That phrase "just works" speaks more to vertical integration than it does to any more specific claim about UX, alignment to preferences, or immediate productivity, and to demonstrate how foundationally this is encoded, you implicitly alluded as much in that opening phrase "a mac, the OS" that directly conflated the hardware and the software.
Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.
> Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers
All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
Unless you install the bare OS from scratch. Apple bundles the drivers for their hardware with their OS.
Good luck with plugging in anything non-Apple branded or not using standard USB audio or Ethernet CDC and you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts that almost certainly will break in the next OS release.
You can do this for Windows too, that's how most corporate images are built.
One image and 30 different laptop models, that's how it's done in every competently run megacorp IT department. Do you think some poor technician is manually loading drivers onto every Windows laptop?
My solution to this very problem was to virtualize an ancient OS X (was not easy) so I could continue to use a perfectly good scanner.
Though I'm certain you've raised this issue before, and it was met with "I've never heard of anyone needing a scanner, you must be doing something weird, have you tried taking a picture of it with your iPhone(R) instead?"
> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.
If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.
Frankly, I prefer the mac because there's so little arsing around with drivers. Not out of any blinkered misconceptions about quality, usability, or an otiose love for Apple or their products otherwise.