These are all good things, because people like them, and are happily handing truckloads of their money over to Ive's company for products with these "features".

I'd like to see Apple try to take this even farther, such as making Macbooks require a dongle just to use WiFi, making it so that they only work with genuine Apple WiFi dongles, and then charging more for the dongle than the Macbook itself costs. I seem to remember a Space Quest game that had something like this in the plot. With the stupidity that consumers have shown regarding Apple, I have no doubt that this would work out just fine for them.

Thousands of design decisions go into a product, while consumers can only vote yes/no.

So a hypothetical consumer could like 1950 decisions, deeply dislike 50 and it would still be worth it for them to buy the product.

This is exactly what's happening for Apple, their products are still good enough to be bought, but at the same time they make a lot of stupid design decisions which frustrate us.

In my case, the MBP has so many reliability issues that I would no longer personally purchase it.

There's more than one product out there. For phones, there's dozens of models available on the new market at any time, plus all the used ones (this is a lot since they change models about every year). For any given product, there should be other options out there that would suit you better. The problem with Apple is that people are emotionally invested into the brand; they buy it just because it gives them status (like a Rolex watch or a BMW), because they're a fan of the brand for some reason, etc., not because the product actually the best match to their list of desired features.

No, thanks to Google there are zero alternatives to the iPhone.

Everything else is just another hardware iteration on the same spyware.

>> These are all good things, because people like them, and are happily handing truckloads of their money over to Ive's company for products with these "features".

That's kind of assuming that Apple users are all the same.

I would unscientifically break down the users as:

1 - People who love the OS too much too switch to something else

2 - People who love the OS and hardware

3 - People who love the hardware form factors, and don't necessarily care about the OS

4 - People who love the owning an Apple products (loyal to the company more than the products)

I don't know how big each group is, but I tend to think the people in group 1 are the bulk of the people complaining, and are begrudgingly buying new Apple hardware until it eventually stops making sense to.