Over the course of 14 years, I had five different iPhones: 3GS in 2009, iPhone 4S in 2011, iPhone 6 in 2014, an iPhone XS in 2018 and now a work-only phone owned by my company which I don’t know the model of - I barely use it. I also had a brief Android-spell from mid-2010 until the release of the 4S with an HTC Legend which was a truly awful experience, and turned me off from Android for a long time until I bought a Fairphone 4 for personal use end of last year and installed CalyxOS on it. No regrets making the switch.
But yeah, I liked iPhones for a while. My prejudice against Android was unfortunate, but HTC Legend was a truly awful phone that lost support for updates quickly after I got it, and was also not prioritized by the modding community. I was going to get an HTC Desire, but they were sold out at the time, and I was about to go into the military, so waiting was not an option. If I got the Desire, I think the experience would’ve been better, but instead I sat with the impression that you could not count on long-term support for Android-devices, and that the hardware was rubbish.
I adopted iPhones at the same time as I departed from my teenage more tech-oriented years in favor of more social stuff at high school and university, so avoiding spending time on customization through the whole “you get what exactly we want you to get”-vibe of Apple worked fine for me then. It is the same shit that eventually drove me mad and made me ditch both iOS and macOS last year in favor of Android and Linux.
The hardware itself is quite good. They lasted increasingly longer for my use, but battery performance was shit towards the end and I was not going to spend a fortune changing the battery. My new phone has an easily changeable battery. Other than repairability, new features of smartphones have not excited me for many years.
The Apple ecosystem never really worked for me. I had iCloud only because the price point was much better than Dropbox for my use when I made the change. Other than that I really didn’t use much of their stuff, which made the transition a lot easier than it could’ve been. Exporting iCloud-stuff from a non-Apple device was a chore though… But since I also did not use much of the ecosystem, that was also a big “why bother”-point. But my main grievance is the lack of openness and control over your own device. I also have an old iPad now that sits with no use cases, because I can’t get a recent enough iOS-version installed, and I can’t install another operating system as far as I know. It’s so wasteful.