Honestly the Apple walled garden that everybody has been going on about for quite a while hasn't really been all that walled. I moved away from Windows to Linux in the late 90's (Slackware!), then later on to OS X, and I've been coding for about 30 years now, so it's not that all I use my computer for is Facebook and porn. On my computer I get an operating system that allows me to use the exact same stuff I would on the Linux side (well, in the terminal anyhow) but is otherwise much less of a pain in the ass than any version of Windows I've had to use in the past years. Sure, the OS & hardware has had its problems and it's honestly been getting worse, but never have I felt like the OS or Apple have prevented me from doing something or limited me.

My days of using Gentoo and a tiling window manager with painstakingly crafted custom configuration and constant tweaking are way behind me. Now I just want my computer to stay the fuck out of my way and not piss me off unduly much, I don't really care all that much about the price, but I need a lot of the UNIX-y under-the-hood stuff too. Not too many options out there, really. Every time I'm forced to use eg. Windows it just amazes me what an absolute garbage fire of an OS it still is (and god fucking help you if you need to deal with Windows servers or workstation AD/LDAP/whatever setups), and not just because it's unfamiliar but because shit breaks constantly, configuration is hard to get to, the update mechanism is downright sadistic, usability in most applications (consumer or not) is often questionable at best, yada yada yaa.

With my phone it's the same deal. I used Android (or Maemo, or Meego, etc.) for years and eventually my "fucking Android" exclamations turned into an in-joke with my friends. iOS I simply just don't have to curse at as much, it stays out of my way and does what I need; and I honestly don't need much. Phone's 5 years old and I only switched the last time because the previous one got so borked that it wasn't worth fixing.

While I think the direction with eg the M1 (which is apparently really locked down) is terrible, putting a fucking touch bar on pro-line laptops was fantastically stupid, and combining iOS and macOS development isn't going to lead to solutions that'll keep me happy, I simply don't get what the issue is that people have with Apple products.