It is about trust in the sense that there was a time when buying Apple products was a safe choice. They were expensive, but you could count on them being well-designed (though you always had to be careful with first gen products) and working together seamlessly. If you could afford them, there was no reason to consider other options. That kind of brand loyalty I had is gone now. Maybe I can't switch yet, but I'm begrudgingly using their products, and am actively on the lookout for alternatives. When the right one will come along, I'm out.

You mean like buying IBM was a safe choice in the 80s?

I don't know if people will switch per se, but people will be less inclined to purchase the latest and greatest from Apple, and less willing to invest in new things like AirPods or iWatch.

If my MacBook Pro dies, which I really hope it doesn't because it's great, and I want to back up my iPhone to local storage, I might get the cheapest Mac Mini I can and use it as a storage device. Yea, I can't move something like that to Linux as long as Linux mobile backups are not great. No, I won't pay for iCloud, and I won't use my MacBook Pro dying as an excuse to buy a new MacBook Pro or an iMac like I might have before. On the side, I may be purchasing a thousand dollars in PC parts and running Linux on desktop, and using my MacBook Pro to just SSH into my desktop using OpenVPN and dynamic DNS through AWS Route 53, and using it as a mobile battery-powered shim, which can be much more easily commoditized. Maybe my MacBook Pro dies and I use a Thinkpad as a replacement to SSH into my desktop, and I learn to love Thinkpad: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/

I should hope Apple doesn't want that. Apple should want me purchasing the Mac Pro or the iMac Pro, and maybe complement that with the MacBook, and some AirPods and an iWatch to boot. The buying decision shouldn't be like pulling teeth, and since it is, I think Apple has lost a good deal already.

I will say my personal pain tolerance for this kind of stuff is low. I will personally invest a great deal of energy to future-proof my personal infrastructure. But I don't think others are too far behind as long as Apple keeps increasing or maintaining the cost of being an Apple customer over time.

I’m definitely an Apple fan - my family has 4 iPhones, two cellular iPads, and two 4K AppleTVs. But I don’t see any reason to get a Mac unless you are an iOS developer. What does it give me over Windows + the Windows Subsystem for Linux? I would be using the same software either way. VSCode, a browser, and Unix terminal, etc.

When I owned Macs the first time between 1992 - 1998, the ecosystem around MacOS was clearly superior. The second time around when it was my secondary computer 2005-2010, there was really no differentiator.

That being said, if I were in need of a better personal computer today, I would get a Mac Mini just because.