In my experience ("filter bubble"), the central reason for the insane hate on Apple is rather that with the iPhone, Apple made the "golden cage" fashionable. When Microsoft attempted to implement similar measures in the past (keywords: Trusted/Trustworthy Computing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing), Palladium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next-Generation_Secure_Computi...), Trusted Platform Module (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module), ...), a huge outcry among users, and a shitstorm against Microsoft happened.
The acceptance of the golden cage of the iPhone showed that an insane amount of users are willing to be enslaved in a golden cage, and thus all the data activism to keep users in control of their devices was just a paper tiger. The fact that these Apple fanbois actively sabotaged this activism by their buying decisions is in my opinion a very good reason for this insane hate.
When we hang out in echo chambers, we start thinking that there are “a lot” of people that think like us.
Most folks aren’t technologically savvy. They don’t particularly want to be bothered by the “nitty gritty” of tech usership. They just want their tool to do what they want, without any fuss.
This has had a lot of terrible results. Tech moguls have made a lot of money, by taking advantage of this.
But it’s far older than smartphones. Demagogues have used this propensity for thousands of years, to keep most folks on the smelly end of the stick.
The refusal of tech activists to understand this, has, in my opinion, caused an enormous amount of damage.
People aren’t dumb, and we need to understand, and embrace that. Just because they don’t find tech as fascinating as we do, is no reason to dismiss them.
In fact, as I said, some rather rapacious tech robber barons understand this all too well.
Want to be effective? Make security and privacy easy to use. Otherwise, we’re just howling at the moon.
I want a Unix system because I prefer that for programming, I want a laptop because I want to change between offices, and I want to get started asap and get my work done without having to worry about hardware compatibility too much, so I prefer macOS over Linux. Simple as that.
Yes, Apple is expensive, but my company pays that MacBook so I don't care about that either. I get a well-functioning Unix with great usability and nice specs, with hardware and software from the same manufacturer. It works for me, so it's ok for me.