For "Retina"-class displays, they absolutely do.
It was easy to see this coming years ago, and it was indeed inexcusable for everyone else to be caught flat-footed. Any fool should have been able to see exactly what was going to happen the minute they laid eyes on a non-Retina iPad.
If a manufacturer could out do the iPhone 4, iPad or MBP screen, they would have. Especially since they are traditionally spec driven.
I think a major reason other manufacturers haven't done this may be that they ship Windows boxes. My logic for that is as follows:
- There are manufacturers that ship numbers of their high-end laptops that are in the same order as the number of MacBook Pro's that Apple ships.
- Apple, by supplying only one form factor, reaps economies of scale.
- That form factor may be suboptimal for some, but it is what they will have to buy if they want to run Mac OS.
- If other manufacturers tried the same, they would lose sales to other parties that do provide machines with different feature sets that also run Windows.
On the other hand, I do not know whether it is that more expensive to have a single high-DPI line crank out multiple sizes of display. If it is not, it all boils down to balls. Other manufacturers may be spec driven, but they do that by buying the best the market has to offer. Apple, on the other hand, is willing (and able) to tell the market what it wants, and put money on the table up-front for it.
http://www.macmyth.com/2012/06/touch-screens-5-440-dpi-at-lg...
But as others noted there are some with comparable displays, I was just unfamiliar with them.
Does this change your point?
Your argument would carry more weight if Apple had a much larger chunk of the market than all others.