Apple’s camera app for the iPhone remains remarkable and gets ever more so. It takes a very small sensor and cheap lenses and now using machine learning creates some remarkable images and videos from them in a very simple to use app. How can you not be amazed by Apple’s image processing software?
But the OSes themselves (for all of the grumbling about them) remain remarkable imo. Stable, providing ever-more underlying APIs to developers to give us ever-more capable apps. Besides mail on iOS and MacOS, which could definitely be made better, Apple’s apps are stable and provide decent, basic functionality. If you need more, there is probably a third party app that provides more.
Also remember all of that great hardware requires software to actually be used. Yes, Apple Watch is pretty great, but it’s not just great hardware - the firmware and OS services that make that hardware works are also pretty remarkable. (And of course people still find things to complain about.)
I don’t mind Discourse but people still wish it was better at what it does, and I don’t think it’s a great example of specialness.