I see many people complain about Apple products recently, but very few actually moving away to alternatives. It seems many are caught in the comfort zone of that walled garden, not to say locked in. This is why I started avoiding Apple products many years ago. Watching things evolve "from the outside" now I find it sad and funny at the same time.
It is possible for something to be simultaneously (a) crappy; (b) expensive; and (c) the best option available.
Prior to 2006, I was a hardcore Linux (and then FreeBSD) fan, but I had to use Windows for a lot of work- and school-related tasks. When Mac switched to x86, I felt less nervous about investing in it, knowing I could go back to Windows/Linux if I wanted.
When I switched, what I came to realize was that Apple - and Jobs specifically - was mostly not content to just be the best option available. They thought through the last little details. They added accelerometers to hard drive enclosures to stop the disk if the laptop fell. They made power cables attached by magnets so you wouldn't send your laptop flying if the cord was pulled. They had a philosophy that the computer should Just Work and - for the most part - their execution showed how dedicated they were to that.
Apple is no longer in that league. Hardware failures, design failures, software failures including goto fail and root password vulnerabilities... Apple simply isn't a perfectionist company anymore. Sure, there is a litany of "What about..." comparisons you can make from times Jobs got defensive instead of being a perfectionist, but this is different. It used to be the exception. Now it's the rule.
That's why people are upset. Something that used to be reliably great is now merely better than the rest - a low bar.
For many, there isn't a better option to turn to. If you want a mostly hassle-free Unix experience with wide COTS software support, macOS is your best choice. But it's a lot sloppier than it used to be and that justifiably causes some angst.
HP spectre and Dell XPS 13 are the laptops that people silently moved away to. These laptops saw a crazy amount of iteration(relative to other companies) to grab the apple dissatisfied niche. They're pretty successful, i see a lot of ex-macbook people who disliked the keyboard/touchbar switch with some variation of them
