I don’t really see it as a conspiracy. What seems to happen is Apple does something like remove the headphone jack. Apple users essentially have to accept it as they are locked in and don’t have any choice in the matter. Plus you have the fanboys that have an amazing ability to rationalize anything Apple does. Everyone else sees that Apple got away with something, and they follow suit.
Losing the SD slot would still be annoying but not as big of a deal with everyone wasn’t also copying Apple’s model of massively overcharging for storage upgrades.
That’s also what my upper level math courses were like in college. In high school and the first couple of years of college I got good use out of my graphing calculator, but after that I reached the point where all of its advanced features were no longer useful. I just ended up leaving it at home and brought my old TI-30 Solar for class for the occasional time I had to crunch some actual numbers.