I think apple had a trajectory, and the best time was at the end of the steve jobs era. After he left, they have plummeted.
I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.
The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.
But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.
(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)
True, also before, during, and after the Intel transition the ecosystem of indie and boutique apps for Macs was great. Panic and The Omni Group, just to name two boutique development companies, were probably at their peak in terms of desktop software. Besides, Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard were polished and the UI was usable and cohesive.
Right now, the quality and attention to detail have plummeted. There is also a lot of iOS-ification going on. I wish they focused less on adding random features, and more on correctness, efficiency, and user experience. The attention to detail of UI elements in e.g. Snow Leopard, with a touch of skeuomorphism and reminiscent of classic Mac OS, is long gone.
Man, I love OmniGraffle. I guess design tools have generally improved over the years, but a couple of decades ago colleagues thought I was some kind of wizard for being able to easily whip up nice finite state machine diagrams in OmniGraffle.
Those of us that are old enough to remember, Apple is back in a John Sculley phase, however this time around there are no founders to rescue the company a second time.
Not that it needs to, as it isn't bleeding money like on the A/UX, Copland and Taligent/OpenDoc days, however they risk to become only the iDevices company.
Yeah, Microsoft apparently is also back on their former self.