Apple is too smart to want #1. I'll concede to you that they dominate the market through their avoidance of monopoly, but they hardly have a monopoly on tech as a whole. Modern MacOS is truly terrible if you aren't a creative or "business" customer, and it's intuitiveness as a user-friendly OS has waned for a while now. All of their other products are glorified lifestyle devices. How does that constitute a monopoly on anything but vanity?

We can both disagree on our subjective interpretation of Apple's ecosystem, and our subjective opinions on where they're headed as a company. We both seem to agree that they're objectively molesting the market though, so we're frankly not disagreeing on much. Still, "permission to worry" is a silly albatross to wear on anyone's behalf. Sounds like an article GameInformer would write about the Xbox 360, not an article discussing the merits of modern computing.