Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is "switching to iPhone", a similar thing happens with "just use a Mac". Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
Most of the time, using an iPhone, Mac, etc., does not "just work". Maybe the UI is simply not very usable (not just Liquid Glass, see MacOS's terrible implementation of a settings app, iOS not having an option to combine the quick settings and notifications), third-party devices (headphones, chargers, tablets, etc.) simply do not work well (no, "get the iDevice" is not helpful!), iOS having the most ass file management that may as well not exist, all the different bugs poking around everywhere (through my own experiences with iOS* and my friend's with MacOS), etc. "Give more money to Apple to fix it" is not good advice and does not help to solve anything.
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware, everybody seems to put up with it? On their Macs, you have 60 Hz LCD displays on a $1000+ laptop, no good ports selection unless you spend thousands more, ridiculously priced memory and storage upgrades that would be a death sentence to any other company, very shallow key travel that feels terrible to type on compared to other options, etc. As for their iPads, you have similarly not so great displays on a relatively high end tablet unless you spend thousands on a tablet with an uber-fancy M5 chip (why would anyone need that???), a keyboard case that is so expensive despite feeling like a cheap membrane keyboard you got on Aliexpress and being so top-heavy, etc. Who in their right mind would purchase a $550 set of headphones made of ridiculously heavy metal, with uncomfortable cushions, terrible battery life, mid ANC, and several year old innards?
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing? ~~I don't really see anything quite like it in other product segments.~~ What is the secret apple sauce?
*note that I currently run an Android phone, but I have my issues with them too that I won't get into. My particular device is very bloated and incredibly annoying to work with sometimes, but it's what I've got. On my laptop I happily run Linux, where the device simply listens to me which is a nice change of pace
edit: Actually, no, I think something similar occurs with Nintendo (in video games) and Disney (for films)
edit 2: A lot of people have added their own thoughts, and I think it boils down to these:
- consistency (this is the main one): aside from a few odd products, Apple has mostly had a good reputation for build quality and having all their products be at least good enough, sometimes excellent, in part due to their limited product selection. If you look at other laptops and phones, they are quite hit or miss for the most part
- some form of elitism: some people (not all, but definitely some) want to show off that they are better than others, and Apple having expensive products is a brand name that lots of people recognise. They think that if you see the metal chassis and the half-eaten apple, it means that person has a lot of money and influence! And since they want to show others they have lots of money and influence, they too want Apple bits (similar to the variety of other "luxury" brands)
- that one exclusive feature that you associate Apple with: think features like Airdrop or how the AirPods seamlessly switch between Apple devices, it's one of those that traps people in the closed ecosystem
- the failures of their competitors: Windows is shooting each of their own toes, plastering all their bloat and CoPilot bits everywhere. In part due to Windows, it's difficult to make a competitive laptop, particularly in the budget segment, since Windows 11 makes everything run worse. MacOS is the only other option besides Windows for most people if they want a laptop, this is speaking as a Linux user, as there aren't many laptops that ship with a Linux distro OOTB. Macbooks don't have very good repairability and have horribly expensive memory upgrades, but a lot of people don't really care about that
- they are good enough: There might be better options available for the price, maybe there's a 120 Hz laptop with OLED, maybe you can get better camera hardware, maybe you can have a lighter chassis, you can get an equivalent for a far lower price, etc., but a lot of people don't want to wade through all the garbage and are okay with spending more for something they are familiar with. Apple's products aren't always the best, but they are never the worst, and for a lot of people, that's enough
They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.
So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.
By comparison, the other options aren't nearly as seamless. I'd need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.
The file management remains atrocious over USB (it's basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they've basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.
At least from my personal perspective, I've never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they're currently using.
With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac's software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.
The closest thing seems to be more that if you're on a device that Apple hasn't released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn't work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.
On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn't actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn't let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.
My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence's settings, and that's not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.