A whole lot of what you're describing -- not all, obviously, but a good chunk -- have to do with not being able to significantly affect the aesthetics of the op

A whole lot of what you're describing -- not all, obviously, but a good chunk -- have to do with not being able to significantly affect the aesthetics of the operating system, or in some cases, the functionality of the widgets. This is fair, but I think people who haven't really gotten deep into "the Apple bubble" don't really understand how much control Apple does, in fact, give you over the functionality of the operating system, whether through OS-level features or hooks third-party applications can latch onto. When I think of "customizing my environment," I think of running things like Alfred and Keyboard Maestro. I think of using Automator (and soon, Shortcuts) to control applications and create system-wide services like "select any Markdown text in any application and convert it to BBCode, HTML, or Rich Text". I think of editing the default keyboard finding file to add ^W as "select word" in every application that uses standard system input. None of these are "hacks" that are going to go away tomorrow. Personally, I don't care whether I can "move the menu bar" (where the hell would I move it?) or turn window chrome purple, and I don't really care that I can only put the dock in one of three places. :) As for some of the others, well, again, yes and no. I mean, in the history of computing, "I can only run FooCo's OS on FooCo's hardware" was the norm"; I don't think it's Apple's fault if you can't rent out a cloud Mac for an hour at a time; I think it's debatable whether the lack of fine-grained editing of BIOS settings is a material loss on the Mac platform. Also, > If Apple decided to stop making Intel machines tomorrow, I'd be screwed. I have bad news. :)