For as tiny of a portion of the personal computer and operating system market as Apple does, it seems to do a lot of evil things as a company.
I did not jump to OS/2, but neither did I jump to Windows. I stuck with MS-DOS until companies stopped making MS-DOS games, around 1997 or so.
I actually started when I was a wee lad on the Apple ][ and I liked it ... until I tried a PC running MS-DOS. I actually loved it a lot more than the Mac I tried.
And ... I'm with you, Frogboy ... just because one company manages to dominate the market does not mean it makes a superior product nor that consumers ever really chose it. I bang my head on a table every time someone claims "Whine all you like, people chose X because its a better product." I have quite a few dents on my head and have had to replace my poor table several times ...
How do you break the cycle and get people to wake up? That's the question. I've unfortunately not had steady employment ... which means I've worked for a lot of different companies, big and small. Time and time again, the 'good' companies lose out to the evildoers, because evildoers don't do evil just for the sake of doing evil, they do it because the slime they ball makes them more money at lower cost. As much of a proponent as you are, even you've said things that support the cheaters-rising-to-the-top status quo in your statement about how people get wealthy through investing. Investing means putting money into companies that make money ... the companies that make the most money are the ones cheating. And some of that cheating makes the worst anti-competitive business practices look angelic. You've heard about the massive move of production from the U.S. to China? Did you know there are thousands of political prisons in China that use forced, unpaid labor ... and these prisons make goods for top U.S. companies? That's right, slavery. It didn't end with the Emancipation Proclamation ... its simply been "outsourced" overseas. I'm all for global trade ... I'm not blindly nationalistic ... but slavery is wrong, period, and companies that dump fair labor workers for slave workers should have their golf-balls castrated.
For many years, attempts have been made and failed to put the kibosh on the import of any goods produced through slavery, and if a country refused to grant unhindered access to its production facilities to ensure no forced labor was used to produce goods they would then export to us. A lobbying effort developed, of course, to fight these anti-slavery-import efforts and a lot of big name companies threw their money into the mix. Among them was, a bit ironically, the company that uses "don't be evil" as its motto ... yup, Google.
So the point of this, in relation to my mention of your discussion about people should invest: return on investment, the money made on the stock market, is earned through the cheats. Unfair practices, overseas slave labor, the undermining of every single environmental, labor and human rights law in the U.S. for every penny earned by going with cheaper morality-undermining overseas labor ... they make companies more profitable than companies that do "the right thing" by maintaining fair trade practices, not using slave labor, etc.
Slave labor taints stock prices ... and traditional investing rewards companies that use slave labor. Its become too strong of a fad to consider stocks as mere numbers on a ticker. How a company's profits are actually made are hidden, invisible ... and that means those that use the most anti-competitive and scummiest means are the ones who survive. Intentional or not, though, investing in stocks rewards and encourages this bad behavior.
So, then, if investing is the only way most people can get 'wealthy' -- and I myself did maintain a mutual fund IRA for some time until a combination of my conscience, thinking about it, and a medical bill I had no means of paying -- then is it worth it? Being destitute isn't fun, but is wealth obtained through investing in companies that profit from slavery worth it?