My amateur opinion: Apple makes beautiful and thoughtful devices that are tightly integrated into a system of services that work well. But I don't use them, mostly because of the closed nature of that ecosystem, and also because they are consistently more expensive. Back when you could jailbreak and sideload apps on iPhones, I had a series of iPhones and they were pretty good phones, although iTunes always sucked. While they were around, iPods were clever. But I preferred to buy music from a variety of places, I wanted to install apps that I wanted and not what were available on the App Store, and I really didn't like the user-hostile decisions Apple made to sell more hardware. Getting rid of the headphone jack was one of the worst decisions to me, as was Apple's dogmatic refusal to use USB-C until European regulators recently forced the change.
My amateur opinion: Apple makes beautiful and thoughtful devices that are tightly integrated into a system of services that work well. But I don't use them, mostly because of the closed nature of that ecosystem, and also because they are consistently more expensive. Back when you could jailbreak and sideload apps on iPhones, I had a series of iPhones and they were pretty good phones, although iTunes always sucked. While they were around, iPods were clever. But I preferred to buy music from a variety of places, I wanted to install apps that I wanted and not what were available on the App Store, and I really didn't like the user-hostile decisions Apple made to sell more hardware. Getting rid of the headphone jack was one of the worst decisions to me, as was Apple's dogmatic refusal to use USB-C until European regulators recently forced the change.