Microsoft was expecting people to line up around the block and fork over $100 for Windows ME and everyone was just confused.
I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it, 95 especially. 98 OSR2 improved quite a bit on the situation, but I don't recall having a great time with 95. It was still a glorified DOS extender in many ways, often slow to start up and shutdown, PC hardware and drivers were a mess and system stability therefore poor. This was right at the beginning of the concept of "PnP" in the PC world (plug and play) and it was a cruel joke most of time.
Windows 2000 being from the NT line was peak Windows in many ways. I resisted XP but it was ok for most people admittedly.
The "UI that runs on DOS" was a feature not a bug for legacy game/software support.
I was trying to figure out how to express myself, but I think you got it.
98SE was still pretty bad because pre-NTFS filesystems would decay over time (of course so would ext2, but linux generally crashed a lot less).
Yeah, a lot of software engineering types switched to MBPs because the OS isn't a steaming pile of garbage and it reliably works with the hardware. The former can't be said for Windows these days and the latter is generally hit-or-miss with Linux.
But I wouldn't be surprised if that's a rounding error when you're talking Macs doubling or tripling their market share. I'd imagine most people walking into an Apple Store in their local mall and buying a Mac with Apple Pay on their iPhone don't really know or care about the telemetry added in Windows 10. I still think Apple deserves the vast majority of the credit for the success of Mac.
My Windows PC is slow, ad-ridden, buggy, and unpleasant. Also, the physical device feels cheap and the plastic is separating on the corner, and the hinge is broken.
Hey. Look at that super sleek aluminum MacBook there…
It was effectively the trojan horse of the Apple eco-system.
Secondarily it was due to Apple switching from PowerPC to Intel chips, allowing it to compete more broadly with support for Windows.
As an aside, Windows 10 is largely a pretty great operating system.
Not only do I use the terminal daily, I live in the terminal on my Mac.
I consistently hear from Linux users they wished there was a terminal emulator as good as iTerm2 for Linux.
In other words, Windows became one of those toolbars that we all have to remove from our grandmothers' browsers.
For me, the answer was Linux, but for a lot of people who don't want to use a terminal daily, MacOS is the answer.
If you are a user, Windows hates you. MacOS doesn't.