It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.

Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

That applies to businesses with small moats.

Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.