People on this site are not in general nerds. The explosion in developers around the late 00s meant that the average coder is no longer a typical 'news for nerds stuff that matters' person.

Maybe in the Bay. But in the rest of the world, the average suit still considers developers to be nerds, only good for pushing the nerd-buttons.

I'm actually their target market, I use an iphone as my main phone because two reasons, first they have a great hardware, and second, they support their devices much longer than any other manufacturer. An iphone 7 is 4 years from their release still a very capable phone and receives security updates and new os versions, there is no other manufactured that does that. You could say that they finance that with the app store, but their devices are actually quite priced and what the app store gives to apple is way more money that what they need.

You can however not invest very much on the apple ecosystem and subscribe to most services outside the app store mode, which is what I do myself, but I'm a minority.