I can’t speak for the Australian market but in the U.K. it was a very different story. The iPhone arrived locked into one specific carrier (O2 IIRC) when most h

I can’t speak for the Australian market but in the U.K. it was a very different story. The iPhone arrived locked into one specific carrier (O2 IIRC) when most handsets were available on multiple carriers. As a result, a contract for the original iPhone was more expensive than most other handsets. There certainly where handsets that were locked to specific providers but even in those cases it was much easier to unlock them than it was to unlock the original iPhone. In fact the iPhone has actively worked against interoperability. Take charging, everything has standardised in USB-C except for the iPhone. Their app ecosystem is another walled garden (other handsets ran a third party OS but Apple rolled their own). Lack of a support for SD cards, etc. If anything, one of the biggest achievements of the iPhone is successfully programming people to be OK with being locked out of their own hardware. A trend we’ve seen Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others follow suit in. If it weren’t for the fact that they are (presently) strong advocates for privacy, it would be hard to say something positive about Apple. But given the current technological climate, they’re definitely the lesser of two evils.