What are those things they preach in finance? Diversification? Managing risk? One should never put all their eggs in one basket, in my opinion. The UX difference between an Apple Card and a regular card, GMail and some smaller provider, etc is so small that it is definitely not worth it.
I pay Apple for... iCloud storage for photos I could lose.
I pay Google for... a dumb internet pipe and YouTube Premium/Music where I could jump in a heartbeat to another ISP, Spotify, etc.
I have some email on my own domain with third party hosting.
And so on.
The price to pay for this is extremely small. I'm not excusing Apple here, but reality is reality -- you are a single person among billions.
Hard same. If something is really important to me (aka... catastrophic if lost) I try to make sure it's backed up onsite (backup drive on my desk) and offsite (one or multiple cloud services).
Otherwise I try to diversify services and stay in a place where I can switch services if needed. I don't obsess about it or anything and I still sometimes choose convenience over keeping my options open. But anytime I get involved with a service, I try not to go all-in.
I pay Apple for... iCloud storage for photos I could lose.
I pay Google for... a dumb internet pipe and YouTube Premium/Music where I could jump in a heartbeat to another ISP, Spotify, etc.
I have some email on my own domain with third party hosting.
And so on.
The price to pay for this is extremely small. I'm not excusing Apple here, but reality is reality -- you are a single person among billions.