Not a decade, it was roughly a 4 year span - from the 2016 super thin chassis redesign with butterfly switches to when they started shipping Apple Silicon in 2020 (they also backtracked on the bad keyboards in 2019 with the i9 MBP I believe)

And anyway, it's an outlier. Exception proves the rule.

Apple's held to such a high standard that people still joke about antenna gate from a decade and a half ago, or the iPhone 6 bending 12 years ago. Every other OEM is nonstop putting out worse devices with worse QC but no one hears about it because no one is shipping units for any individual high-end device in anywhere near the numbers Apple is. They've got a massive magnifying glass on them that no one else does.

I could tell you a swathe of issues I've had with every Android I've owned, all worse than any iPhone I've owned. But most people probably have never heard of those issues and/or don't remember them because it's not notable unless it's Apple. For instance, the Nexus 6P failed so reliably after the first year, it got to a point where you could just call Google, say you're having issues, and they'd fastlane you to sending you a Pixel XL as a replacement. The Nexus 5P from the same year had even worse issues where they practically all started boot looping at some point. If Apple had a dud year to that level, it would have been MAJOR news.

Apple stuff lasts me longer than any other computers I've purchased in my life. The Mac had a bit of a dark age in the late 2010s but barring that, I think it's incorrect to say Apple products are unreliable.

I bought a late-2013 13" MacBook Pro when I started university and I used that thing up until the end of 2021 when I got a 14" M1 Pro MBP. And it wasn't even because it was performing that terribly, I just wanted the new Apple silicon machine. Now it's ~4.5 years later and that machine runs like it did on day 1 and I have no desire to upgrade anytime soon.

You're kinda skipping over the 75% of my comment where I said I like everything else, including things Linux can't replicate.

I see the Vista comparison a lot but I'm not sure I agree with it. I never thought Vista was that ugly, I thought it was more most of the computer hardware people were buying at the time just wasn't capable of running those visual effects (and I recall it was pretty buggy too)

It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.

Can't speak for GP but I got the feeling that after Apple embarrassed itself shipping almost none of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024, they scrambled to get something drastic out the door to show they're still "innovating" and "doing big things"