It’s not even just consumer mindset. Look into any deep dive into their custom tech, it’s insane the engineering dominance they have.
The M series was and still is generations ahead of x86. There is no competition from anyone else.
Their AirPods routinely score the best on noise cancellation performance, battery etc.
The iPad (even though arguably “out of place” platform) is the only tablet device anyone actually uses.
MacBook hardware pre-ram price issues was incredible. My wife has a NEO and I was floored at how much it was like my m4.
They did some pretty good marketing at convincing us they don’t sell our data to third parties. I assume this is still the case.
I’m a long term PC enthusiast, I’m old enough to have played games on dos. I daily drove Linux on gaming laptops and MacBook clones. I have a custom machine running Bazzite for my gaming needs.
In the last couple of years I made serious attempts to switch to Linux from windows for my main development machine but it was pretty unreliable experience across all the distros I tried (fedora was the most stable), so I bit the bullet and bought a Mac mini, the only complaint has been related to thunderbolt and it’s unreliable hubs.
It replaced an i9-14900k and did it with almost no change in performance and it doesn’t sound like I’ve got a leaf blower in my office.
Arguably the platform I’m least happy with is the iPhone. It was at is best 5 years ago and just gets buggier every release.
It’s impossible to not sound like an Apple shill but this has been my experience for 35 years of computing.