Their software was never great to begin with. But there was a form of uniqueness, some innovation. That much is gone now. Despite the fact that they're developing for their own hardware, despite the hundreds of billions, their software is neither especially fast nor particularly reliable.
I can't compare to windows 10, but I had to send my mbpr in for a screen replacement and while I waited for it to come back, I installed ubuntu on my old mbp.
The desktop was a singularly terrible experience of bugginess.
The bugs I experience in OSX are nothing compared to that experience. The only bug I notice right now is sometimes my wife's computer isn't accessible through Finder, and vice versa. Annoying but we have a work around.
At work I use windows 7, and it makes me want to punch the wall several times an hour. Some of that is (I think) the corporate crap that my company installs. Every day is a super horrible experience, and I have not been able to pin down where the problem is stemming from.
Working on my mac at the end of the day is an absolute pleasure by comparison.
I'll concede though that I really don't like the design of itunes and haven't ever thought it was good. It's definitely worse now than in the past though.
RE iphone/android... I switched to android for a year. It's not been horrible, but also not great. Really the main problem I have is the awfulness of the google app store. 25,000 five star reviews for the AT&T app, yeah right. In fact it's rare to find anything less than 4 stars. It's all rigged reviews out the wazoo, probably fed by the mechanical turk.
I hear your point, but I feel like the comparison is not fair to Ubuntu. Like I said, Apple develops their own software for their own hardware. They control the whole thing. One can HOPE that everything will work out of the box. Ubuntu on the other hand has a MUCH harder task at hand depending on the computer and it's a known fact that common hardware has better support (Intel chipsets in general for example). The libre community is also spreading itself thinner by having to support every other architectures and hardware under the sun with little funding.
So my point was that given the extremely favorable conditions Apple is benefiting from (their own hardware, extremely forgiving users, bajillions of cash, advertising), they're not delivering the goods anymore.
I don't know that I buy the varied hardware thing much anymore. I mean, it's either AMD or Intel, a few chipsets, very few integrated video and it's well defined.
Support for dedicated video can be spotty I suppose, but most macs don't even have that so I'd just ignore it.
As far as controlling the hardware, it sounds like a good point, but I'd be surprised if Apple had less than 100 different variations on their laptop/desktop models over the last 5 years.
