[Kururin]

I guess that the image posted by @OldMeister in Post#6 best summarizes Apple's MO(/Modus Operandi).

Apple is all about the brand. The vast majority of Apple's Customers -if not all-, when they buy something from Apple, they don't buy for the product itself BUT for the BRAND!.. and they are willing to pay big bucks for it!!.. That's it!.. To them buying Apple stuff is a way to make THAT implicit social class statement!..

Apple ceased to be about the products a long long time ago!.. It has always been about the brand and the 'social status' image it tries to project.. to the eyes of the gullible beholders...

So where this attitude came from?.. It has of course a historic context that's essentially due to the fact that Apple's computers were manufactured in-house, from bottom up(hardware + software) making their prices way too expensive to be accessible to everybody else. In contrast to the IBM-clones (PCs) whose hardware where manufactured by anybody willing to do it and the software(/OS) supplied by the rising M$$ company.

This commercial situation made Apple to carve itself a niche in the high-end market of desktop computers (essentially by polishing the design), just the same way it did subsequently in the smartphone market and the other gizmos and services they currently sell, including their cloud services of course!..

Nothing unusual really at this point; it's essentially a celebration of the Neoliberal attitude of the "Greed is Good" immoertalized in the classic Oliver Stone's movie 'Wall Street (1987)' during the Reagan years in the US:

What's more unorthodox about Apple is when they were caught 'deliberately slowing down older iPhone models ...'; a deed for which they were fined and they did apologies for it...

I would guess these kind of practices may be common among smartphones vendors as well -I don't really know as I'm not a smartphone and other gizmos fan- but Apple was caught doing it in addition to the fact that it's  a pioneer in US Tax evasion and job outsourcing and so on and so forth... So, YES, Apple Inc. is TOO GREEDY!

This is funny, Most people buy Apple for just "get it and forget it". They never need to tinker with anything, and "everything just works!" I personally myself never pay for "Brand" I pay for "functionality" and "seamless-ness". As @tbelldesignco mentioned its mostly about the ecosystem, once you are in you are just amazed but how well it works. You don't have to install other software to connect what you are doing from one device to another device. As said before professionals use this to save time and headaches between software interoperability that would be a big headache if not for the seamless-ness. Also I have said before yes Apple has their history of shadiness but which company does not? Did people already forgot about Note8 battery fiasco? And even Samsung did same thing Apple did--slow down the phone "planned obsolesce".