[astine]

"Yet they never reverse course."

That's because they don't have to. A lot of Apple customers don't even consider competing products. Apple could release a Macbook without a keyboard and there would still be a contingent of users willing to stick with it and explaining that you start to prefer it after a while. A lot of their decisions were good, or at least made sense in the long run (and were just introduced earlier than customers would have preferred,) but they're pretty much unaccountable at this point, I think.