If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple's overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet's surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.

I think it's safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.

Shareholders don't by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.

GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I'm still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.