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Why does apple use .plist files?
Windows uses .ini files, which may be less flexible, but also takes up less space, for the same reason why JSon takes up less space than XML.
They could even use JSON for their configuration, it’s at least as easy to parse, supports the value types they need (dict etc.) and takes up the least space.
The original property list format found in NeXTSTEP looked a lot like JSON, but with slightly different syntax. When NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X, that format was replaced with the XML version you see today. The new format had a few improvements over the old one which you can read about in that link.
Property lists can hold several data types that JSON (and INI files) cannot: Numbers specified as real numbers (floating point) or integers, dates, and base64-encoded binary data. Also, JSON wasn’t documented publicly until well after Mac OS X was released.
Mac OS 10.2 and newer include a binary plist format that’s much more space-efficient than XML, and plist files can be converted losslessly between the two.