In the past, the things that Apple has done well has generally been good build quality and long support. There are exceptions, yes, but they're usually better than their competitors in that field. Performance was always similar (or worse) for the price until Apple Silicon came around.

In modern times, all manufacturers produce laptops with excellent build quality (even smaller ones like Framework, Tuxedo, System76, etc.), all devices are generally supported for a while (+ can be extended with things like Linux), and performance is nowadays a race between the Mac and PC. You can do all the things on PC on Mac and vice versa.

What has always been the case and never gone away is Apple's locked down ecosystem. They don't support standard protocols, USB file transfer with iPhones is a nightmare on non-Macs (though it works fine for me on Linux right now, I imagine it depends on your distro and kernel, and it didn't work for me a few years ago), all the iServices being closed and not interoperable with non-iDevices, poor repairability, setting the standard / trend for the worse, etc.

In terms of the operating system, it's pretty different. For Windows, 2000 and XP were the golden age and it's (mostly) been downhill from there, Windows 10 / 11 being the most egregious requiring an online account. CoPilot and broken updates certainly don't help. MacOS is very closed and everything needs to be done the "Apple way", and you need Apple hardware to run it (for the most part, see Hackintoshes).

Linux has always been an awesome alternative, though it doesn't ship on many devices, it had excellent support on lots of hardware (unlike MacOS) and didn't require any online crap (unlike Windows), app development is much more open than MacOS while being as convenient as the App Store (unlike Windows), and FOSS software are the GOATs. There are so many options for distros, desktop environments, depending on your hardware or preferences, and you can have full control over your system, or it can "just work" for grandma. It's awesome! There's recently been lots of development with Valve on the gaming side and there has been a drive towards Linux due to Microsoft breaking Win11 constantly and pushing CoPilot spyware (more users, more developers, more apps, more drivers, etc.!)

The Linux desktop has never been better, and there is no reason not to switch! You can even get Linux on a Mac if you wanted too, thanks to the team at Asahi Linux!

I'm running EndeavourOS (the easy mode Arch-based distro before CachyOS) with Niri (scrolling tiling WMs are neat!), but if you want to get started with Linux, I would not recommend either if you aren't interested in config files and making something exactly how you want it to. Mint is awesome if you like Cinnamon, and Fedora is also good (though owned by Red Hat/IBM). The -buntus are also fine, but snaps, aside from using a proprietary and centralised repo, are often broken and not very user-friendly to fix. Debian is excellent if you have an older device and want stability, it's been there since the beginning. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is fun if you want to try rolling release, and of course Arch-based distros like CachyOS (or standard Arch with archinstall) are also good if you are fine with the "scary" black text box (that's all it is really).

If you want to experiment with an ARM device (laptop, tablet, or even phone), Nura is awesome! It's not fully there on everything, but it's fun to mess around in and try out apps that those devices were never intended to run!