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The Blackberry used to be a status symbol, and same for the Razr and those taco-shaped smartphone. The iPhone succeeded because it was the most aesthetically appealing, and it had other benefits such as the app store and good product reliably. In my opinion mac product are overpriced, unusable, walled-garden toys and would only use if no other choice, but the stock has done great though. The success of apple does to some degree baffle me considering how bad the user experience is compared to alternatives for anything beyond just basic web browsing . The iPhone integrated with the iTunes store, too, so you didn't need an mp3 and a cellphone. This was in 2008-2012, before wokeness was a thing.
This is like saying "This was in 1916 - 1920 [foundation year of NSDAP], before German Nationalism was a thing." Wokeness has existed at least since the 60s, even if it wasn't called that (and Apple has been aligned with whatever it was called at the time since its formation). Political tendencies don't magically snap into existence at the exact point in history where they grow dongs big enough to slap everyone in the face.
Sure, but you didn't have people buying Apple products because Apple was signaling how much they loved gay people. People were buying Apple products because they liked what they were buying.
They liked what they were buying in large part because of the image of the product, not some genuinely enlightened analysis of its raw utility. If you slapped an Android logo on an iPhone with iOS modified to change all of the logos to Android's, they'd like it a lot less. And wokeness is a large part of that image.
I don't completely disagree, I'm sure if Apple had a partnership with Google where they released a new Google Pixel but it had all its logos changed to Apple, it'd sell like hotcakes. But as a reverse thought experiment, if Google released two phones, one that's a normal Pixel, and one that's an iPhone with the Android logo on it, you'd still see a lot of people preferring the iPhone version.
I'm really not one to argue the iPhone advantages, I'm not that into phones and I strongly prefer Android myself in any case, but it should be obvious some people genuinely enjoy the iPhone for itself, not just for signaling purposes.
But do they really enjoy the unique features of it or simply what's common to every smartphone (and yes admittedly Apple pioneered a lot UX-wise here)? In a world where only Androids existed, would they really be deprived of much actual functionality?
I have no doubt they enjoy it for itself. To go back to the debate that took this place by storm a bit ago, surely people who drink $2000 wine enjoy it for itself. The question is how much they enjoy it more than any wine beyond the prestige signaling.
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If I had argued the opposite point I'd get someone telling me how wokeness is much worse or new
It can be both worse/novel and also an extrapolation/continuation of prior tendencies, much like the different stages of cancer.
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