[dougabug]

How so? This is about Google's relative competitiveness. You seem to blithely dismiss Apple's success with iOS relative to Android, claiming that high end Android phones sell in comparable quantities. This is patently contradicted by the facts. If the goal of an enterprise is to make profits, Apple is crushing Google in the mobile device business.

[eitally]

Google & Apple aren't remotely in the same business WRT mobile. Apple is hugely successful, no question, with their success riding largely on four factors: 1) industrial design, 2) idiot-proof OS, 3) zero hardware diversity, 4) 3rd party developer support. Google is hugely successful, too, but they have no mission statement that says they are intending to squeeze every last penny from the mobile market. I mean seriously, the last number I heard was that there were close to 1500 people working on Chrome-related stuff. The fact is that Google makes "small" (hundreds of millions to a few billion) amounts on a broad variety of things, and underwrites the spectrum of R&D/engineering via their advertising juggernaut. Whether they do well at this or not is another question, but they are not competing with Apple on hardly any fronts.

[rednukleus]

The discussion is not about whether Apple is a profitable company, its about whether "everyone who could afford it would buy an iPhone". There is plenty of evidence that many people prefer Android regardless of price. Whether Apple's business model is good or bad is a completely different discussion.