You know, love or hate Apple, they did a lot of things right.
Personally, I think that Microsoft has taken a lot of bad press for “crashes” where 95% of them, especially the last 10 years have been caused by:
-Overly-ambitious software that was very bleeding edge, put in the hands of inexperienced programmers (including those at Microsoft itself) and users. If you ever wrote software on anything less than a 386 and Windows 3.1, you know what I mean. It’s amazing that it actually worked at all, much less reasonably well.
-OE Manufacturers trying to stuff too much software on too little hardware.
-Buggy device drivers (at least with NT+ Windows, Microsoft could at least point a finger).
-Dicey hardware screwed together by high school students.
Apple makes or tightly controls it’s hardware; they have never tried to sell too little of a machine (at least in the last 10-15 years). And if Microsoft has reputation problems stemming from iffy hardware, especially in the past, check out an $80 Android tablet.
There are those who say “Apple has made a walled garden”. I actually like that metaphor. My wife lives in that garden, and I must say that it is a very nice, safe, and low maintenance garden although the real estate and shrubbery are a little expensive. Compare those with Android’s, whose garden is very cheap, but it’s sparse and what few nice plants grow there are interspersed with dangerous plant diseases and weeds that make you itch.
Microsoft’s garden consists of a very nice tulip in a pot, surrounded by razor wire.
A manager of mine put it best (perhaps he stole this? I don’t know, but it’s good):
“The pioneers take the arrows, and then the settlers just come waltzing in.”
I’ve thought of it more as like cars.
Some people LIVE to squeeze that last 0.01 sec off their quarter mile time, the 1/4” of bounce off their hydraulics, the 1% improvement in top speed.
These people need a Windows box with all kinds of slots.
Some people just want to drive a car that gets them wherever they want to go with no muss and no fuss. The want to focus on the trip and the destination, not worry about the wheels.
Apple lets them do this.
The roads are plenty big enough for both.
The early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese!