I'm an Irish citizen who until 2023 lived in Brno then Prague. Since I moved to the Isle of Man I've travelled and worked in Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Austria, England, Ireland, and Scotland, from memory. While I lived in Czechia I routinely travelled in all the countries it borders.
I have seen more iPhones in use than any single make of Android, and more iPads than all other forms of tablet put together. MS Surface tablets are #2 and outnumber all Android tablets put together. I am typing on a work-provided MacBook Air and my boss also uses MacBooks, and I think the majority of the company works on them, but we stopped having a central office years ago so my sampling is very ad hoc.
At both the enterprise Linux vendors where I've been a paid full-time member of staff, most managers and marketing people use MacBooks. (IMHO this is a damning indictment of desktop Linux but that's incidental.)
My own direct observations in the last decade refute your claims. I can't give you numbers but let's put it this way: the majority of the guests I invited to my wedding in 2023 I had to use Apple Messages from my iMac to contact, because they're not on any of the systems I use: Whatsapp, Signal, or Telegram.
Ah, well, the most irrelevant place from a company compared to the actual product development.
Thus, no wonder everyone sees Macs as fancy toys just to show off instead of doing actual work. The times from OSX under G4 being a really good system for A/V and press/journalism production are long gone.
It can be, but any Windows or even some Linux machine with Krita and some medium A/V tools with some -rt kernel with Pipewire can destroy OSX on performance.
Ardour is no joke and people has tools like DavinCi.
There's no need to spend $4-6k on a Mac Pro any more.
Pick any high end Nvidia card with hardware encoding/decoding and A/V producing can be trivial.
If OSX it's just a tool do bullshit presentations, OSX it's doomed in the desktop.
The iPad it's everything else. It's really good at handwriting, and it's really good for students at uni doing tons of writtings and notes, and OFC for painting and photo manipulation.
You are demonstrating and perpetuating bigotry and prejudice.
Who uses them does not matter. What they use them for does not matter.
You claimed there were no Apple users in Europe. That is a blatant falsehood. Now you have explained why you lied: because you admit it was a lie and that there are lots of people using them, but you think those people are not important, and so you ignored them and did not count them.
I am not interested your value judgements. I may even share some of them but that is not important. The point is that Apple kit costs more because Apple doesn't make budget models and doesn't use cheap cut-down components like Celerons and "Pentium Dual Core" and other budget junk.
Apple costs more. So Apple is bought by or for richer people. Management and marketing make more money so they get more expensive toys.
I am not arguing if this is right or wrong. It isn't relevant. The point is, it sells, it's used in large numbers, and as such it's commercially important.
I reject all your generalisations.
I'm an Irish citizen who until 2023 lived in Brno then Prague. Since I moved to the Isle of Man I've travelled and worked in Latvia, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Czechia, Austria, England, Ireland, and Scotland, from memory. While I lived in Czechia I routinely travelled in all the countries it borders.
I have seen more iPhones in use than any single make of Android, and more iPads than all other forms of tablet put together. MS Surface tablets are #2 and outnumber all Android tablets put together. I am typing on a work-provided MacBook Air and my boss also uses MacBooks, and I think the majority of the company works on them, but we stopped having a central office years ago so my sampling is very ad hoc.
At both the enterprise Linux vendors where I've been a paid full-time member of staff, most managers and marketing people use MacBooks. (IMHO this is a damning indictment of desktop Linux but that's incidental.)
My own direct observations in the last decade refute your claims. I can't give you numbers but let's put it this way: the majority of the guests I invited to my wedding in 2023 I had to use Apple Messages from my iMac to contact, because they're not on any of the systems I use: Whatsapp, Signal, or Telegram.
Your experience is NOT representative.