Maybe for people of a certain age. But there is a whole generation of people (some of whom are on HN) who have only ever known a world where everyone wanted the latest iThing. It's been probably 15 years since you could seriously consider Apple an underdog in the tech space.

The iPhone hasn’t even been out for 15 years. People were calling Apple dead not even 6 or 7 years ago, the Apple Watch not being enough to satiate the demand for new toys.

The days of Apple basing their business on shiny new iThings are mostly past it, Airpods notwithstanding. Now they’re in pure optimization mode, and going deep into content and services.

This is probably the most absurd comment that I've read so far in 2023.

Apple is a 2.73 trillion dollar company, and single-handedly makes up 13.3% of the entire S&P 500 index. The iPod was launched 22 years ago. Apple hasn't been remotely an "underdog" for over a generation now.

A generation ago, Apple was a penny stock and the iMac was released. The iPod was a success but a small fraction of the story. They were “only” a $75 billion company by the year the iPhone came out.

Apple’s valuation and PE ratio only became in line with its peers around 5-6 years ago. It was priced as if it were about to go bankrupt for much of its history , even after the iPhone was released, convinced that Apple just HAD to go out of business, or hit a ceiling, or whatever.

History is also littered with quotes from competition that didn’t take them seriously: Dell, HPE, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Facebook.

The absurdity isn’t that Apple was thought to be an underdog, it’s that so many never took them seriously. Perhaps the main reason Apple is as big as it is now is because wall street and the competition refused to take them seriously? If they did, we’d have a more balanced industry.