<i>why do users continue to buy them, year after year?</i><p>Let&#x27;s consider phones. They&#x27;re over 50% of Apple&#x27;s revenue, so they&#x27;re currently the biggest piece of Apple.<p>Early non-Apple phones were a craptastic fucking joke. E.g. my daughter had some cheapo phone (an LG I think). It was becoming slower and slower by the day. The local AT&amp;T store couldn&#x27;t fix it. They gave me the address of a special service center about 1&#x2F;2 hr away. We had to drive there and wait while they attempted to restore the phone. In the end they gave up and gave us a new phone.<p>This wasn&#x27;t a hardware problem. Under typical &quot;stress&quot; of a teenager using a phone to send text messages, etc., the phone software degraded itself into unusability.<p>That was typical &quot;state of the art&quot; before Apple came in and kicked ass with far superior products. Not flawless, but still superior.<p>Add to that the other typical problems with phones: 1) manufacturers allowing themselves to be the carriers&#x27; bitches, meaning phones come preloaded with tons of crapware apps, and 2) both carrier and manufacturer indifference to any sort of software updates, either to fix bugs or to update features, and the end result is:<p>Apple phones might have minor problems, but they suck a lot lot less than typical alternatives. And Apple&#x27;s service (if you live close to an Apple store) is usually far superior to the competition.<p>Maybe there are good alternatives. But can I be sure they will survive? E.g. some people like Nexus. But I sure don&#x27;t trust Google. Almost everything except search (and its concurrent advertising) is treated as a hobby by them. Why would I switch to Google? They routinely discontinue products on a whim.<p>Until a Google phone is considerably <i>better</i> than Apple, and I feel that it will remain better for a number of years, then I will continue to stay in the Apple ecosystem.<p>In short, Apple sucks the least of all the phone companies out there, and inertia will keep me with Apple until I&#x27;m convinced that a competitor is far superior.