Putting the Cart before the Horse?

I can't stop shaking my head about the let's-buy-an-iThing™-and-then-try-to-use-it-with-FOSS style of energy waste that's going on. (Yes, in immediate response to John, but I see it happening again and again.) Yes, Apple's devices are shiny, nice things. But I think that company is at least as good at customer lock-in as it is at design, marketing and engineering. It certainly is better than Microsoft (MS users use Windows and MS Office because they are lead to believe that there is no alternative. Apple makes their users want to use their stuff — obviously they can't go the MS road since it's obvious that Apple users could just use Windows like “everybody else”. Linux advocacy should learn more from Apple there instead of always working against MS!) So: why, oh why, do people, especially Debian people who on average care a bit more about freedom than others, keep using devices made by a company that again and again proves that it believes it needs tight control over what customers do with their products?

(Examples, some from history: Apple not allowing foreign hard drives in their old Macs; Apple using proprietary connectors and protocols wherever it could, from keyboards to printers to displays in hardware and in things like iPod synchronisation in software; Apple tightly regulating what kind of applications are legal on the iPhone; Apple regulating what kind of hardware their OS can be installed on. I think Apple might be more or less Microsoft minus the market share, although their products are usually better.)