Part of that story of course is their execution, thoughtfulness and great taste to pick “just the right” technical ideas.

MacOS X Panther with Aqua’s basically artifact-less and butter smooth postscript based rendering capabilities, the beloved (!) BSD shell I could drop into at any point. All of that in 2003 … a true OS from the future and for the masses!

Battery runtime of PPC 7xx also was stellar at the time. AFAIR nothing could compete in relative comparison.

Humanistic and design oriented engineering at an excellent level and consistently so. Of course I aspired to be exactly like that as a professional!

Too bad they have strayed from that in many ways over the years. They IMO mostly still, but only barely hold the functional high ground these days.