocked when I found out that macs are popular among people who actually work with computers and even make software. It will never cease to shock me. The only explanation I can think of is that this is a USA social class thing. In the USA the upper classes have Apple stuff and the lower classes have something else. Most people in software come from an upper or upper-middle background so they grow up in an Apple house. Those who don't get Apple anyway to blend in.