While Microsoft had a good run when they made products people wanted, overtime they seem to have become comfortable thinking of their products as something that users had to use whether they wanted to or not - and that is where they ran into problems. Lots of other companies do the same thing (cable tv/Facebook...)

"Frosted Glass" is a silly thing to use as a focus - just a superficial implementation detail that has nothing to do with the differences between why any of these companies do what they do. Hopefully Microsoft decides to change focus and start making all of their products things that users really want again.

Apple and Google (and many other companies) seek to create products that users really want (so much that they can "sell" at a premium in outright cost or user data/privacy).

It's easy to think every company intends to "lock in" a customer, but that's not always the case. The Apple and Google and Facebook ecosystems might on the surface appear to have an evil intent (if you have a paranoid view that the world is evil and scary), but functionally they all satisfy a want that their users have - and filling that desire is just good business.

In theory, if there are many companies competing to fill the needs and desires of the customers it becomes far more profitable for all of them to have a common means of exchanging data across platforms. The walled gardens are still going to exist, but by the content owners and not the companies between them and the customers. The only reason you see "lock in" stuff in any company like Google/Apple/Microsoft has to do with the content owners and the only viable mechanism right now to get that content to the users that want it.

Evolution really comes down to no survival of the non fit so -> the optimal solution for any species is to have both selfish and cooperative behaviors (they give different advantages to a species in different environmental situations and for a species to have a strong preference for one or the other decreases the chance that both will remain in the population).

Game theory approaches that model the optimal behavior for an individual are cute and may apply perfectly well to an individual in a specific environment but really has nothing to do with the survival of a species over time.

I really don't think that reviews focusing on what an Apple product has (or doesn't have) under the hood matter as much as they do for most other products. Apple tends to make products that are "solutions" for a problem (that you may or may not know you have). Having the most features or the biggest/fastest hardware or the lowest initial cost is irrelevant to their customers. The only reviews that really matter for Apple customers are functionality based and since that's too subjective to market to a large audience (it's also why once a customer is happy with Apple's products they continue to buy more).