> And "you can just use Google" is the equivalent of saying "you can just use British Telecom." True only in some kind of theoretical sense. You can fly to Britain and subscribe to telephone service there. It's not realistic.

I'm not following. You can literally just go to a Best Buy and gaze at lots of different phone models to see for yourself. It's very realistic.

> Saying that you have a choice for the $1 app and all you have to do is replace your $400 phone and all your other apps and convince all your friends to switch away from iMessage is at the same level of practicality. Worse, because there are multiple different apps. What happens if I need both iMessage and a BitTorrent client?

A couple of things: first, you ideally should be doing research before buying a product. Second, if you need to replace a $400 phone for a $1 app, you're effectively buying that app for $401 - it must be really worth that amount for you to switch phones. If it's not, then it's just not. I think that's a personal choice and doesn't have much to do with anything other than making economic decisions for yourself. For example, I really like video games (but hardly play). There are games that I want to play that aren't available on the Mac. My choices are buy a Windows machine, or buy a Mac, or buy both (or neither). I chose to forgo a game I want to play in favor of having a Mac and to make that trade off. It's a trade off. I'm hopeful that game could come to the Mac but there's no good reason I can tell to force someone to make the game because I want to have my cake and eat it too.

Products have features and trade-offs. On the iPhone you have iMessage which might be very important to you so you can go with an iPhone. Or maybe you need a BitTorrent client and it's not available on the iPhone so you buy something else.

This is just how the world works.