I see Apple pursuing a long term vision where product integration and privacy are pillars in a seamless, trusted ecosystem.
Privacy is clearly not what Apple is doing: simply read the 90s texts from the cypherpunk scene to get an idea what privacy really means. Also consider that a lot of features that make life a lot more comfortable ("seamless") are very privacy-invading. Thus going for privacy would make the (in this case Apple) product quite uncomfortable to use.
Bascially, the internet is a dark forest. A lot of things "ordinary" people do all the time is insanely privacy-violating (just to give one example: if you send a message to a person who is not insanely privacy-conscious and capable (meaning very knowledable about technology) of preserving your privacy, malicious entities can spy on you).
So, for the product/OS to be capable of keeping your privacy, it will have to prevent you from doing an insane amount of things against your reflexes, comfort and what you learned about politeness.
Since there is a limited amount of people on the planet that can afford Apple at Apple's prices, this eventually hits a ceiling.
You don't see Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen, and similar brands, expecting an exponential growth in sales, year after year.
M3 Air 16GB/512GB is $1,100 at Costco, and $800 for an M2 (which is probably good enough for at least 50% of laptop users).
iPhones might be a few hundreds more than a Galaxy competitor phone, but the amortize the extra cost over the number of hours people use their phone and it is negligible.
Apple TV is a $120 or so, Apple Watch is a few hundreds, HomePods are maybe a couple hundred. I don’t see how anyone can put Apple in a pricing league with
> Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bang & Olufsen
Very large portions of the population can afford Apple products.
Many folks across the globe don't even reach $200 a month!
But honestly, I think many people buy Apple products they can't reasonably afford and end up in trouble because of that. A new iPhone is luxury. You can't really live without a smartphone these days (not just in "tier 1" countries!), but a $200 device covers your basics just as well as a $1000 iPhone.
And before someone tells me they can live without a smartphone. I guess you can, but that may actually be the ultimate luxury, that is, it is more expensive to live without a smartphone than to live with one. It is telling that most of the homeless have smartphones, usually Android.