Some of these people completely miss the point. Harley owners frequently exclaim, "if you have to ask, you won't understand".
I switched to Apple because of Vista. After the OSX light clicked on for me, I've nearly converted my entire family (5 kids and wife) to Apple.
1 iPad 1
2 iPad 2's
1 iPad 3
2 17" MBP
2 13" MBP
1 11" MBA
1 13" MBA
5 iPhone 4 (two retired from phone service and are now iPods for the youngest kids)
1 iPhone 4S
1 iPhone 5
1 Mac Mini Server
1 Timecapsule
2 Airport Express
I don't buy Apple because their products are perfect or the fastest, but what Windows/Android combination of phones, tablets, and computers integrates as well as this?
- Find my friends lets my wife and I track each other and our kids (our choice, and it works for us)
- Synchronized bookmarks on every device I pick up.
- Mobile device management on my server. One massive profile for email services, VPN, security policy, and all the other remote management goodness I get with MDM.
- Photos in-sync on each individual's devices.
- Synchronized calendars and reminders: Wife and I have our own private calendars, we have a shared mom and dad calendar, we have a house calendar for family matters.
- I can SMS and have synchronized messages on my ipad, MBA, MBP, and iphone. I can switch to whatever one I want and my entire conversation is on whatever device I pick up.
- Shared photo streams with my family and friends
- Facetime *just works*. Skype is not friendly for 7 year old kids. They can all call me on FaceTime when I travel, and they all do.
- When I download a song on my mini, it's on my ipad by the time I pick it up.
- I can sit in my pool and stream music from my mini to my pool speakers via the airport express and I can control it from my phone.
- When my teens have parties, they fire up iTunes DJ and any kid with iOS can make requests or promote a song.
- My mini serves Plex videos to my TV and to all of the Plex Apps on the IPads, iPhones, and laptops. We have two kindle fires, and plex on the fire just sucks, I'm sorry. The expereince is immeasurably better on iOS.
- I no longer have to fiddle around with backing up laptops or idiotic backup software. I turn on time machine, hide the status menu icon and nobody even knows its going on.
- I can remote (vnc, ssh) into every OSX device from my phone or my ipad and oh by the way, I only paid for the vnc app once and the ssh app once.
- All iOS devices that want to can wirelessly sync to iTunes.
- I can Airplay my iPad/iPhone via Mac mini to my TV.
- Mac mini with Server gives me brain dead simple and easy to use push mail, VPN, calendars, contacts, webmail (I added roundcube back), dns, dhcp, ldap, wikis, and super easy ssl web server.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I polled my wife and kids, this list would double.
Now, I know Android and Windows can do much of what I've documented, but no other platform integrates all of this the way iOS and OSX/OSX Server do.
Is not perfect...no complex system is, but it INTEGRATES spectacularly, and for that, I'll continue to buy Apple even if the latest from Cupertino isn't the fastest, flashiest, and feature packed.
BTW: I did my fair share of kernel development on Android over at xda, so I have lots of experience with the platform. For me, none of this is about a single device, it's about the bigger picture and I'm sure I'll get flamed for it, but android simply doesn't provide the overall combined capabilities I get with iOS and OSX.