> But I do believe that those "nerdy guys" did a lot to push the Apple brand

We sure did. We're also ignoring all the celebrities that helped to push the Apple brand (remember the iPod and it's terrible but iconic white headphones?).

Popular culture has a much stronger influence on Apple's standing with non-nerds, than nerds do. We like to think we're important, and that people value our opinions, but increasingly that's not true. as the differences between the options diminish to 'probably bad for the world long term' (big tech) and 'probably bad for you today' (open source / pinephone / etc, they're just not usable enough yet), the value of our opinions drops, because there's no real choice between bad or badder.