They never were. They were just really good at maintaining the bluster and backing it up with expensive lawyers. Now that they don't come in claws-first like they did when they were a NASDAQ rocket to the stars, it's easy to see.

Their MO was to court an executive and sell second-rate tools to them before the people who had to use them had a chance to say anything. It doesn't matter how much evidence you can provide to the contrary, once the million dollar deal is signed, you are going to be tasked with finding reasons to say that your executive was shrewd for buying this pile of junk and unfulfilled promises, and not an insane idiot sucking away your job satisfaction as fast as they can.

They did a lot of deals based on how their products would have features their competitors already have 'soon' when they haven't even started them, and a long track record of taking 3 major releases to get from something to good, and then breaking everything again by doing a 4th major release that re-imagined everything and made it horrible again.

I'm not going to claim that Apple was or is a panacea. Apple doesn't use vaporware which is big, and their Cycle of Awful is 2 releases instead of 3. You could afford to skip 1 waiting for the next even-numbered version, instead of being 2 versions behind and getting pressed to upgrade.

One might question your perspective if you ever thought they were serious.