I would argue that Apple is primarily a software company. Sure, they do offer nice, polished hardware touches like Retina display, TouchID, unibody aluminum enclosures, but the actual components are the same as commodity PC hardware. Further, companies like Samsung are making phone with bigger screens and (ostensibly) faster processors. What people are paying a premium for is the Experience (well, and the Brand) - in OS X, things "just work," and the OS is generally more stable and user friendly than Windows. Similarly with iOS, at least before iOS7, the design choices that were made by Ive and Co allowed the mass market to intuitively use a smartphone.

Also an excellent point. The reason people line up for many hours for the privilege of spending $500 is because they expect perfection. These are the consumers that Apple has courted, and so far they have reaped the rewards from it by earning the trust of their users. To change that would damage their brand in a huge way.

Apple Maps wasn't a failure of "perfect the first time", it was a failure of iteration: it was an existing Apple app using Google data that, as part of an OS update, Apple "upgraded" with a new version using non-Google data that performed, in many users opinion, less well than the previous version.

> Compare that to the new Google Maps, which was pretty shitty when it went to open beta but has been getting progressively less so.

When Google maps was released to "open beta", it wasn't a new version of base app delivered as part of the OS bundled into a premium-priced hardware device that was widely seen as a downgrade in functionality from the prior version. It was a free web application that added to, rather than replacing, the existing options in the space.

> Google's users cut Google the necessary slack to allow them to release imperfect products and improve on them. Apple's do not.

Google's users get mad when they perceive Google to make products worse in subsequent versions just as much as Apple users do. Google tends not to put premium price tags on its first public release of products, while Apple does, and people paying premium prices for products are less inclined to grant the maker slack.

For example, first version of iPhone OS did not have copy-paste functionality. On a device that has keyboard with keys sized 1/4 of my fingertip size. Now try getting a long URL or email from one app to another in this setup. Perfect? Yeah, right.

Another iOS thing - it gained multitasking (for apps other than select few) only in the 4th version. For years we've been told multitasking is evil - right up to the point when they got to make it usable and then it suddenly became newesest bestesest thing ever.

Now we can look at hardware. Macbooks are extremely popular, but I've personally seen a number of Macbooks dying at 2 years of age from exactly the same symptoms (failure of graphics subsystem). It's a reasonably nice piece of hardware, but perfect? No way. And it still doesn't have docking capability, after all these years.

And those are just random things, if I tried, I probably could list dozens of deficiencies in Apple products. Both first and current versions. It doesn't make them especially bad - all their competitors have their sets of faults - but let's not buy into the "perfect" hype too much.

So I can attribute this "perfect the first time" myth to a definite success of Apple marketing, but, unfortunately, there's little substance behind it.

Software companies, especially ones that are service-based, have a distinct advantage in deployment.

Apple is fairly unique in that its product is both hardware and software.

Search, Mail, Social Network, Maps, Photo-sharing, etc.

Yeah, Apple will always make tons of money but IPhone/IPad will become just a device that hosts these apps. If most of the apps people need are available in another platform, the costs of switching is going to be low.

I highly doubt Android would fracture if Samsung goes its own way. A number of manufacturers (Motorola, ZTE, even Xiaomi) would fill the void if Samsung leaves Android.

I highly doubt Samsung would do it. Samsung doesn't know platform. Microsoft does but it still struggles to convince developers to build on top of Windows Phone.

If Samsung leaves, it loses all the Google apps and services. I highly doubt that Samsung could build a decent Map, Mail and other essential apps.

However, that won't be how Apple will die out (if they do...), because there is already a huge market of people with lesser quality standards than Apple (Android). Instead, Apple's threat is another company who takes the time to give extraordinary quality for novice users. This isn't happening right now, b/c everyone is fighting for the disruptive (low) end of the market.

So, Sun could have extended their business by diversifying to serve specific high-volume customer markets. Java was an epic half-step. They gave away their ability to add value to customers for nearly free, while focusing ever harder on custom unix hardware and software (UltraSPARC!).

If Apple wants to avoid a Sun-like fate, they'll need to properly diversify beyond custom hw and sw and extend into the spaces of large customers where they can add value. You see _some_ of this in their supporting multimedia Bitflingers, but they'll need to incur much deeper and much more specifically into the multimedia and small office spaces.

Perhaps the Cyanogen corporation could morph into a "luxury" distro?

I think it has more to do with Apple's marketing. Every time they release even the most trivial improvement they tout it as being amazingly innovative. They also charge premium prices. This creates an expectation with their users that everything will be perfect from the beginning.

For a media version take SNL's clumsy portrayal of Pres. Ford after his incident and the reality of his athleticism[1].

Ask Blackberry about how their release with flaws worked.

1) he played linebacker and was actually pretty athletic and not clumsy. Chose your shoes wisely.