> which despite huge antitrust action, Microsoft was allowed to continue bundling and defaulting?

> how did iOS ever thrive without Office & Windows integration, lock-ins that Microsoft tried to exploit?

You need to go back and reread the history here.

I think you have a fundamentally flawed view of how the market works. I'm not sure what else I can say except that markets don't work the way you think they do.

That's not a Libertarian or Socialist or Ancap thing, you can belong to any political spectrum while still understanding that profit is not a perfect representation of value, and that the market is a system that reflects the education of its participants, and that markets can have unoptimal outcomes sometimes.

In a weird way, what you are saying would be correct if the market worked the way you think it did. Except it doesn't, and you're misunderstanding the history of all of the cases you site (and conveniently leaving out really important stories like Bell Labs and the history of the Internet), and you're creating an alternative history where lock-in just kind of doesn't have any effect on anything, and where the market just kind of magically solves all of the problems it creates, and where we haven't had significant legislation to fix these problems.

At some point you have to go back and critically examine those assumptions, they're just not true. Even Conservative circles are going to laugh you out of conversations if you come in with an economic model that isn't sophisticated enough to explain phenomenons like forced arbitration or externalities like pollution. Perfectly efficient markets do not exist, every market has some inefficiency and some instances of consumers exercising their purchasing power against their own interest.

> They are also more profitable, which means consumers value and want them more.

Again, this is just not how markets work or what profit represents. There isn't a perfect one-to-one link between profit margins and consumer value.

> It's true that price is one of the largest factors between Android & Apple, but at the high-end range of phones where price is less of a confounding variable, Apple is still the brand of choice.

And again, this is not really a valid way to think about market data. Anyway, it doesn't matter because according to your worldview the only thing that matters is what consumers choose, and consumers have clearly overwhelmingly chosen that they want the cheaper phones instead of the flagships.

> For them, other factors like security or lock-in are less/not important.

Right, they're not thinking about security and they don't care about it, they care about the green bubble. The security of the phone is irrelevant, and it doesn't make sense to look at their purchasing decisions as some kind of validation of Apple's security model because they don't care, it is not a factor in their purchasing decisions.

If Apple allowed sideloading tomorrow, their purchasing decisions would not change. So why on earth would we use them as examples to say that sideloading is a problem?

> Conflating the intelligence of a consumer with their security skill doesn't make sense at all.

I don't need to be a plumbing expert to know not to take apart my toilet. Nobody needs to be a security expert to know not to flip a switch or mess with default security settings. It's not a complicated system, when I don't know how something works, I just don't mess with it.

I'm not going to let you walk away from the fact that you're saying customers are perfectly informed about the tradeoffs of buying into an ecosystem, but too stupid to be taught not to press a single, clearly market button buried in a phone's settings. That is a contradiction.

> I doubt the majority of Android users have ever sideloaded anything.

Then why is it a security risk to give them the option? You're arguing that iOS is more secure because it doesn't offer people the option to do something that you don't think they would do.