Hello, I’m a dedicated Apple user who came across this post on the “all” feed while scrolling. I know that I’m not really the intended audience of this community so if I’m not welcome to discuss here, feel free to tell me to get lost. I don’t want to impose.

I thought it might interest you a bit for me to share my two cents - just for context, I’m very technically competent, much more than the average smartphone user. Feel free to ask me anything. I am not a fanboy of anything in particular except Star Wars, so I’m not particularly inclined to get defensive - I’ll try my best to stay objective and I’m very happy to talk about Apple’s flaws as well.

Anyways, with all that out of the way - my reason for continuing to to use iPhone isn’t because of marketing. I don’t buy it because I think it’s cool/trendy/whatever. I get it because I prefer the experience of iOS over Android. When I tried Android, I found it a lot harder to get things the way that I liked them, it generally felt like it needed a lot more hand-holding from me.

I definitely don’t feel scammed. I’ve been using iPhone since 2011 or so and I’ve been a Mac user since 2016 - most recently I feel like the Apple Silicon MacBooks are genuinely good value, but prior to that I would definitely say that Macs were relatively overpriced compared to Windows PCs. I feel like iPhone is priced maybe (~20% or so?) higher than a comparable Android device, but personally, to me, the price is absolutely worth the improved experience.

Belgium

You probably meant Luxembourg.

Major markets. The arrangement is whatever LibreOffice chose, which for some reason is reverse alphabetical order. Oh well, at least World comes first.

Apple has 'won' a lot of countries with just 20-30% marketshare, because the Android market is so fragmented. Look at China, for example.

I had one too. Great specs and battery life but piss poor software support.

~~India has not frozen Xiaomi's assets as far as I know~~. They got a pretty big fine for tax evasion (they said they were paying the tax in China, but weren't, or something like that).

its attempts to stir up a China vs India culture war

All the viable alternatives to Xiaomi (Oppo, Vivo, Realme,, etc.) are also Chinese, so this doesn't really matter. Now these companies are challenging Xiaomi, but they're doing it by offering comparable performance to price ratio and better cameras. Also, Xiaomi has conceded to our demand to set up some local manufacturing. Low-end phones are now assembled in Chennai, Bengaluru and Noida, although the components are still imported.

Edit: First sentence is incorrect, as pointed out below.

Apple is leading in a lot of countries despite Android being the dominant OS, because the Android userbase is divided among different manufacturers. See China, for example.