Phil Schiller, and the whole marketing group, are an underestimated part of Apple's success over the past 20 years. It's why there's no company like Apple in the tech industry.
Also, despite the fact that it’s shallow, status signaling is sometimes useful. Just like with the well-dressed Manhattan lawyer example in the recent thread about physical attractiveness in legal justice, having the right product in the right crowd subconsciously affects how others see you.
I'm not saying you're wrong to value those things, but a good amount of people don't. So no amount of explaining why iMessage is great will convince them, even if they understand and agree iMessage is great, since the "maximum appreciation" for any feature is capped by the perceived value of its premise.
Like here's an exercise, someone comes to you for a computer recommendation. They want a work laptop, home laptop/tablet (something with a keyboard), and an all-in-one. Give a recommendation from Apple, Dell, and HP.
Personally, I don't need to go to google to look up the Apple products I'd recommend, and I'm not even a fanboy. I don't think I can name a product from HP off the top of my head, and I know I'd need Dell's search tools to harrow in on something.
I heard the Dell 8930 was a good desktop. Or maybe the 8490?
And the HP Envy 14w71x and the Lenova Yoga 930?
Maybe?
What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.
Compare to Dell, whose equivalent datastructure would be a directed graph that probably contains cycles and non-sensical topology.
They do seem to be coming out of it finally, but for a good while almost every Mac's entry level config was awful, the spinning hard drives being the worst offender considering a computer without an SSD just feels broken these days.
I was about to say that the 21.5" iMac isn't so bad now they've dropped the platters, until I checked and saw that they're still selling the model with a 1080p panel!
To me, Tim Cook's lasting influence on the Mac is the transition from a "good, better, best" set of configuration options to "poor, good, better". Continuing to sell old and crappy models to hit a price point—like the 2010 MacBook Air that continued to be sold with only minor spec bumps until 2018, and the aforementioned entry-level iMac which has been around since 2012—reflects very poorly on them.
For example, I have a 2008 MacBook Pro that's whipped out on rare occasion to simply act as another computer when I need to test something. It works fine. It's on macOS Yosemite, I think, but it's certainly not up to date since most of its time is spent powered off in a closet. Whenever I boot it, I usually get a banner saying it got a security update or something while I'm using it.
I also have a tower PC that is used for tower PC things, also rarely. It has Windows 10 Enterprise Eval, and I decided to be a good consumer and give it a license because it's been unlicensed since 2017. It's also running far slower than it should be for the specs it has. Turns out, it hasn't updated since 2017, but that's fine, I'll just update it.
Well, I can't license it without updating. The build's expired.
I also can't seem to get it to discover that the Fall 2017 build of Win10 is not the current build. I think that's because it's unlicensed. I'm currently working on getting Windows reinstalled, I'm probably fucking it up some way, but I don't use this PC enough to warrant spending this much time on it.
What I'm trying to say here is that there is a decent amount of fanboyism contributing to Apple's success. However, the little things they do to make their software work better makes it worth it in my opinion. I have never had an issue with a Mac being too "out of date" to do stuff on; that 2008 Macbook Pro still works (with the wonders of an SSD). That's what sold me.
I was considering getting a windows laptop to replace my current macbook pro, but this experience, combined with many others, doesn't make it worth my time to save that money.