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Personally I use Linux unless forced to use something else by my employer.
Why is that in any way exonerating? Most people do most of their actual computing on their phones now, it is not an irrelevant toy platform. We should be more, not less, hard on Apple than Microsoft for pulling this shit on their mobile platform.
Its a psychology trick that took decades of marketing to pull off, but they are deeply entrenched as someone's identity. These users have a religious devotion and will defend them, because an attack on Apple is an attack on them and their group.
If you don't care about a corporate in-group, you are most likely wanting a quality computing platform. Which is why people are so hard on Google an Microsoft when they restrict computing.
Since you're projecting onto people, I'll provide a counter point in that I dislike Android enough, the hardware is often of poor quality, support for updates don't last very long, OEMs install unremovable software (unless you root).
All in all, an awful ecosystem, in my personal experience.
I don't think I ever used iMessage or Facetime in my life and I've been using iPhones for 15 years. Most people I know that have an iPhone also don't care, in the 3 countries I lived in. We use WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.
I don't buy Apple for fashion reasons, some mythical "in group" or any of the reasons you say.
I was just talking to my 80 year old mom yesterday and she was telling me how much she loves being part of the “in group”
This reads like the whining of a 14-year-old standing in a dark corner during the school dance. Translation:
"Look at me! I'm different! I'm so very counter-culture. People like Apple products, so I'm going to pretend it's a problem with the people and not other products. That way I can cosplay like I'm better/smarter/cooler than all those 'lemmings.' Now I'm going to smoke cigarettes, wear jeans, pop a leather jacket because nobody's been doing that since the 1940's. I'm special!"
I think you're reading into the parent too much. They were simply stating a fact.
on a new install of MacOS, when you have installed Chrome and explicitly set it as the default browser, MacOS will still ask you, albeit once, whether you really want to open that resource in Chrome, or Safari. And Chrome isn't the default option.
