>If Huawei or someone else was building a better mobile experience people would be buying that over Apple.

Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?

Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.

Apple Pay didn’t come out until 2014, the rest of the world was paying with contactless on phones for years before that - Japan from 2004 onwards.

America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.

This feels like a straw man argument. It is pretty widely recognized that innovation in the US is ahead of the vast majority of the rest of the world, even Europe. Only China is now challenging the US in that regard. I think that the late adoption of contactless payments by Apple is the exception, not the rule.

Huawei was starting to make such phones, but got blocked by the power of the US state to help protect Apple, Google and others. Even if they hadn't been, Huawei is another giant, controlled by an even worse regime.

And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).