Comment by eigenspace

> I assert it is trivial to not buy Apple products

While it is easy to not buy Apple products, I think the thing that often gets missed is that once someone is significantly invested in Apple's ecosystem, getting out of that ecosystem is highly disruptive and difficult.

For example, suppose you are a person who for historical reasons owns a MacBook, and iPad, and an iPhone, and a large chunk of your friends group also has those. The default choice then for you to use a cloud storage solution is Apple's iCloud Drive. The default choice for you to store and share photos is Apple's Photos App. The default choice for you to message your friends is the iMessage App. The default way for you to store passwords is Apple's Keychain Manager.

If you then decide "you know what, I'm fed up with Apple, I'm going to buy an Android", suddenly your cloud storage solution, your photo storage and syncing solution, your messaging solution, and your password management solution are all not supported, so you not only need to find an alternative on your new device, but you also have to do so on all your other devices if you want your phone to be in sync with them. This is a really high friction environment, and makes it so that a lot of people feel trapped in Apple's ecosystem.

So you can be a person who would not choose to buy Apple products today if you were starting from scratch, but you can feel compelled to continue buying them because Apple has made it so that switching in the future is very inconvenient and impacts all your other devices. It's specifically people in this situation who are being taken advantage of by Apple and why Apple's practices are labelled as monopolistic.

Apple spent a long time acquiring customers and coaxing them into their walled garden, and now they're switching tactics to milking those customers now that it's inconvenient for them to leave the walled garden.