I really dislike this community conflation of attention to aesthetic detail with "detail". Apple does fantastic work on aesthetics. Wonderful little details like the pulsing sleep led. Their hardware is generally pleasant to look at, their OS...though starting to show its 9 year old age still holds its own.
While important, and often imitated, aesthetic detail is a superficial kind of detail. And it's not wholesale "attention to detail" not matter how many breathless fan posts in blogs on threads there are. Apple products in general have a great many areas where they have piss poor attention to actual detail, and let it slide for years without attention and instead build a marketing campaign around the font they use on their keyboards.
They substitute shiny too often for substance and the vast majority of Apple fans fall for it, "ooh shiny!". There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>". And that list of problems is long and ranges in everything from technical issues to hardware reliability to usability problems to yes...aesthetics. Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.
Aesthetic detail is "nice to have" but not a "must have". Detail in other areas are probably more important. And sadly, Apple often falls down in those areas. It doesn't really matter if my MBP is cut from a single piece of aluminum and the leds pulse at some certain rhythm when its asleep. It's far more impressive to me that when I open it up, it resumes in under 10 seconds (which BTW is thankfully one of those areas that Apple did turn the attention to detail gun on, Macs sleep and resume fantastically better than any Windows machine I've ever used). But it also matters to me if I have to send it back for repair due to manufacturing defect more often than my dell -- particularly if I've paid a huge price premium to have a pulsing sleep led, the damn thing better be more reliable than a $12 toaster...and sadly it isn't.
I'm certainly not claiming the opposite, that other vendors and software makers are better than Apple in the detail department. Just that Apple has many failures as well, but the community of Apple users religiously ignores those little problems without a peep -- a massive display of this phenomenon is on display here. They stop recognizing that their stuff is just stuff, and Apple makes stuff that's pretty nice to use, but in the end it's just stuff and it's full of flaws.
just trying to provide the voice of reason here