Apple's value is absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And as compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)

It definitely was in the MacOS 9 days. That OS was a joy to use. 3rd party Mac apps were incredible too.

You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.

It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two

the software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.

I worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.

Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.

It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.