<snipped> and the iPhones last 3x as long in the field.
Even I know a few Apple iPhone users who would laugh at such specious nonsense. In fact not specious at all. Just nonsense, because it isn't even superficially plausible.
Actually, it’s not! I’ve still got some friends in the corporate IT world, and the average service life for an iPhone is two to three times longer than than a comparable Android phone or tablet. Two companies and nearly 800 devices between them, each company said the iDevices last about about 2.5 years on average, compared to 9 months for Android devices. For one company, leading cause of replacement was a worn battery, for the other it was broken screens. (The first company issued protective cases to all job site employees, which nearly eliminated broken screens.)
Leading cause of replacement for Android phones was almost exclusively software issues for one company (slow performance and lack of OS updates from the phone vendor). The other company had issues with hardware quality (phones literally falling apart).
One company had 300 iDevices and 60 Android devices in the field; nearly 90% of support tickets were for help with the
Android devices (!).
I don’t have any data to back it up, but I’ve had similar experiences with friends and family. (Admittedly, not a large sample size.)
People want to attribute Apple’s success to their products being trendy or fashionable, but it’s not true. They’re successful because they make a high quality, easy to use product.
I mean, they literally make their laptop bodies by machining a cavity into a solid block of aluminum. Yes, that block contains commodity Intel hardware, but it’s rugged, good looking, thin and light. Running on that hardware is an amazing, secure, stable OS, with full Unix compatibility, a 3D accelerate GUI (done years before Aero, by the way) that looks amazing and is easy to use. (By the way, that same OS (along with the Apple File System) is at the heart of their entire product line, from Smartwatches to set top boxes to phones, tablets and computers.)
I’m also sick of hearing people bitch about Apple stealing this or that. The entire PC industry is built on theft! Microsoft has stolen more products than Apple ever has. Then there’s Compaq, who started the whole PC compatible industry by ripping off IBM’s BIOS. The only difference between Apple and Microsoft in this regard is that Apple generally make whatever feature they’ve “borrowed” better, or somehow perfect it. Microsoft almost universally figures out how to make it worse.
Apple products generally “just work”, and that’s what you’re paying the premium for. It’s well worth it to me, and many other people.