Yeah, this rings true. I'm not an Apple customer, but I certainly remember the days when Mac users had to justify the much worse bang-for-the-buck of Apple hardware (then) with it being the only ticket to their preferred software experience.

These days it appears more that the hardware is fantastic, especially in the laptop form factor and thermal envelope, and perhaps the downside is a languishing macOS.

I use macOS daily for dev and office work, and to me it doesn’t feel languishing at all. Add Homebrew and Docker or Podman, and we’re off.

The only places I can see there could be features missing are:

- IT management type stuff where it looks like Apple are happy just delegating to Microsoft (eg. my workstation is managed with InTune and runs Microsoft Defender pushed by IT),

- CUDA support if you’re into AI on NVIDIA

- Gaming I hear, but I don’t have time for that anyway :)

Of course this is biased, because I also generally just _like_ the look and feel of macOS

Just basic customisation functionality is missing in MacOS. Recently bought a MacBook and am constantly amazed about the stuff you can't do. Oh you want do use normal scrolling on your external Bluetooth mouse (like everybody that uses a mouse does) and natural scrolling on the trackpad? Nah bro, choose one for both. You wanna just plug in some generic usb hub connected to multiple monitors like you did with your 500 euro laptop? No can't do. Want to specify the SDR content brightness on an external display separately from HDR content brightness when enabling HDR on the display? Nah bro we're just gonna blast full brightness at you all the time, and I can go on. Hardware is second to none but the software is really.holding the machine back

Scrolling, you’re right. I usually run alt-tab, rectangle and bettertouchtool to solve scrolling and a couple of other annoyances

Any decent mouse should have software that lets you customize that device.

Isn't it the other way around? Majority of noises around macOS seem to come from {front-end|back-end} {mobile|app|Web} {development|asset creation|content authoring}. The way I feel is macOS outside blogmedia hypesphere is still not a lot more relevant than OS like Haiku, and CUDA and gaming are just glitches in the Matrix: the distances between macOS hype-core to glitch walls is not uniform, and those two domains are the closest to the core.

The software has languished severely. It's been incredibly downhill since Snow Leopard (2009).

One thing to consider is Apple has always made high-quality hardware that often still works after a decade or more.