[moomin]

To be honest, I'm not an Apple fan. I'm a fan of the iPhone; I think it's a superb bit of kit. But I waited 4 years to upgrade my last one, so I'm probably not exactly their best customer.

I don't really see the problem with claiming a company sets out to make money. But Apple's achievement in this area is nothing short of phenomenal. They've driven component costs down to the point that there's _hundreds_ of dollars of margin on every device. Then they've got the app store. The only firm I can think that does it this well is Nintendo, who even in the days they weren't fashionable were nonetheless very profitable.

[wanorris]

From the standpoint of operations and supply chain, Apple's work is absolute genius. People who keep up with successful businesses and study business strategies should marvel at this. HN is full of people who care about the running of business, so this is a natural topic.

But the drift amongst consumers in general from discussing things like "Apple makes great phones!" and "Android phones really empower me to do things I find useful!" to arguing your phone is superior to someone else's because of the supply chain management involved or the profit margin is utterly baffling. These things have no bearing on the consumer experience.

Even the sales stats are ultimately a pretty silly thing to argue about. If you have a device with the limited ecosystem of a WebOS phone, then market share matters, because at that level, not many people will write apps for your phone. But both iOS and Android phones are tremendously successful, and both have pretty much all the third party apps anyone needs (plus or minus something new enough that it hasn't been ported or knocked off on the other platform).