I think apple customers are generally only semi captive in the sense that the products are so good that they find it inconceivable to pick one of the dozens of other high end smart phones.
Then Apple Silicon launched, and I bought a base-spec M1 Air. Almost 3 years in, and I have never owned a better laptop in my life. It is astonishing the amount of power and battery life they've managed. It destroys my work-assigned fully-spec'd i9 MBP in every conceivable metric.
Finally, I swapped a Pixel 4a 5G (tried Pixel 5 and 6, was disappointed with both) for an iPhone 14 Pro, non-Max. After getting used to iOS, I have to admit that iPhones are better than Android in nearly every way. The only thing I really miss is Android's launcher. Everything else is just better, as long as you stay within the Apple ecosystem. Pairing new devices, Universal Clipboard, scanning PDFs from the phone directly into Preview, FaceTime, iMessage... it's better. Period.
Ios I can only use one browser with different skins. Navigation on Android is as far as I know still much better. And email is no better on ios
AFAIK, the only way to get a clipboard that syncs across devices on Android requires installing 3rd party software on both devices. I could be wrong. If you don't need to copy/paste between a phone and laptop/desktop, this of course won't matter to you, but it's very useful for me. Not having to think about it is icing on the cake.
> And email is no better on iOS
Agreed. Mac/iOS email client is hot garbage, but since I use Gmail, it doesn't really matter what platform I'm on.
> iOS I can only use one browser with different skins.
You can install Chrome, Firefox, Opera, et al. on iOS...? Not sure if I understand your point. That said, I switched to Safari on the laptop purely because Netflix has nerfed HD playback on Chrome, and 720p wasn't cutting it for me. The slightly better battery life and less memory consumption is a plus. Since I was using it on the laptop, it made sense to keep using it on the phone as well so sessions and history could be shared.
I don't exactly love Safari, but I like it well enough that combined with the aforementioned benefits, it works for me.
Kagi's Orion browser on iOS lets you use Chrome and Firefox extensions, so there's that.
I can't with chrome on android but I can with firefox. The choice of using firefox with ublock or whatever extensions is what I'm after.
I had a friend in nursing school rely on my android to edit a PDF when apple barred them from downloading apps - they somehow owed apple money. I keep hearing your anecdotes, but have to deal with things like that. They seem to be doing good things with the arm chips though.
Apple Silicon Macs on the other hand... I'm still waiting for a Linux device with no fans & comparable battery life + performance.
also not that different from the state of support for other new devices out there. Apple's GPU architecture is also quite friendly to the project [1], as is the system security model, which is less janky than UEFI keys on PCs.