Also, I factor my phone purchases as a per year cost. Apple is still supporting the iPhone 5s. I only have to replace Apple devices every 5 years. At that rate it's about $250 per year, which is better than any high end Android phone. Privacy is the main reason I get iOS devices, but the price is not bad.

Yup, I'll have had my 6S Plus for 3 years in December. With a new battery and the new OS it's still a very high end experience. 6S Plus was when they added optical image stabilization, so the camera is still pretty good too. Cost $1k brand new then and I'll probably drop the same $$ or more for a maxed out iPhone whatever in Dec 2019.

If only their laptops were this high quality.

I'm still working (happily) from my maxed out 2012 11" Air. I put a new battery in it earlier this year and upgraded the SSD last year. You can definitely get longevity out of the laptops. My work undulates between email, text editors, Perl, C#, and whatever I do while SSH'ed into servers. None of that requires much in the way of CPU. Maybe if I was an iOS developer or did some other creative work I'd have a different opinion.

The new Air may be enough for me to upgrade (mostly for the Retina Display), but that's mostly because I can rather than because I need to.

iPhone 6 Plus had optical image stabilization.

I stand corrected.

Of course, you don't have to pay $1K for a new iphone: you can buy a new iPhone SE 32GB for $140 from Walmart (locked to their captive cellular provider for a year, but still). Or refurbed for $70!

You don't think Apple is tracking your every move too?

No, they are not. When customers set up a phone Apple presents clear choices about the use of Location Services, Siri, etc., and various types of tracking can be easily turned on or off at any time in the settings. Most people opt in to some amount of tracking, e.g. for getting map directions, and using the internet inherently involves sending data around, but they are all optional. Applications must explicitly request customer permission at runtime to track location, look at contact info, etc., and Apple takes action against apps which collect customer information without authorization or abuse it.

Both first-party location/data tracking by Google, and underhanded tracking by third-party apps on Android are pervasive, and more difficult to keep tabs on / opt out of.

Of course, the main people tracking your every move with any phone are the phone company, anyone the phone company is selling or providing your data to, and anyone operating a device which can trick your cell modem into connecting to it (“stingrays”).

They're not. You can inspect the network packets being sent from an iPhone (and it's been done) and it doesn't phone home data to Apple outside of iCloud usage and those packets are encrypted.

They are. Worse, you can't even opt out of it. On an Android phone, AGPS data collection is opt in. On iOS, there is no way to turn it off.

On an Android phone, you can set an offline maps app as the default. On iOS, every map link will open in Apple Maps, sending data to Apple in the process. On an Android phone, you can set Signal as your default messaging app. On iOS, any time you click an SMS link, it will open in iMessage, which tells Apple the number you want to SMS and check if that user uses iMessage.

Really, anything Apple has said about privacy has been pure marketing for the easily duped.