[caycep]

it's not that I blindly trust apple; it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happy. Google/MS could care less how I feel; and I am well aware that I am most certainly not their customer.

[NBJack]

> it's more that they're the one FAANG company where I am the actual customer and their incentives align/depend on keeping me happier

Do they though? Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence, locked in ecosystems, overtly undercutting the alternatives, marketing that hypes up rather bland features...I admit I don't see your point.

Apple, if anything, seem about as user hostile as Microsoft is these days.

[audunw]

> Battery performance that 'lies' to you intentionally, planned obsolescence ...

Everything is relative. Apple generally supports their devices with OS updates for longer than most Android phone makers. Their incentives here are well aligned: they get a decent profit from Apple Store no matter how long you use their phone.

I think a lot of the reporting on Apples actions is very click-baity and lack nuance. Take the case when Apple throttled CPU performance of their phones when the battery got old and degraded. It was reported as a case of planned obsolescence, but it was in fact the exact opposite: by limiting the power consumption of the CPU they avoided unexpected phone shutdown due to battery voltage going too low during bursts of high power consumption. A phone that randomly shuts down is borderline use-less. A phone that is slower can at least be used for a while longer. Apple didn't have to do this. They would have spent less R&D money, and had a much lower chance of bad PR backlash, if they just simply did nothing. Yet they did something to keep old phones useful for longer.

> locked in ecosystems

That's a fine balance. Creating a good ecosystem is part of what makes Apple so user friendly. And it's a lot harder to create open ecosystems than having closed ones. Especially when you factor in security and reliability. If Apple diverted resources to making their ecosystems more open I think their ecosystem integration would have been significantly worse, which would have made them lose the thing most users considers Apples primary advantage.

Apple is a mixed bag. They were one of the first to go all-in on USB-C. Sometimes they push aggressively for new open standards that improve user experience. Yet they held on to Lightning for far too long on their phones. But here you get back to the planned obsolescence factor: there's a HUGE amount of perfectly fine Lightning accessories out there that people/companies are using with iPhones. If they killed Lightning too fast I can guarantee you they would have gotten a lot of hate from people who couldn't use their Lightning accessory anymore. With laptops that wasn't a big issue. Adapters are significantly less convenient to use with phone accessories.

[skydhash]

Apple is tinker-hostile, but they’re great at getting-things-done for the majority of people. It’s frustrating when you have the knowledge to build custom workflows, but the happy path and the guardrails work great for many.

Microsoft have no consistency and Google wants you to pray at the altar of advertising.

[AnAfrican]

Shouldn't Microsoft be somewhere between Google and Apple ? After all, they do rely on you buying their software in a way Google does not.

[realfeel78]

Who do you think is Netflix's customer if not you?