So no one outside of apple is smart enough to get it working.
What bothers me about non apple stuff is. I can pair my AirPods to my phone, tv, and laptop. Even if they connect to the laptop if I press connect on the Apple TV or phone they switch.
With any non apple headphones. (Bose, Audio-Technica, Sony, Asus) I have to press Bluetooth pairing button and connect on the decide again. So switching between two laptops is a pain.
Why can’t other brands do what apple can? It’s not the tech problem when someone solves it…
Pretty much, yeah. And the reason is that Bluetooth is a disaster of complexity. One implementer thinks function X in state Y means "frob", but another interprets that as a "glim" command. Apple makes it work by controlling variables: their controller, their driver stack, their library framework, their app integration. If one team doesn't understand why another team's layer is doing something, they walk across campus and ask them.
You have to have the capability and be given/assigned the time to do it properly.
Things that are genuinely a mess (e.g. bluetooth?) often only work smoothly when there was a mountain of effort put into it - that consumers can't see.
Eeehhh... Specs are big, complex documents with fuzzy terms like SHALL, MAY, MUST and weird corner cases that no one thought of, being read by engineers with varying linguistic prowess, implementing them in disparate hardware and software vendors with radically different manufacturing/release pressures, different skillsets, different interpretations of the same damned specs... It's a wonder any of this shit works at all.
Apple's the only vendor out there with something approaching a consistent experience because they're the vendor with the greatest degree of control/integration over the entire stack. BT, ACPI, all the same.
What problems are you running into?
BT is just a disaster everywhere. My experience is that for "normal" use cases (input devices & headphone audio, basically) Linux is no worse than anywhere else, but still bad. Apple users think it's great because Apple made AirPods work, but that's a testament to Apple's integration engineering and not the underlying technology.
> Plugging in a new display doesn't immediately work
I haven't seen this with Intel drivers on a major distro in a long time. But yes, the driver story for other hardware remains somewhat weak. And obviously the farther you get from "Gnome on Ubuntu/Fedora" into the weeds of desktop choices, the weirder the feature set is going to get.
> A USB microphone fails to register as an input sound device
No idea here. I haven't seen a USB audio failure in a LONG time (closest I can think of is a Razer headset that has two chat/game output streams and Linux sees only one by default). Mostly likely you had a broken piece of hardware that worked in windows only by installing its own driver. And that sucks, but poor standards compliance is just something we all live with.