We've submitted a proposal lately that  involves bringing a popular Mac application to Windows.  When doing research for this proposal, I've finally figured out the claim "Macs just work".  My answer to this claim is that:

 The Operating System is the framework.

By this statement I mean that the engineers at Apple have put a lot of thought into what support developers require.  They make sure that this support is bundled with the Operating System and a nice touch, it is all free.

Interested in developing for a Mac?  Good news, pretty much everything you need is installed and is free to use.  Your Mac disks that were shipped with your computer contains Xcode, this is the main development IDE for the Mac.  When a Mac developer wants to persist their application's data to disk they use the Core Data Framework.  Indexing on the Mac just works.  Need to work with PDF files? then use the PDF Kit that is installed and waiting for you.  Want to try one of the new development languages that all the cool kids are using these days? python and ruby on rails are pre-installed.

The engineers that are responsible to selecting which libraries and applications ship with every Mac have put a lot of thought into it and in my mind are the guys that deserve the credit for the "just works" statement.

My purpose of this post is not to make it sound like an ad for Mac.  My reason for writing this was that I was truly surprised at the amount of support Mac developers get out of the box.  Our proposal to bring the Mac application to Windows is littered with Open Source and third-party licensed components to make up for the missing features we will need to provide.

Once Microsoft figures out how to support the million+ hardware configurations they support they should really think about supporting their developer from the initial startup.