So do people just buy these to look cool? I tried using a Macbook many times, but often got frustrated and went back to my good old Linux laptop for development. Doesn't look quite as slick, but certainly gets the job done.
I develop on this thing. It is running a great Unix os. I can't stand desktop Linux. The hardware quality was the best with a wide margin before the latest gen. Battery life is also great. I like them for development work when they are stable.
A lot of people are also really invested into the ecosystem. My entire photo collection is on iCloud. I use an iPhone. I can copy paste between my computer and phone. My Apple watch unlocks the computer when I'm near... List goes on.
But now I feel like Apple is a fantastic phone company that also happens to make some computers. They have been degrading pretty bad.
It's also that Windows/Linux has many of these issues as well. It's not as if Windows 10 notifications are clear and intuitive. When I go to my desktop after a day of work, Windows will slowly replay every single slack message and email I got all day, one at a time, for almost an hour, as single notifications.
I think it's less that OS X is bad now, but more that it's finally degraded to a level of annoyance that people just have gotten enured to with Windows. It's not to say that that's a good thing, but at this point, I have known bugs and annoyances with all of the computers I work with, no matter the platform.
Some of it is also that Apple has a "real" integrated ecosystem. To what you say, you can easily move things between iOS and OS X. If you're watching stuff on your Mac, you can throw it to an Apple TV or your Airpods. Windows doesn't have a version of that that "just works". The closest you get is opting into Google's ecosystem and going Chromecast/Android, but I'd rather not trust Google with even more of my info.
Honestly I'd dare to say most of Apple's market right now is purely from vendor lock-in. Both their hardware and software are getting worse, but not bad enough for people to switch their entire digital lives to a different ecosystem.. not yet, anyway.
My first Mac was an employer-provided MBP in... oh, 2011 or so. Before that I'd used DOS, Windows (3.1 and up, including NT4 and 2K) and Linux (Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, roughly in that order with a little Redhat and Fedora here and there). I'd seen some early OSX server edition thing, but not really used it, and I'd used pre-OSX Macs at school (hated them, "it's more stable and faster than Winblowz" my ass). Some exposure to Solaris, too. Used BeOS (loved it) and QNX on home machines for various purposes, as well.
The MBP was the first laptop I'd used that 1) had a trackpad good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to carry a mouse around to use it for more than 10min at a time, and 2) had battery life good enough that I didn't feel like I needed to take my power supply with me if I'd be away from my desk for more than an hour. It had every port I was likely to need for most tasks. In short, it was the first time I'd used a laptop that was actually usefully portable as a self-contained device. They kinda ruined that appeal by going all-USB-C and The Great Endongling, but that's another story.
It was also very stable, and over time I came to really appreciate the built-in software. Preview's amazing (seriously, never would have thought a preview app would make a whole computing platform "sticky" for me, but here we are, it's that good), Safari's the only browser that seems to really care about power use, terminal's light and has very low input latency, it comes with a decent video editor, an office suite I prefer over anything I've used on Linux, and so on. In short it's full of good-enough productivity software that's also light enough on resources that I don't hesitate to open them, and often forget they're still open in the background.
These days I like having a base OS that's decent, includes the GUI and basic productivity tools, and that's distinctly separate from my user-managed packages (homebrew) rather than having them all mixed up together (yes, I could achieve this on Linux, if it had a core, consolidated GUI/windowing system so various apps weren't targeting totally different windowing toolkits, but it doesn't, so separating a capable and complete GUI "base OS" from the rest of one's packages gets tricky). There are quite a few little nice-to-haves littered around the settings and UI. Most of the software is generally better polished UX wise than Linux or Windows, and that doesn't just mean it's pretty—it performs well and, most importantly, consistently. There are problems and exceptions to "well and consistently" but there are so many more issues on competing platforms that even if it's gotten worse, it's still much nicer to use.
Given the premium on hardware (that's come and gone—at times there almost wasn't one if you actually compared apples to apples [haha], but right now it's large) I'd rather use Linux (or, well, probably a BSD, but that'd mean even more fiddling most likely) but the only times that's seemed to function genuinely well and stably compared to its competition was when I either kept tight control over every aspect of the system (time-consuming, meant figuring out how to do any new thing I needed to do that other systems might do automatically, which wasn't always a great use of time to put it mildly) or in the early days of Ubuntu (talking pre-Pulse Audio, so quite a while ago) which was really sensible, light, and polished for a time.
I do still run Windows only for gaming, and Linux on servers or in GUI-equipped VMs for certain purposes.
