I used to be an Apple hater, but switched ~4 years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given here.

I handed my 2012 fat macbook pro down to my mom. Still kicking with 16 gigs of RAM since I upgraded it when I still had it. I myself got it for like a hundred or two hundred euros. It’s running on a newer MacOS than it officially supports with opencore. Yes, Linux will support devices even longer, but how many laptops have this kind of hardware longevity? Mostly just Thinkpads, but not all generations of those either. And SOME generations of Elitebooks, but not most of them. Bit of a survivorship bias on this one though, some of the 2010-2012 15" models had different forms of graphics chip failure, mine was 13".

Android landscape is changing, but when I switched to iOS, you could get, for the same price, 3 years of Android updates for a flagship phone vs ~5-7 for iOS. But if you have an iPhone 8, you still got security updates in May despite not having had a new major version since 2022. That model is turning 9 this year.

Android runs on non-Google devices too, so Google needs to make money off those by doing something other than selling hardware. iOS only runs on Apple devices, they’ve already made their money off each device. Not saying they’re absolute privacy champions, but they have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation if they were doing extensive spying on you 24/7.

This all without even getting into the Apple Silicon chips. M1 when I had it was ridiculously fast and power efficient already.