[david38]

Wow. This whole comment section is full of armchair CEOs saying how the iPhone, ARM laptops. tablets, and AirPods are just inevitable outcomes.

Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.

[astrange]

Sony is the closest company to Apple (and the original inspiration for it), but they can't do anything like it because they have no taste and no internal standards for simplicity.

AirPods in particular really are that good, and compared to them essentially every other audio product is a scam. Japanese companies instead invented something called "hi-res audio" which is just a pledge to only focus on useless features.

(The scam prevention systems like rtings' objective headphone reviews are themselves scams because they don't measure actually useful scenarios.)