One specific thing that’s starting to work very well is cross-device interactions. The Airdrop feature was probably the first example of this years ago: you go to share a picture and you see a list of nearby devices. You pick one and that device gets a pop up asking if they want to receive it. It didn’t always work great back in the day but now it’s very reliable and works between phones, laptop, whatever. AirPods are also great at switching which device they’re connected to seamlessly. You might be listening to a podcast from your phone but if you open up a video on your iPad and hit play, the AirPods will switch to the iPad so you can hear that video. There’s a visual cue that this occurred, and it’s very easy to get to the controls if you want to change devices manually. The Apple Watch works great in this regard. When you’re wearing it, your phone knows and will send notifications there instead of buzzing your phone, etc. When you’re playing a podcast on your phone, the watch knows and will display play controls when you look at it. Stuff like this is starting to work really easily and intuitively, though it has been a slow build over years to get here.

I don’t know how great this all works across Windows computers and Android phones. Maybe it’s good there too. But this kind of easy handoff between computing surfaces has been a concept that computer makers have been promising for a long time but has only recently begun to deliver.

You can see how it would be easier to make all this switching and sharing easier if there’s only one manufacturer involved, and they control all the hardware and software. Yes you can create open standards for this sort of thing, but those are not always very good or quick to come about. And manufacturers may or may not support them well, or promptly as they evolve.