Nobody is suggesting the user should be forced to type in the protocol, the subdomain, or the port number. If the user types in:

apple.com

It should lead to where the user wants to go.

However, there are good reasons for using the www subdomain as the canonical URL, and it is also worth noting that some users will habitually type in www anyway.

If you don't want to include the subdomain in marketing material, then there's nothing stopping you from leaving it out, just as there's nothing stopping you from leaving out the protocol.

And even just typing:

apple

Should lead to where they want to go.

Which leads to 127.0.53.53 on Iceweasel 38.5.0 https://www.icann.org/namecollision

From the article:

Should I redirect no-www to www?

Yes.

Redirection ensures that visitors who type in your URL reach you regardless of which form they use, and also ensures that search engines index your canonical URLs properly.

So I don't think you're advocating anything they don't.

Annoyingly, this can be difficult to do if the A record for your domain doesn't point to a webserver. There are other legitimate things it could point to, like an authentication domain controller or a session border controller. Do you really want to be running a webserver there, even if it's only redirecting?

I'm not familiar with session border controllers, but DCs can be and usually are placed somewhere at the apex of the domain, via SRV records.

If you really have trouble, you can tell your firewall to route ports 80 and 443 to another machine and everything else to the device you need. (I've run a hackier version of this that used netcat inside inetd: we didn't want a web server on the machine that owned the domain name, but there was another nearby web server cluster that we added a virtual host to. And we were fine running inetd and netcat on the machine.)

I've done something similar but using iptables and dnsmasq to route DNS differently depending on where the requests were coming from and what domain they were asking about.

Your argument that eliding the www is better for users is logical, but you failed to make any argument whatsoever that it is significant. Given that you were responding to a statement that the difference isn't significant, you're basically attacking a straw man.