alt Hacker NewsI want to speak up for OS X. When it came out, and for years afterward, it hit an amazing sweet spot of looks cool, runs browsers well, runs MS well, runs Adobe well, full Unix shell, added great new features every year. There is a reason it became extremely popular with web devs, as the web was taking over the economy.
A closed local firewall blocking all inbound by default. Spotlight indexing. Time Machine backups. Flexible screenshot tools. Print anything to PDF. Lots of useful trackpad gestures. And after Intel, we got Rosetta, Boot Camp, easy Windows virtualization like Parallels, etc. That’s all off the top of my head, but for sure OS X had Microsoft on their back foot for years. Gates used to yell at his team about it.
I'll definitely give you Rosetta, and even more so Rosetta 2. Spotlight too, at least in principle, but it has had its fair share of dodgy behavior over the years. I'm not really sure about the others.
There's certainly always been fantastic software available for Mac. However, it was almost never built by Apple. It sort of felt like someone one day needed a FireWire port, so they bought a Macintosh. Then they must have told a close friend working at Macromedia they needed some software - and it was all just inertia from then on.