I guess my selfish point was that I hate Apple and I don't use their products specifically because of their asshole-parading-as-innovation approach to everything. I've made that choice and I think the world will, too, eventually as soon as your friends no longer make fun of you for carrying a Android. Even Apple knows a sea change is coming, and that's why they will go to the ends of the Earth to protect iMessage.
There's a misconception at the heart of your argument: They're not. They're absolutely not. Apple realized early and often that proprietary hardware mattered way the fuck more than proprietary software and built their entire business model around it. There was a brief shining moment in the Sculley era where you could buy an Apple clone, but it was the Sculley era so you were paying extra for shitty software that nothing ran on and didn't accomplish anything and was also beige so why would you do that. Theoretically you could build a "hackintosh" but you need to start with a DVD of Snow Leopard which says a lot. Did you know that the market cap of Airpods is greater than the market cap of Roku? Shitty tinny little lithium pills that die every eighteen months and people buy those things like they're pacemakers. Now - Apple could make the batteries detachable (lol remember when phones had spare batteries? thanks, Apple!), put an extra slot in the charging case and double the useful runtime. They could even sell spare batteries. The connector has been standard for 30 years. it is used widely for headphones. But if Apple did that shit you'd see a million MMCX batteries that are cheaper than Apple's and Apple couldn't sell you a new set of AirPods every eighteen months. And the thing about Apple? Is they're the dicks that fuck over their customers first and then eventually everyone else's life sucks. Things Apple took away first: - disk drives - batteries - memory card slots - keyboards - headphone jacks And every time, Android (and Windows!) users went "WTF" and twelve months later, Android users were just as fucked as Samsung and Motorola and everyone else went "look, people pay eighty gajillion dollars for iPhones without keyboards so obviously people who don't buy iPhones don't want one either." Apple's lack of innovation punishes everyone else because they flaunt the fucking law.Apple is continually taking a market risk by trying to make their stuff proprietary.
What I meant by "market risk" is that the reason they can get away with being different is that no company maybe ever has enjoyed their brand equity. Brand equity is fleeting. And when theirs fades it's going to be way harder to convince anyone to buy a Firewire 6.0 or whatever.
And what I mean by "flaunt the fucking law" is that Apple's brand equity is protected by the fact that their anticompetitive practices have so far avoided regulatory scrutiny. 'member when Microsoft got in trouble for bundling Internet Explorer? And Barnes'n'Noble got busted for trying to buy Ingram? Misty water-colored memories.