No other company is allowed to use smoke and mirrors and be granted the benefit of doubt by it's customers.
And it's extra concerning knowing Apple is constantly riddled with scandals with product quality, security, ethics, etc... Yet their marketing claims anything but.
I also smell FUD in your post. You are one of those who likes to jump on the Apple bashing bandwagon whilst having no substantiated facts to back you up.
You allege poor product quality ? I have been a long-term Mac user since the 80's. Either I am spectacularly lucky, but I have never encountered any scandalous product quality in any Apple desktop, laptop or phone that I have owned. Infact I've always found their quality to be top-notch compared to the litany of issues I've had with PC's over the years.
Security ? Again FUD. By and large Apple do an excellent job on security, they do their best. Their overall track record remains better than Microsoft.
Also my friend, cut the crap, we're all serious techies here on Ycombinator ... name me one technology company that has had zero security issues ? Even the cybersecurity vendors (who you would expect to be on top of their game) have all had their fair share of high-profile security issues. ;-)
Apple laptop butterfly keyboard failures - many years before they gave up on it. You may have heard of it.
> Security ?
MacOS root authentication bypass by using root and then hitting enter button with the password field empty. I don't think there's been a bigger authentication failure anywhere else?
Apple products are pleasing to the eye, but there are pain points. Some users get very defensive of Apple, that can get pretty annoying.
The butterfly keyboard issue is so noteworthy because it is a dramatic departure from the normal quality levels of Apple products. The only other major (modern) hardware quality issue in an Apple product I can think of is the iPhone 4 antenna thing from 2010; I would be hard-pressed to find another hardware company that's shipped as few problematic products on that time frame, and for many companies a butterfly keyboard style quality issue would be unremarkable! Can you name a company that does consistently better than Apple on hardware quality?
The Apple root password bypass was not good (four years ago), but the set of people with a threat model such that this really mattered is not large (I think it was only ever proven to work with physical access to the device, for example). The "goto fail" bug[1] was also quite bad, in fairness. But on the same time frame neither of those really registers as a vulnerability on the same level of impact as Heartbleed[2], Cloudbleed[3], Spectre[4] and related issues, or even the more recent Solarwinds[5] or Exchange[6] hacks. Every software company has security incidents; Apple is absolutely not an outlier or unusually insecure.
[1] https://dwheeler.com/essays/apple-goto-fail.html [2] https://heartbleed.com/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudbleed/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_federal_gov... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Microsoft_Exchange_Server...