UPDATE: "Essentially useless" is (obviously, I hope) rhetorical hyperbole. See subsequent discussion for clarification.
You’re right in criticizing Apple on certain things. But the alternatives are far worse, and to use the topic appropriate term here, “crappier”. For all its faults, I still prefer some Apple products and wouldn’t touch the competition even if they paid me to.
Yes, I agree. That's why some day someone will have to pry my mid-2013 MBP from my cold dead hands.
Strongly disagree, and I think this is part of the problem: Apple positioned itself as "The Good UI Company" so strongly that people cannot imagine a good UI which doesn't come from Apple. Therefore, they compare all UIs to what Apple's doing now and take points off for not being Apple, as opposed to evaluating based on usability and fitness for purpose. The ultimate expression of this is people deriding UIs like Window Maker, essentially the NeXT UI, because it isn't Apple, when it's from the same mind as the "Wonderful Apple UIs" everyone seems to love.
Sometimes I blame greedy computer repair people of the 90's and early 2000's for this mess. I remember my friend opened up a repair shop (I helped weekends as a side gig). There were companies in our town charging OUTRAGEOUS prices for very easy repairs, and doing a really bad job. Then we would end up fixing the "repair" and then the original problem, which of course was always more than the original problem. It was really sad.
Now I live in a town with NO computer repair shops, and the closest thing is the Best Buy which is the KING of overcharging for repairs and doing a crappy job.
It's no wonder people just started buying cheap computers after being ripped off.
/rant
As the Elton John song says, it's a sad, sad situation.
Desktops are luxury items that aren't needed anymore, laptops are quickly becoming those too. People don't need computers, their computing needs change too and the iPad is better at mobility so many people just get a tablet rather than a computer anyway. Even I question my need of using a full gnu Linux phone once I was able to get chrome desktop extensions in a browser on Android.
Is Apple overpriced? I dunno, the rest of the market is priced similarly. But the hardware is no better or worse than the competitors, and it can be argued Apple supports it a whole lot longer than the competitors.
Then Apple made a conscious decision to emphasize form over function. The result was products that fail often (e.g. the butterfly keyboard), cannot be easily repaired (if they can be repaired at all), and have a terrible UI/UX. Discoverability, configurability, and reliability are things of the past. Every software update (which are no longer optional, BTW) is a crap shoot (no pun intended) with regards to whether it will introduce more problems than it fixes.
> we get 5-6 years out of each one we buy
Then you're talking about products that were built before this trend really took hold. The butterfly keyboard was only introduced 5 years ago. The UI/UX horribleness began with Yosemite, which only came out 6 years ago, and didn't get really bad until Catalina, which is barely two years old.
Catalina got released in October 2019, less than a year ago.
And right now, there aren't really any better alternatives. I use MacOS, I use Windows, I use Linux. I have Android devices, and iPads. Apple's devices are every bit as good as any of the competition. They are ahead in a couple key areas like privacy and long-term support.
I also think you're being too nostalgic about the Apple of yore. Apple has always had quality issues, both in hardware and software. Apple Cube cracked. Macbooks had screen delimitation. Titanium laptops discolored (as did the plastic iBooks). Video cards failed due to bad drivers. I had a 1st Gen Intel Mac Pro that burned through video cards every 3 months while I was on a World of Warcraft binge. Apple ended up replacing 3 for me while it was under warranty. Apple released OSX before it was ready for primetime, and the result was an OS that was markedly slower than OS9.
As for OSX/macOS UI/UX, people griped about bugs and poor design decisions from day one. Whether it was monochrome stripes in window elements, or too much candy colored buttons, to bugs so annoying that Apple released an OS that was basically just a hard reset of bug fixes.
I don't know, but my iPad updated itself without my approval a few days ago. That had never happened before, so I assumed it was a change that came in with the last update that I did approve.
As far as nostaligia, I have two mid-2013 MBPs that I use on a daily basis. One runs Mavericks, the other runs Catalina. The Mavericks machine does everything I need it to do. It is stable. It runs flawlessly for literally months at a time. The Catalina machine is buggy, has to be rebooted on a regular basis, and once needed the entire OS reinstalled from scratch because the disk filled up with crap and no one could figure out how to get rid of it. (The only reason I use it at all is that one of my clients requires me to use it for security reasons.)