Their vertically integrated model leads to very good customer service. I don't pay extra for Apple Care and I still get treated like an adult if I show up to an Apple Store with some need.

Even when Apple makes a mistake and collects more data than they should, I don't expect that data to influence ads that I see or to be sold to the highest bidder. (As a developer myself, I find that I can be quite lenient on app internal telemetry.) I can also see that ad review is barely a small side hustle to them in their Quaterly Reports and I can also see that most of their ad revenue is from untargeted campaigns. (Microsoft is a bigger ad company than Apple. Google is an ad company deep into its DNA at this point with everything else a side hustle.)

There is a beauty to a well maintained walled garden. Royalty invested a lot of money into walled gardens and Apple maybe doesn't treat you exactly like royalty, but there's a lot of similar respect/dignity there in their treatment of customers, even if they want you to trust them not to touch the flowers or dig below the walls too much. They want you to have a good time. They want their garden to be like a Disney World, safer than the real world.

You may not appreciate those sorts of comforts and that's fine. Plenty of people prefer the beauty and comfort of a walled garden than the free-for-all of a public park (or the squatter's rights of an abandoned amusement park if you don't mind playing unpaid mechanic more often than not). There's a lot of subjective axes to evaluate all of this on.