I've seen this news of Toyoda's passing posted across various social media channels and it's incredible to see how many Toyota owners have thanked him posthumously. I remember that when Steve Jobs died. This seems similar in a sense.
From that statement, I'm guessing you've never owned a Camry?
They exist in very similar segments portions of their respective industries serving very similar customer demographics (in North America). Naturally there is going to be quite a bit of evolutionary convergence.
Something that you can hardly say about Apple.
This marketing video from Toyota on the 2nd gen Century is a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1erJ1eVmLo
They both make products that are about as high as you can go in their respective market segments without getting into pure luxury and conspicuous consumption type purchases and refuse to go down-market lest they sully their brand image. In both cases they lather it up with a pretext so buyers don't feel like they're indulging in a luxury purchase. In apple's case they tightly integrate the hardware and software to assure a homogeneous user experience. In Toyota's case they try and dominate the 3rd party rankings on reliability. Of course, when you compare to the "next best" think in their class, like a Google or Samsung flagship phone or a Honda Accord you'll find that the actual difference is razor thin and that not having any "value priced garbage products" is really what's doing the reputational heavy lifting. Not wading into value priced territory is also very useful to the great many of each brand's respective customers who are willing to pay a huge premium to not have to think about it. A Toyota product may be overpriced for it's features/performance but if you just want an A to B appliance in a particular form factor it will do so with minimal maintenance expense. You won't have to waste your precious brainpower thinking about an expensive 100k service or fiddling with some gimmick feature. And on the apple side of things their tight control over the hardware-software combo results in a pretty strong guarantee of a high minimum user experience. If you just want a "nice phone" and don't wanna think about software versions, various flavors of android OS and stuff like that you can simply buy whatever iphone is in your budget? Is it the nicest phone in your budget, no. But you didn't have to waste precious brain-power comparing all the various Android options.
Basically they both charge a premium for products that "just work" and they refuse to get into market niches where they can't do that, much to the benefit of their brand image.
The above applies to North America only. Toyota makes a more diverse set of stuff globally and Apple doesn't dominate the same buyer demographics globally.
My family's four iPhones are: 2 iPhone X (Nov 2017), 1 XS Max (Sept 2018), and 1 13 (Sept 2021, only bought in order to hand-down one of the X to our kid). Those phones are 5, 5, 4.5, and 1.5 years old. Each of the 3 older phones was bought used when the next phone generation was released. Across our ownership, I've replaced two screens and three batteries (two were needed and one was "while I'm replacing the screen, it's easy and would be needed soon"), all DIY.
I doubt we'll replace any of these phones in the next 2 years. The iPhone 8 is still getting software updates to iOS 16, so I expect the X will keep getting updates for several more years.
I'd argue that my iPhone SE2 is also a product that is very much a low end non-luxury phone, but with unparalleled physical build quality. I purchased it from a budget box store as part of a cheap prepaid cell phone plan- total ownership cost will be far less than the cheapest Android phones targeted at the 3rd world, if you consider how much longer it will likely last.
The oldest iPhone that supports the most recent full iOS version update (iOS 16) is iPhone 8, which was released in 2017. And they released a security update for iOS 12 in August of 2022 that supports iPhone 5s (released in 2013).
That would make it 5 years for full OS updates and 9 years for security updates.
Tip: don't bother with consumer grade PC laptops if you are after longevity. Only buy "business grade" machines like Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell Latitudes, HP EliteBook/ZBooks.
My impression is that they've had several years of poor quality and bad design decisions with their laptops. Some models were banned from flights due to battery fire issues [1]. They had keyboard problems for many years [2]. And they've had a lot of recalls [3].
Fortunately the quality seems to have improved with the M1/M2 macbooks.
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/macbook-pro-flight-ban-everyt...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/apple-settles-macbook-butter...
[3] https://www.macworld.com/article/673631/macbook-recalls-and-...