I think they were in their own little world, and when they got past that with unix-based OSX and moved from powerpc to intel, they entered the best time.
The PC-based macs were very interoperable and could dual-boot windows. They had PCIe and could work with PC graphics cards, they used usb bt and more. Macs intereoperated and cooperated with the rest of the computing world. The OS worked well enough that other unix programs with a little tweaking could be compiled and run on macs. Engineers, tech types and scientists would buy and use mac laptops.
But around the time steve jobs passed away they've lost a lot of that. They grabbed control of the ecosystem and didn't interoperate anymore. The arm chips are impressive but apple is not interoperating any more. They have pcie slots in the mac pro, but they aren't good for much except maybe nvme storage. without strong leadership at the top, they are more of a faceless turn-the-crank iterator.
(not that I like what microsoft has morphed into either)