You can certainly count me in as an Apple cynic, if not a hater. That was always not the case. I am old enough to be able to say that the first personal computer that I ever used was an Apple IIe back in the mid 80s.
I do have an iPod Classic which I bought against the advice of a colleague at work many years ago, he said that iTunes was rubbish. My verdict on the iPod was that is was great hardwear, let down by iTunes.
I always wanted an iPhone from it's launch but I thought that it was a high price to pay for a phone that could not even connect to 3G.
The turning point came at the time that Steve Jobs died when I heard one of his quotes when he once said the the iPod Touch was, "the iPhone without a contract". The current iPod Touch runs the same Retina screen and runs the same os, yet is less than half the price of an equivalent iPhone, with admittedly lower specs. I was surprised that the price difference was so big.
On top of that, I can qualify for discounts on orders direct from Apple through my employers who are both customers and clients to Apple UK. I found that there were discounts to be had on every Apple product, except for the iPhone, which is only ever sold at full price here in the UK if you want one sim free. At Amazon UK, you can get a discounted Samsung Galaxy Note 3 32GB with a 5.7" screen for just ?5 more than an iPhone 5c from Apple. Amazon do not sell the 5s and 5c, the 5 is priced at higher than the price from Apple, which means that even the mightiest online retailer in the world cannot get a discount out of Apple on an iPhone.
As the smartphone market matures, different customers will have different requirements for their phone. I don't like that Apple dictates that a smartphone cannot have a screen bigger than 4", that it cannot have a removeable battery, that if you want more memory that you must only buy from Apple in the form of a whole new phone. Samsung, BlackBerry, Nokia, HTC etc, all have a wide range of choice for the customer, Apple just has 2 versions of the same phone and it has taken them 6 years to reach this stage.
I see from that article that the iPhone was rated higher in sales than Proctor and Gamble. This does not quite fit with the repeated claim that I see here that Apple is a premium brand to be conpared to the liks of Gucci or Bentley. A poster elsewhere said that on a visit to DC, almost everyone had an iPhone, it's about once a month that I will see a Bentley. Apple have created an expensive, mass market device in the iPhone and they have made truly huge profits from it.