Some people are passionate about design, as evidenced by the apple RDF and the number of upvotes. There's nothing wrong with that.

>Smartphones have become a commodity in the developed world.

Whereas startups are rare?

Not rare, but not interchangeable. Commodity suggests that there isn't much qualitative differentiation across a market, which is more or less true at this point.

The difference between phone rumors discussed here are pixels, megapixels, centimeters maybe.

The differences between start-ups discussed here are the sun and the moon!