If I am a typical Apple customer (and I suspect I am), then the iPhone is not about elitism, it is about pragmatism. The first time I picked a friends up I was able to start using it intuitively and so I bought one. Now I am perfectly happy just to buy a new upgrade every few years when I break it. I have no idea what “Android” is. I thought it was something out of a “Doctor Who” episode.
Seems that the App Store was a loss-leader until around 2013, when they broke even and the real profits and margins have only gone up since then…
Here’s the latest info I could; find: which says they’re raking in between $7B-$35B annually, depending on how you count.
Stickandrudderman wrote:
the iPhone is not about elitism, it is about pragmatism. The first time I picked a friends up I was able to start using it intuitively and so I bought one.
For every person finding Apple’s interface highly intuitive, there is another person thinking exactly the opposite, such as yours truly. For me it is the least intuitive of all platforms on the market, and I’ve been doing IT on and off for 35 years.
alioth wrote:
Apple’s devices are also all premium products sold for high margins. Most Android devices are sold at the lowest price point possible with wafer thin profit margins. Premium Android phone makers have comparable market shares to Apple.
This is probably true, but “premium” does not equal high performance, whether iOS or Android. It’s mostly about glamour and status. Quite a few devices on the market would blow Apple or Samsung phones out of the water on every single parameter, including price and customer support.
Ultranomad wrote:
For every person finding Apple’s interface highly intuitive, there is another person thinking exactly the opposite, such as yours truly. For me it is the least intuitive of all platforms on the market, and I’ve been doing IT on and off for 35 years.
I think you nail it there in the last bit. Apple products are for people like me who couldn’t care less about how they work – just that they do. A bit the same with computers. Macs simply are much more intuitive and in some industries (e.g. creative, where I am) the industry standard.
In any case, Apple isn’t only ‘in business’, they are currently the most valuable company in the world. Guess they’ve got something figured out!
If „glamorous“ is an attempt to ridicule Apple‘s leading industrial design – well then i like glamorous. To me Apple liberated technology from beeing boring and ugly and it‘s not a coincedence that everybody tried to copy the iPhone or the Macbook.
Is it also a lifestyle product? Yes, but so what? Outside the islamic state this is (still) completely legal.
I just use an iPhone because I use Apple IT in our firm and in my home. Many years ago a threw all windows related computers (pardon: PCs) out of the window and never regretted it a second.
Connecting an Android device to all the Apple stuff can be done, but it kind of doesn’t make sense. There is a remarkable similarity between iOS : Android and Macs : PCs and that has a reason.
Apple just works. As a non-IT person, I have zero, zilch, nil, nada interest in how a computer works or things I need to do to keep it in good order. Even Bill Gates recognises some of the idiosyncracies of Windows.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/20/technology/bill-gates-control-alt-delete/index.html
For every person finding Apple’s interface highly intuitive, there is another person thinking exactly the opposite, such as yours truly. For me it is the least intuitive of all platforms on the market, and I’ve been doing IT on and off for 35 years.
I couln’t agree more, but maybe that is the problem. Those who know IT prefer the greater access to everything. I don’t mind the IOS user interface (smartphone UIs tend to be all the same these days – dumbed down to three buttons, so you need 5 similar apps to do a given job 
) but it is IOS’s painful avoidance of access to any “file system” which I find difficult to get my head round. I can see why they did that but the paradigm has been stretched too far for me. We have an Ipad 2 here and Justine used to have an Iphone 4 so I know how they work. The phone eventually stopped ringing on most incoming calls; a long queue at the Genius Bar resulted in a new one which also eventually packed up. The Ipad is still here (another long queue at the Genius Bar over an HDMI output which never worked resulted in “get lost; HDMI is not a core function”) and it makes a good portable web browser for casual use… On Android, even unrooted (which is essential if you want google pay to work) you get a file browser so you can get things organised the way you want them. But crucially you can connect stuff like SD cards; IOS blocks all that, except to copy to/from what they call Camera Roll. So you can get a 32GB android phone and insert a 200GB SD card and keep a whole load of stuff on it, and in the right scenario that is really useful.
Even Bill Gates recognises some of the idiosyncracies of Windows.
There is a lot wrong with windoze but a computer is a tool to do a job; not something one should be playing with 
And windoze has delivered the greatest productivity tool of all time, arguably…. one day, history will rank it along with the AK47
For me, IOS fails to deliver a good tool for the job of a phone or a tablet – but that’s because I am used to a different way of working.
Other negative sides of iOS are that the paper feeder works better on your typewriter and that it’s not compatible with Windows XP.
;-)
It is also not true that you connect a memory extension ti iOS. There’s USB sticks, hard disks and even wireless HDDs for that. I don’t use any of that, I use Dropbox. But with 128 GB I really never run out f memory.There’s now a file system on the iPad (iOS11).
