[hu3]

There's more to competition than price.

After all apple hardware isn't even the most expensive. There are pricier phones and laptops being sold daily due to different features. So your race to the bottom point is moot.

If anything, competition could fix apple's sloppiness which it manages to leverage over the gullible due to artificial anti-competitive measures.

If Apple was so good, it wouldn't need to abuse their customers intellect.

[bigglywiggler]

I don't feel like Apple abuses my intellect. It's well known that Apple doesn't really care about people who want things that they don't offer, they market their devices to owners of their other devices. There are more expensive devices out there but none of them deliver the same value that Apple's devices do. They use standard methods and they have standard functionality and that's fine but if you want Apple then you buy Apple. Everyone is talking as if users are forced to buy and use Apple devices. The fact is that if you want a pebble or a garmin watch then you can just buy an Android phone and use that as the center of your tech and be happy with your non-apple devices. Why would someone want a Garmin watch that's compatible with their iphone? What possible real, non theoretical, reason is there to have one over an Apple watch? My wife had one and it's features were fairly pedestrian. There is nothing it did better than an Apple watch and that wouldn't have changed if it was able to work with Apple's proprietary technology. The existence of a comfortable walled garden alongside an open forest is not impossible by any stretch.