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Once upon a time the hardware diversity of the PC ecosystem would have been considered its strength. But nowadays it's clear that the absolute zoo of hardware that Windows has to run on its holding it back.
Spend any time in PC BIOS settings to get a glimpse of the horror. MacOS simply does not have to deal with this shit. Apple can dictate whatever it wants from the hardware and it's there in the next year, with drivers all written by Apple.
Microsoft meanwhile takes decades to whip hardware vendors into shape enough to get (e.g.) a Secure Boot infrastructure in place and it's widely considered a joke because of how bad each manufacturer is at implementing it.
To be fair to Microsoft, they have been bitten several times by governments accusing them of anti-competitive practices for doing things that (which I would agree are anti-competitive) Apple gets away with on the regular because "they are a minor player" (so they can have the only default storefront for installing Mac OS software) or "the phone market is different" (so they can completely lock out other ways to install software on a major platform). Apple has had its share of cases, but "use USB" doesn't seem as onerous as that Microsoft has been required to do for browser selection and such.
Although most PCs these days use EFI rather than BIOS, and at least a few years back, and Device Tree on ARM is, comparatively, a recent addition over the previous state I hear was even worse. Microsoft isn't in a place to make major bets to try to displace x86 OEMs without huge legal battles, whereas Apple only needs to support it's own hardware designs, and so we're all stuck in a world of long-term backwards compatibility, although IMO it's worth most of the complexity.
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