Just to be clear, the statement is 'far ahead'. Not ahead of average. Not ahead of every one else. It is 'far ahead' of every single competitor.
They must be doing some amazing stuff then, to make up for the fact that they have more versions of charge cables than average, they don't make it easy to replace batteries and they purposefully slow down older devices.
I don't want another one of these bloody threads.
The only thing that Apple ships that doesn't have a USB-C hole is the old series iPads, the iPhones and the Airpods and they ALL ship with USB-C chargers and USB-C cables.
The batteries you can walk in an Apple Store and get replaced and you can buy them from their parts store now.
And they don't slow down older devices any more (that was inexcusable. They should have notified the user at least)
People complained and they fixed it
You're making a lot of arguements for someone who claims to not want to argue.
You imply that you agree lightning cables are bad and try to hide the prevalance of lightning cables by minimizing the prevalance of iphones.
You imply non-replacable batteries are bad and minimize the effort to replace theirs. It'd take me days to walk to an apple store. Lots of people don't like giving their phone to anyone, none-the-less a stranger who knows tech. Nor do they want to pry it open to replace the battery themselves.
In doing so, you admit they are in many ways, worse than competitors. So, they must be doing some very amazing things to make up for that enough to earn the title 'far ahead of all competitors'.
I'm not saying they are the worst, not saying they aren't average, I'm just saying they aren't far ahead of every single competitor.
You admit they've done inexcusable things while making excuses for them. We should probably just leave it at that.