"UX is complete and utter trash" is a bit hyperbolic — you listed a handful of nits that don't affect 99.9% of their users. On the other hand, iOS is undoubtedly more efficient, smoother, and more stable than Android. I have a Pixel phone where the Google camera app crashes about 10% of the time when I tap the shutter button. The cellular connection often gets stuck in a disconnected state, without telling me. The "Always on Display" stopped working entirely. Along the core dimensions where Apple invests their energy, their software can be pretty good.
Just my opinion -- I'm a daily MacBook Pro user; I really struggle to find one thing that Apple is doing better than Microsoft from a UX perspective. Less options for customization; tiny buttons all over the place (very abundant in the system dialogs); the notch causing some apps to disappear from top bar on the right; the spatial distance between the window and the top bar as opposed to Microsoft where the app bar is attached to the window; the poor window snapping options for organizing desktops; the childish default animations; lots of issues with Finder versus Explorer; the seemingly random organization, sizing, and placement of windows in Mission Control; the weird behavior when you CLOSE all of your windows like Chrome and then CTRL+N creates a new Chrome window -- no, you need to quit the app, too.
I don't think there's anything macOS is doing better than Windows in so far as UX goes. Put it another way: I use macOS every day and I never think "Wow, I wish Windows had this feature, too" but every day I wish I had some UX element from Windows -- just basic window management feels so clunky on macOS unless you fullscreen everything.
It's just different. Like KDE/Gnome/i3/Windows is different from each other. MacOS applications are more like services, while windows let you perform the current task you have. As an example Preview.app allows you to open PDFs and picture files. But you need to open a file to do anything to it, and when you do so, it creates a window allowing you to interact with the file. When you're done, you close the file by closing the window (which is why it duplicates the window when you chose "Save As"). The window has a 1:1 relationship with the files. The menu bar is part of the application, but the currently focused window can interact with it.
When you're close all Chrome windows, that just means you're done with the webpages, not that you're done with Chrome. Chrome dev team can set Chrome to terminate when all windows close, but they've not chosen to do so. It's there when you want to create a new window when you want to interact with a new webpage. And again it's up to the developer to choose to tie the application lifecyle to its windows.
That's all well and good, but when I've closed the interfaces with which I'm interacting with the Chrome "service", isn't it pretty clear that the intent is that "I'm done with the service"? "Chrome team chose to build it like that" -- I guess the question here is "why is this even an option at the OS level?" and "shouldn't we expect window and application behavior to be consistent?". Davinci Resolve on macOS, for example, exits when I close its window while Chrome does not. Do you not think that even having this option to create an inconsistent application interaction seems like bad design? Sometimes the app exits when I close all windows, sometimes it doesn't.
My issue with the menu bar is purely from an ergonomics and usability perspective, especially with high resolution monitors. If I have a window at the bottom right corner of the monitor, I need to move my mouse all the ways to the top left of the monitor to interact with the menu bar. If you always full screen everything, it makes total sense. But I would make the case that macOS has done a very poor job of adapting to changes in monitor resolutions. Consider ultra-wide screen monitors where I have apps side-by-side or I have 4 windows tiled. The accessibility of the menu bar becomes quite low for three out of the 4 windows.
The key stroke to access the menu bar is (do you know it?) CTRL+F2. Try that stroke yourself and see how it feels. It's not at all obvious that this allows you to access the menu bar with the keyboard.
By attaching the menu bar to the application window, the spatial locality increases usability, especially for modern ultra-wide monitors don't you agree?
I do agree that you have a point. But it’s an interaction model that works for many people and there are customization options to alleviate some of the pain points from keyboard shortcut (administrated at OS level) to 3rd parties software. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a complete reworking of the interface.
I use Windows all day and it’s garbage as well. Perhaps they are both garbage? I’m talking the latest release of Windows 10. Or maybe it’s 11. Whatever it is it sucks too
