I don't think the GP meant "trust" as in "I think Apple has my best interests at heart."
Rather, I think they meant "trust" as in "Apple is observably predictable and rational in how they work toward their own self-interest, rarely doing things for stupid reasons. And they have chosen to center their business on a long-term revenue strategy involving selling high-margin short-lifetime hardware — a strategy that only continues to work because of an extremely high level of brand-image they've built up; and which would be ruined instantly if they broke any of the fundamental brand promises they make. These two factors together mean that Apple have every reason to be incentivized to only say things if they're going to mean them and follow through on them."
There's also the much simpler kind of "trust" in the sense of "I trust them because they don't put me in situations where I need to trust them. They actively recuse themselves from opportunities to steal my data, designing architectures to not have places where that can happen." (Of course, the ideal version of this kind of trust would be a fully-open-source-hardware-and-software, work-in-the-open, signed-public-supply-chain-ledger kind of company. You don't get that from Apple, nor from any other bigcorp. Apple's software is proprietary... but at least it's in your hand where you can reverse-engineer it! Google's software is off in a cloud somewhere where nobody can audit changes to it.)
At the heart of it: I feel like I'm Apple's customer in a way that I never feel like Google's customer (in everything they do it always seems like their real customers are Ad Buyers, even when you are ostensibly paying for services). (And Microsoft is in the middle and all over the map where some divisions treat you like a customer and others don't depending on the prevailing winds and the phase of the moon.)
They are anti right to repair & they have their walled garden on their mobile devices. Their vertically integrated model also leads to unusually high prices. This website in particular would also directly feel the pain of Apple killing apps to implement themselves later, the greedy apple store cut and also not allowing use of hardware features that Apples themselves can use. Consumers feel this indirectly (higher prices, less competition).
Also, don't get it twisted, Apple is still collecting all of your data, even if you ask them not to [0].
There's absolutely several axes in play here. You have very different concerns than I do, and that's valid.
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.
France’s data protection authority, CNIL, fined Apple €8 million ... for illegally harvesting iPhone owners’ data for targeted ads without proper consent.
If ads are a small percentage of Apple's quarterly reports, that isn't sound reasoning; after all, they make a lot of money in general in a lot of areas.
And if ads are leading to services growth (which they are), you should expect them to do more, scummier ad related things over time.
Fundamentally, ads is an incredibly high margin business with lots of room for growth (particularly when you own the platform and can handicap your competitors) so over time, all tech companies will become ads companies.
I don't think this applies to their watch or tablet business where the limiting factor on lifetime in the market is security/os updates. Most alternatives in that space have significantly worse support cycles.
This used to be true of their phones as well, but the android market seems to be catching up in ways that tablets/wearables have not (see google's 7 year commitment for pixels).
Not sure if it applies to general purpose. Certainly there are non mac computers that we can throw linux on and use for 10+ years and there are examples of apple laptops getting cut off earlier than I'd like (RIP my beloved 12" macbook), but there are often some pretty serious tradeoffs to machines older than 7 years anyway. Also, I'm not sure if apple's strategy re: support lifecycles on products after the AS migration have shifted. It wouldn't surprise me if the first gen m1 products get 10 years of security updates.
Rather, I think they meant "trust" as in "Apple is observably predictable and rational in how they work toward their own self-interest, rarely doing things for stupid reasons. And they have chosen to center their business on a long-term revenue strategy involving selling high-margin short-lifetime hardware — a strategy that only continues to work because of an extremely high level of brand-image they've built up; and which would be ruined instantly if they broke any of the fundamental brand promises they make. These two factors together mean that Apple have every reason to be incentivized to only say things if they're going to mean them and follow through on them."
There's also the much simpler kind of "trust" in the sense of "I trust them because they don't put me in situations where I need to trust them. They actively recuse themselves from opportunities to steal my data, designing architectures to not have places where that can happen." (Of course, the ideal version of this kind of trust would be a fully-open-source-hardware-and-software, work-in-the-open, signed-public-supply-chain-ledger kind of company. You don't get that from Apple, nor from any other bigcorp. Apple's software is proprietary... but at least it's in your hand where you can reverse-engineer it! Google's software is off in a cloud somewhere where nobody can audit changes to it.)