In the early period of Apple computers, they offered more affordance ("intuitiveness", the user's immediate sense of how to use the tooling) than $competingOS.

In the early period of Apple computers, they offered more affordance ("intuitiveness", the user's immediate sense of how to use the tooling) than $competingOS. This is in part because of the simple WIMP [0] affordance, some humane design choices such as smiling faces and long filenames, and because a few applications were pre-eminent in their categories. Adobe Photoshop, for example. What people did with Apple computers, they knew how to do and what to expect. The reputation for ease of use persisted for a long time after it became less of a differentiating characteristic. "Reputation" is sometimes perpetuated by marketing, not by a consensus of thoughtful users. An OS such a ChromeOS can make a claim to "ease of use" by limiting the user's ability to cause damage. These days and for some time, I use Linux (Debian), Android, ChromeOS, and M-Windows in that order of frequency. Linux gives me all the tools that I want, Android is mobile, ChromeOS is hard-to-break for restricted computing. For M-Windows, the typical driver requirements make it necessary. [0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)