You can tell all this revisionist history is written by people who did not experience it. Macbook market share grew among developers because it had a BSD shell and worked well with the web and mobile stacks of the mid- to late-2000's that were built on open source. Among non-developers it was an upsell from the success of other Apple products, especially upselling from the iPhone to the Macbook Air for which there was little hardware competition. User-facing parts of the operating system was not a reason in any of this.

Fully agree. Didn’t mean to imply that Apples growth was specifically due to Vista or Windows 7, just that it mostly occurred then and not as much in the Win10 era.

Both the BSD layer _and_ the polished interface let me switch to Mac OS X in 2004 as a developer. Trying to get a nice Linux GUI was too much of a time sink for me then.