> Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding. I agree it is certainly part of their branding. An iPhone is an iPhone no matter the price you pay. The iP

> Brand Prestige is a HUGE part of apples branding. I agree it is certainly part of their branding. An iPhone is an iPhone no matter the price you pay. The iPhone SE for $400 doesn't feel any less premium as the most expensive $2000 iPhone. There isn't really a obvious design element that tells you it's the cheap iPhone (except the notch and the camera, but it could just be that you didn't buy a new one) and this is also true for the hardware. Other manufacturers definitely have a much worse customer experience for people that buy their low-end models. This is understandable because they don't have the margins Apple has. But pretending that people buying Apple just do so because they are held hostage and they are missing out on a better user experience is delusional. Android and iOS both are trying to lock you into their ecosystem and try to sell you additional services which increase your lock-in. I'm not conviced that they deliberately design their products in a way to increase the lock-in. It probably comes naturaly if you don't have any open standards and interopability as a design goal. People on here talk about RCS for example but if you look at the Wikipedia page about RCS [1] you can see that carriers started implementing RCS in the last 4-5 years. For my country there is only one carrier listed and they implemented RCS less than 2 years ago. Sure RCS was a standard when Apple released iMessage but at the time most providers were still charging outrageous prices for SMS/MMS. Good luck convincing them a standard which would remove a revenue stream. So iMessage was a good solution to offer a better experience for iPhone users. It just works, no configuration required and you can always fallback to SMS/MMS. They probably could've made iMessage an open standard or made an Android app. But would've other manufacturers and Google participated in this standard (mind you it would've been centralized, there was no Signal protocol) or would everyone using iMessage be better than what we have now? I think a lot of the criticism today is hindsight. We know a lot more today and a lot of stuff was in it's infancy when it was released and tried to solve different problems than what we see today. Sorry for the rant. This post went a bit overboard but I had a lot of thoughts on the topic that ended up in this post. And I'm interested if someone has something to add or disagrees with my assesment completely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#St...