They are the most valuable company on the planet with a $2.5 trillion market cap. Surely it's fair to say they've gone far?

And that they’ve had a number of flops (not just ‘one’) along the way.

All this means is that they're adept at parting fools from their money with "feel-good" marketing and such, to benefit their shareholders (those are their "real customers", not the consumers of their stuff), and to benefit themselves - huge bonuses etc., and have you seen their campus? That kind of opulence is on the same level as Trump's gold toilets.

> All this means is that they're adept at parting fools from their money with "feel-good" marketing and such

It’s hard to square comments like this with things like the M1 - what should the fools be buying instead?

I agree that the HQ is a navel gazing exercise of the highest order.

But their ability to sell a full line of computing devices with so few SKUs is pretty amazing. Dell sells like 30 different laptops. Apple sells 3.

> Dell sells like 30 different laptops. Apple sells 3.

So Dell offers 30 different choices in price/feature ranges, from lowest to highest. Apple only offers at most 3 - likely all in the more expensive range.

Kinda fits and confirms the "telling you want you want" mentioned above.

Apple historically has been a tiny player in terms of share. They are able to punch over their weight and be profitable making hardware. The original iMac, at the company’s nadir, was the #1 computer model, which gave them supply chain advantages in the market.

The other thing is that while Dell is stuck with Windows, Apple owns a few platforms. They sell cheap iPads as their entry product.

You may not like the strategy or the particulars of it at a given time (ie shipping a defective keyboard for years for inscrutable reasons), but they have a differentiated strategy because that’s what makes sense to them. They are not a commodity. Dell, HP, Lenovo can’t do that because they are merely a channel for delivering Windows - just like Exxon or BP are middlemen brokering gasoline, the only way to make more money is to ship more stuff.