The same criticism applies to Windows - give it away for free and I might care less about crashes and the huge slide in quality over the last ~5 years.
As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names, responses to introspection queries, etc. Apple hardware is uniquely well-engineered. If you’re writing your own hobbyist OS, it’s a breath of fresh air to run it on a Mac, compared to other kinds of PCs.
This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines. Windows and Linux paper over all the brokenness in hardware land, and so machines built for Windows/Linux rely on these heuristics with sloppy integration work. Apple, meanwhile, just does the integration to the standard in their hardware, and then relies on said standards-conformance in their OS. If everyone conformed to hardware ABI standards as well as Apple does, Hackintoshing would be a matter of just dropping a patched dont-steal-osx.kext into your install disc and calling it good. Everything else you have to do is the hardware vendors’ fault.
> As it is, it’s the opposite: Macs run both Windows and Linux “easily”, while other vendors’ buggy hardware has to be patched over with heuristics in these OSes because it has non-conforming device names
> This is, coincidentally, also the reason it’s so hard to run macOS on other vendors’ machines
Are you not aware that OS X does various explicit checks to make sure it is running on approved hardware, regardless of compatibility and capability attestation? Apple doesn't want OS X running on non-Apple hardware.
Er, yes, that's the "dont-steal-osx.kext" that I mentioned. My point was that thwarting those checks is a very small part of getting macOS to run on a system (and is a solved problem—if it was all that was required, Hackintoshing would be a one-and-done thing, rather than something that breaks on every system update.)
The majority of the (continuing) effort of getting macOS to run on arbitrary hardware—hardware that, by its components, should be compatible with macOS's drivers—is dealing with vendors' whack-ass "doesn't even pass static analysis using Intel's own provided AML compiler" DSDTs (which macOS rightfully tosses its hands up at, but which Windows and Linux heuristically munge into something barely passable and then use it.)
> latest high-end Apple and Dell laptops
Dell (along with HP and Lenovo) are the better vendors as far as spec-compliance goes. Really, any of the PC makers who have an "enterprise workstation" arm, have the in-house expertise for things like ACPI compliance, or UEFI compliance, or PXE compliance, etc. But other vendors? Acer? LG? Xiaomi? Razer? Better to not even try.
The result is they have a lot of problems with tin whiskers. Which is why you'll find about a billion forum threads about people baking their macs in ovens, and similar hijinks.
Granted, if you're not using a mac for anything that intensively uses the hardware (for instance, just text editing) you'll never run into this problem.
Xorg.conf is a delightful stroll through a meadow compared to the nightmare fuel that came before, and in setting Linux (Kali,Ubuntu) on several machines of various spec over the last weeks, it has Just Worked.