I believe users place too much trust in corporations such as Apple, Google or Microsoft to protect them. There is too much debate over which company to choose ("I like ___________'s approach to security") instead of questioning whether delegating security to any of them is truly the wisest course of action.
I hope that this incident causes at least one user to question whether users might benefit from adopting a less trusting and more vigilant approach to protecting their data.
And by "vigilant" I do not mean "choosing the right tech companies to trust", diligently installing updates from these corporations and feeling self-satisfied.
I mean questioning the status quo and thinking seriously about the benefits of free, open source operating systems that are potentially reviewable by millions of developers and users. Systems that can be modified, compiled and installed easily by anyone, not only by small groups of people in corporations with special knowledge. Systems that can, e.g., permit and maybe encourage "safer", more conservative usage patterns.
Under the prevailing laws, I believe this pool of open source developers and users will always contain a larger number of people who care more about protecting user data than any groups within the above companies. It is a matter of self-interest.
Apple is a company with seemingly infinite resources at its disposal. But clearly in this case there were more people seriously interested in fixing this vulnerability outside of the company than within it. And as a dumb, naive user, I question anyone who would suggest that no one except a small group of people at Apple would be competent to do this work.
IMO, this mistake had nothing to do with what makes Apple valuable, namely their hardware. A UNIX-like OS running on Apple hardware does not need to be proprietary and, IMO, users have a compelling interest for software, that can expose their data and pose other security issues, to be open.