[horusthecat]

When i read about the "hardware integration" of OSX/macOS/whatever I really have to wonder.

Power 32 bit is dead. Apple never ventured into other architectures. macOS (and OSX 10.whatever plus since the mid 2000s) are running on x86 and stumbling towards ARM; iOS runs on ARM. It's still commodity hardware, just like Windows and Linux.

I understand that Apple supports a much smaller set of hardware and drivers, but in my mind it's not really 'integration' the way, say, dinosaurs like SPARC + Solaris or POWER virtualization under AIX is integrated hardware with software. I'm really just being cranky here and splitting hairs.

[dredmorbius]

This isn't HW integration at the CPU level, but the whole damned device chipset. Apple know what network, WiFi, video, audio, network, camera, USB, FireWire, or whatever else device(s) are going to be on the system. They can buy out entire production runs of hardware if need be. And if there are changes to spec, they can stay on top of that as well.

Linux ... takes what you throw at it. It does this pretty damned well most of the time, but I've lived and seen the challenges.

Broadcom chipsets. Nvidia. Dell's so-called RAID controllers (PERC). WiFi.

Audio, trackpad (at least for single-touch), networking, and WiFi not so much any more, though bootloaders and telco kit remain issues.