Many tech products are still sold on feature lists. Few people care any more.

This great (short and funny) internal video from Microsoft was supposed to be a wake up call, but nothing really changed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k

The fact that Apple doesn't really play that game seems to drive some people wild.

The real player in this space is Nintendo, which specifically uses commodity hardware in its devices to drive down costs and to my knowledge does not sell consoles at loss the way that MS or Sony do or have done in the past.

As I once heard it described, Nintendo is fine to laugh about being a second-rate console all the way to the bank, because while MS and Sony fight out expensive battles to be people’s first consoles, the second console is usually Nintendo.

Apple has always been “behind” on some aspects and “ahead” on others. It boils down to the fact that they have their own priorities, which are different from what Android OEMs like to emphasise, which are also different from what people on Teh Interwebz like to go on about.

> stay ahead while often being a step or two behind

Yeah, good advertising can make even those sentences a valid statement.

You dropped “from a technological standpoint” from the parent comment. Removing words from a sentence changes the meaning.

Ahead in what? Money they fleeced from US market? Core fanbase satisfaction? I don't think they were technologically ahead in anything in a decade or so. Unless you count inventing new charging ports and removing headphone jack or discovering that screen can have notches and customers still buy it.

unless you count the fast mobile chip year over year for the last decade, developed and designed in-house

Are they leapfrogging their competition or just keeping pace with the first place going alternatively to Apple and Android chips every generation where simply the newest chip is the fastest?

When was the last time a Qualcomm (let alone an Exynos or Kirin etc) was faster than the Ax of that year? I can't even remember. Any ideas?

I don't know, but assuming the answer is never I got response to my original question.

Apple is ahead in the amount of money they fleeced from US market, core fanbase satisfaction and CPU speeds.

That's not nothing.