Yeah, but there is more to it. Oddly enough, the alleged rip off world of Apple, turned out to be quite a good value, for me personally. It might be different experience for a lot of people, but for me, after decades with SGI, Sun, PC's, Apple proves to be best bang for buck I have ever encountered in computing.
On PCs, even if you ignored all the latest trends, hardware rotation became enforced by the OS. There was no reason to switch from XP to Vista for most of users at the time when I abandoned ship. XP was stable, popular, well supported. But it wasn't enough for MS. So they forced us to move to new OS by withholding DirectX upgrade. You want to use new games, video accelerations etc? You must upgrade. Your OS, your graphics card. Oh and memory. Get a lot of memory. I think I'm right to think DirectX trick to enforce OS upgrade was used by Microsoft at least twice?
OSX doesn't do that. It doesn't force you to upgrade. If you feel you want to or need to, it's £13.99. And doesn't come in several different flavours, none of that Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate, with embedded CPU and memory limitations, just to rip you off and sell you upgrade to an upgrade. And for me, again personally, on any of the multiple OSX machines that surround me at home and at work, there was never that "drama" you get in Windows. No missing drivers from random manufacturer forcing you to update hardware, no unexpected incompatibilities. No fresh installs because something, somewhere prevents boot after in situ upgrade.
Back to last decade story. Vista was terrible mistake for most of us at the time. It definitely broke the Windows market. And Apple knew it very well. People often say Apple sells basic hardware for crazy money, but the 2008 Mac Pro with 2 physical CPU's and 8 cores was priced at £1400. There was no Windows server or workstation you could buy with the same spec, from any PC manufacturer for even remotely similar money. Back in 2008 Apple just had it all. The deal they made with Intel totally paid off. Fastest and best bang for buck workstations. Slimmest desktops. Slickest laptops. And Windows 7 simply arrived too late to the rescue.
I don't follow Windows market too closely since I switched. I mean I do have windows boxes at work, I also have Windows 7 on my Mac Pro, to which I found no need or opportunity to boot into for over 12 months. I keep Win XP laptop handy for car diagnostics. Tried Win 8, it's odd. But not the way, for example Finder in OSX, is "odd" (one could even say Finder is retarded). "Odd" in the way BeOS, Enlightment desktop in Linux or Launch Control in OSX is odd. I just don't see purpose of it. It's just one of those products that feel like it was written by couple of stoners in college dorm who took their thinking process two joints too far "outside the box", and kept on going with the code just for the sake of dramatic reveal (with obligatory "tada!") and still stand there with palm of hand raised in eternal high five that will never arrive.
By the end of last decade, as Microsoft focused on constantly misfiring web based services and console market, they effectively killed the reasons to remain in Windows. Gaming market stagnated. There was no ground braking, mass hardware upgrade worthy production since what - Crysis in 2008? Console ports were just as easy to port to other OS's as they were to other consoles, games started to slowly trickle into OSX world. Professional software market abandoned OS specific platforms. Even the obligatory MS Office stopped being a reason to use Windows PC for work. It was now available to all platforms thanks to open source options. And MS themselves, thanks to Office for Mac. The two main driving forces behind annual hardware rotations and constant upgrades, were effectively demolished by Microsoft themselves. The reasons to go back to Windows vanished. The reasons to stay with OSX remained. At least for me.
