As much as I love hating on Apple as much as the next person... they have developed taking products (iPod, iPhone especially) - and turning them into fairly polished products - into an art.
I'd get my mom and iPhone/iPad before I got her an Android/Tablet.
It's that simplicity that "ordinary" people gravitate towards - which I, as a power user, hate.
You could argue that Android/Windows gives more power to the user - but Apple makes better "appliances" than anyone else. Appliances don't get tweaked or twiddled with.
I think the better way to look at it is that Apple doesn't produce gadgets to appeal to early adopters, they produce gadgets to appeal to everyone and get early adopters to try it.
There were lots of MP3 players before the iPod, and they all had lots of features, most of which were terrible and confusing. No one had made an MP3 player to appeal to the mass market, they were designing them for the existing users of MP3 players, the early adopters.
Along came Apple and designed a device that everyone could want and use, and a lot of the early adopters saw that it was a superior product in a lot of ways. After that they iterated on it to improve it and make it more appealing to more and more people.
I agree with your sentiment that Android, Windows, and, I assume you would agree, Linux, provide more customization options to the user, and there's a huge part of me that loves being able to tweak things to work exactly right. I bought a Mac to replace my Dell, however, because I was tired of having to tweak things to work exactly right and I was happy to invest in a known quantity. There's nothing empowering about a system you have to work to maintain constantly. That's the appeal with Apple's products.
Seriously it took PC MFGs until 2015 to get trackpads to be not awful, when Apple had great ones like a decade before. The clickpad was copied by basically every PC laptop maker and I didn't use one that wasn't terrible until last year. For better or worse, everyone rips off what Apple does, even if Apple didn't do it first, and the rip-offs are generally really bad. People buy them thinking that "it's the same thing".
The iPod. By specs, no, but by interface and by usability, very yes. (Also I think they were among the first to include headphones that weren't complete junk?)
The iPhone. I use an Android phone, but...I'm not gonna front on this one. At least for a while, and there is an argument that this continues to today, nobody was touching the iPhone.
The iPad. Android tablets, to this day, are really kinda lousy (source: the stack of them sitting on my desk, unpowered) with poor application support. Windows tablets are okay, but they're a different market; iPad competitors, the Surface RT line, plunked without a trace.
iPod had better specs when it came out if you look at battery life, transfer speed, and charge speed. Turns out if you get those right people don't care as much about WiFi and FM radio.
- no-install peripheral support that "just works" from the typical user's perspective
- iPad
- keyboards
- trackpads
- general product design
- OS-level security
Their software quality has, of course, been declining for several years now. Their software design choices are becoming increasingly questionable. Their hardware quality is beginning to show some problems (merely anecdata from experiences I've had with recent hardware for the first time).
Of course, determining what Apple has done better than competitors is frequently a subjective decision.
I'd get my mom and iPhone/iPad before I got her an Android/Tablet.
It's that simplicity that "ordinary" people gravitate towards - which I, as a power user, hate.
You could argue that Android/Windows gives more power to the user - but Apple makes better "appliances" than anyone else. Appliances don't get tweaked or twiddled with.