It's about differing visions of the software industry as well:
* Apple's centrally-planned vision of how software should be managed versus Android's more anarchic vision
* Apple's leveraging of the software/design patent status quo as a business weapon versus the Android ecosystem's more laissez faire attitude towards the exchange of ideas
Whoever eventually wins in the market will set the tone of the software industry.
I think that this perspective certainly has validity. But I've also noticed a tendency towards making it too simple and this can lead to the sort of seeing-your-interlocutor-as-one-dimensional that OP is referring to. When it comes to ceding control of our devices to an authority, the choice hasn't always been between controlled and open, it's between Apple or HTC/Motorola/Samsung/Huawei and the mobile carrier. The situation may be improving, but it's still not great. For a host of reasons, some of them aesthetic and/or idiosyncratic, I'd rather give up a lot of control to Apple, because I know they won't give an inch of it over to Rogers, AT&T, or Verizon. It's true that buying an unsubsidized Google Nexus device sidesteps some of these problems, but large parts of the installed Android ecosystem seem to be more like feudalism than anarchy.
Too often I think the people on the Android side of the discussion assume that iOS folks just lack an entire collection of values around openness that they personally consider really important. The reality is that the market is big enough for similar values to be catered to differently. I don't like that I can't delete Newstand.app from my iPhone, but just seeing a pre-installed and undeletable "Rogers Anyplace TV Live" icon on a friend's Android phone makes me die a little inside. A lot of folks don't seem to mind so much. There's no point in trying to convince each other which is worse, it seems mostly dispositional.
But a lot of people don't care about that. It's fine to say "I don't buy Apple products because their policies are X, Y, Z". It's not fine to tack on "And you're [insert insult] for not realizing/caring and buying anyway".
Not in the general population, but on HN a lot likely do.
>It's fine to say "I don't buy Apple products because their policies are X, Y, Z". It's not fine to tack on "And you're [insert insult] for not realizing/caring and buying anyway".
I would imagine the audience of HN to care more about larger concerns more so than the general population, but I don't know how much higher those numbers would be.
I don't buy Apple products for the very reasons you cite, but there is considerable passionate support and occasional vitriolic ass-hattery for them here on HN.
* Apple's centrally-planned vision of how software should be managed versus Android's more anarchic vision
* Apple's leveraging of the software/design patent status quo as a business weapon versus the Android ecosystem's more laissez faire attitude towards the exchange of ideas
Whoever eventually wins in the market will set the tone of the software industry.