I don't know if it was ever on their software

It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two

Apple's value was absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)

Not when comparing classical Mac OS to Windows 9X/NT, which is why they were into trouble during the 1990's.

Agreed, I wouldn’t make that comparison before 2010. And even then you’re right into peak Windows with Windows 7. That was a goated OS.

Agreed. In the creative space there is no equal. Macs have provided consistency and stability from the 90s.

It definitely was in the MacOS 9 days. That OS was a joy to use. 3rd party Mac apps were incredible too.

You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.

You mean the OS they failed to find a replacement for and almost went bankrupt, had it not been for the NeXT reverse acquisition?

Yes, that OS. There is more to an OS than technology. Mac OS X was the technological solution they needed, but it has ALWAYS been an inferior UI. Many hundreds of thousands of words have been written on this.

If you're at all curious, you can start here [1] with John Siracusa's famous piece on the Finder.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

I am into computers since 1986, and the first Mac I touched was in 1994.

Speak for yourself, then. I can tell you countless people used to find computers easy to use when they had Macs in the 90s. Now they find computers baffling and want essentially nothing to do with them.

the software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.

I worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.

Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.

It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.