WARNING: What follows is a somewhat tangential (and perhaps rambling) alternate theory in response to the “Apple is just greedy” posters. To those who like only short, fully-relevant comments - mea culpa.
I know most people see this sort of thing as a consumer freedom issue, but I’m choosing to look at it from a security and quality control perspective.
The consumer tech industry is at a tipping point. Multi-billion dollar fines can’t stop them from commoditizing our private, personal data, and nothing short of global thermonuclear war will stop state actors from charging full-speed ahead into the hacking business.
There is no turning back. We will never take our data and our transactions back offline. Moreover, even if we are all woke to the fact that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, nearly all consumers are incapable of defending against these threats.
To me, it appears Apple is the lesser of evils with respect to this new and somewhat terrifying environment. We can (and legitimately do) criticize their business model as “luxury brand” or “captive user” but at least it’s not “we sell your life for our profit” (again, at least so it appears). It is therefore reasonable to believe they have an incentive to protect their users’ privacy and exercise whatever vigilance is necessary to do so, including implementing a tightly controlled ecosystem for both hardware and software.
In short, I too hate having to pay (correction - overpay) for storage or memory I don’t need when I buy, but might need in the future, because upgrading is impossible. I too hate having to jump through Apple’s hoops to fix hardware that, despite Apple’s excellent build quality, can and does fail. But, I’d hate even more to worry about the more significant problems that come with going the non-Apple route, like bloatware, spyware, potential hardware incompatibility, individual driver updates, system diagnostics/tuning, etc…. No thanks. I'll pay the Apple tax instead and get on with my productivity.
I realize I’m placing a lot of trust in Apple here, but I don’t see that I currently have much of a choice.
