Comment by twrkit

>I'd argue that Apple is first & foremost a hardware company

I would argue that Apple is primarily a software company. Sure, they do offer nice, polished hardware touches like Retina display, TouchID, unibody aluminum enclosures, but the actual components are the same as commodity PC hardware. Further, companies like Samsung are making phone with bigger screens and (ostensibly) faster processors. What people are paying a premium for is the Experience (well, and the Brand) - in OS X, things "just work," and the OS is generally more stable and user friendly than Windows. Similarly with iOS, at least before iOS7, the design choices that were made by Ive and Co allowed the mass market to intuitively use a smartphone.