I bought my first and only Apple, a Macbook Pro, in October, 2009, and I'm still pretty happy with it. It's by far the best laptop I've owned. I didn't want another Windows laptop, and the Linux laptop offerings at the time weren't very good. I figured if I didn't like OS X, I could install Linux on it and have a light, long battery life laptop. But OS X is quite nice, so I never felt the need to try Linux on it until recently.
My only regret about my Macbook Pro is that I went cheap and got too little RAM, a small hard disk, and the slowest processor. I upgraded both RAM and hard drive (note, you can no longer upgrade RAM in the newest Macbooks - to save weight and space they are soldered in). I also replaced the battery last year; its run time was getting down to an hour or two, from the 6 or so I was getting when it was new. I probably could've waited on that, but I didn't want to get to the point where it couldn't even reliably boot on battery power, so I spent the money and replaced it.
The only issue I'm having with the laptop is that when I upgraded to Mavericks, Apple apparently made everything fully 64-bit, and my machine's processor, although it's a 64 bit, is a bit long in the tooth, so previewing files is frustratingly slow, especially raw files. Using the resource monitor, I see it's a processor-bound activity, so - unfortunately - upgrading to a solid state drive likely wouldn't solve the problem.
Otherwise, it works beautifully; even Aperture seems to work better than the Preview app: I have no gripe at all with the laptop's speed inside Aperture. Not bad for a 5 year old laptop. I recently tried formatting everything and reinstalling just in case, but it works the same way it did. While the lack of improvement was disappointing for my problem, I was also impressed that it didn't help, because it meant OS X didn't get fouled up by years of crud, unlike certain other OSs. I would have lost some respect for OS X if the clean installation had helped.
I can't recall ever having it crash or anything like that. It may have happened, and I've just forgotten. When it was new, even with a spinning hard drive, it would start up and shut down much faster than any Windows or Linux computer I've used. (I think the additional RAM slowed down the startup/shutdown sequence. Not surprising.)
Due to the speed issue, I'm considering replacing it, and I blanch at the cost, but on the other hand, Windows 8 is a complete WTF for me, and the Linux photo editing solutions aren't quite there yet for me. (It's probably good software, but I'm no expert at modifying photos... I probably just need to bite the bullet and learn it. Aperture spoiled me with its "magic wand" fix that does well on probably 95% of the photos.) Also, replacing the laptop means we would delay buying a new DSLR to replace the D70 my wife still uses, and I REALLY want that camera to be retired, so I continue to search for ways to keep my laptop useful.
I'm not sure what you mean by "their totalitarian approach to content" - I've installed plenty of applications on my Macbook that weren't approved by Apple. Yes, they have the App Store (which is a nice way of getting applications installed and keeping them up to date), but you only need to change one security setting in the Config to allow you to install applications from anywhere. I can play videos that I ripped under Linux with no problem.
