I'm in the same boat as you, although not quite 2 decades. I have even tried various Android phones for a year here and there, and always ended up back with an iPhone. So, I'm not completely blind on what's happening outside the Apple world, but their products mostly work for me and I don't really have to think about it.

I'm old enough to remember when Apple was marketed as different. Because they were niche - to choose Apple was to signal that you're different from the masses.

That's still somewhat true - they do not yet dominate laptop or desktop markets, and outside the U.S. they are not (as) dominant in smartphones.

But they do dominate some of the newer product categories, just as they dominated portable music players - tablets, smartwatches.

I'm unsure how much of the headphone market they harvest.

My point of all this is that many got the pleasure of feeling unique and "smarter than the rest" by getting the novelty Apple items that most people were too ignorant to value. But it evolved over time and now maybe it's something else?

A big part of Apple's brand is that things generally work. I don't need to do a ton of research on the exact pros and cons of other products, I don't have to make sure that a particular brand's model wasn't silently replaced with a cheaper version with the same SKU, that service options do exist (though expensive), and that there's a robust secondary market of Apple devices.