For me it's less about what's "so great" and more about what's not awful.
I need a Unix-like command line environment and Windows is inferior there. Otherwise it's fine (I use it on my gaming machine), but if you look closely you can see it's a huge mess (e.g. the insane state of the control panel(s)) in ways Mac OS just isn't.
Linux is too much work. I say this as someone who has used it for years, still uses it every day, I've compiled my own kernels, etc., but it's just too much work to get everything working perfectly on my personal machine, especially on a laptop.
Mac OS doesn't have many of these problems. I am old, I have too much real work to do, and I need a machine that works and gets the fuck out of my way. I am past the point where I consider fiddling with the guts of my OS a badge of honor and think having a bunch of code up on my screen makes me look super cool like Neo from The Matrix. For people like me who don't need things it doesn't have and like what it does have, it's a good choice.
Now if only Apple would stop making so many dumb hardware choices...
Another feature that keeps me on OS X is the ease of imaging a system and booting from that image. Also target disk mode - I've yet to see anything that comes close in Windows or Linux but I admit I'm a bit out of touch.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'll add, though, that due to some recent work in deep learning I started running Pop_OS 19.04. Other than the stupid name, it's actually been surprisingly great at doing everything I need and staying out of the way without me having to fiddle with it. I can run steam, skype, zoom, and everything but office as easily as on any other os.
Overall polish is not to Mac level, but it's a smidge above Windows 10. Which is about 100x better than my prior experiences with desktop linux.
I need a Unix-like command line environment and Windows is inferior there. Otherwise it's fine (I use it on my gaming machine), but if you look closely you can see it's a huge mess (e.g. the insane state of the control panel(s)) in ways Mac OS just isn't.
Linux is too much work. I say this as someone who has used it for years, still uses it every day, I've compiled my own kernels, etc., but it's just too much work to get everything working perfectly on my personal machine, especially on a laptop.
Mac OS doesn't have many of these problems. I am old, I have too much real work to do, and I need a machine that works and gets the fuck out of my way. I am past the point where I consider fiddling with the guts of my OS a badge of honor and think having a bunch of code up on my screen makes me look super cool like Neo from The Matrix. For people like me who don't need things it doesn't have and like what it does have, it's a good choice.
Now if only Apple would stop making so many dumb hardware choices...