[xkemp]

This is said the other way around at least as often. As in: the high price of Apple Hardware is only worth it because it's a requirement to get MacOS.

And I'm willing to admit that there have been more annoyances in the OS. But having recently tried Windows and Linux again for the first time in over a decade, I can report that nothing much has changed in their relative standings. Just the Windows Activation process alone is a crime against customers. System settings/Utilities/etc are some abomination of cruft accumulated over decades, in a conglomerate of interfaces that seem to try to emulate websites, and sometimes actually are websites that somehow make changes to your system.