[teyc]

The real question is whether Apple's growth is defensible?

Talking about smart phones, Apple is a latecomer to the industry, and does not have a sufficiently strong patent pool to prevent competitors like Oracle, HP and MS from encroaching.

Apple is the first to deliver to the mass market affordable tablet computing and touch computing devices. This will remain growth areas, and hence Apple's willingness to accept lower margins in return for a beachhead and a sufficiently large user-base to establish itself as a platform-play.

However, further on, Apple is going to have to finely balance the tension of being the most widely used vs being "exclusive", "cool", or "different". Give a few years when competitors reach feature parity, Apple will be at crossroads whether to go mass market or boutique.

[X-Istence]

I wouldn't necessarily say that Apple doesn't have the patent pool for mobile devices (yes, the smart phone sector included) with Apple doing a lot of innovation in the form of multitouch, OS UI design, usability and a whole other range of other things.

Dismissing Apple outright is definitely the wrong thing to do.

[teyc]

I'm sorry, I should have said "patent barriers" instead. Apple is faced with the necessity of cross licensing their patents with their competitors in order to continue developing smartphones. I don't think Apple will be able to aggressively use their patents to prevent MS, HP, etc from copying.

[Nelson69]

Will the competitors really reach feature parity? Really? I mean, to have feature parity with iPod, you need a top notch player, you need a very good music manager and then you need a one click store that has nearly everything. It's not the touch screen, it's not the iTunes app, it's not the store: it's all that stuff.

Does the competition take away or does it help them stand out more?