[goethes_kind]

Why is there only one Apple, anyway? It does not make sense to me. Their niche is luxury consumerism + overbearing paternalism. I don't think that is hard to replicate.

Since BlackBerry gave up on making smartphones, there is no other phone manufacturer trying for the same market. Sure you can buy an Android with cutting-edge tech specs, but you don't get the Apple customer experience and the brand recognition.

[blfr]

Samsung and Pixel are trying but Apple has the advantage of the integrated ecosystem. Samsung is supposedly approaching it from the angle of their home devices but I don't know how valuable a seamless integration between my phone and a washing machine is.

Also, high-end phones aren't really like luxury goods. I think the margins on a manufactured phone are only ~50%. That may sound like a lot but is pretty close to manufacturing of most not-dead-simple stuff.

[slekker]

It's unfortunate that with Samsung phones you can't uninstall the myriad of bloat apps, not to say of their telemetry volume (compared to Apple at least).

[jorvi]

> I think the margins on a manufactured phone are only ~50%.

On Android phones, the margins for OEMs are a few % at most, sometimes even in the negative.

[epanchin]

Their niche is trust. You cannot replicate overbearing paternalism as a USP without trust.

If Microsoft only allowed installs from their App Store people would switch to Apple en mass.

[gary_0]

> I don't think that is hard to replicate.

Oh, sure. Heck, I can do that for you. I'll just need a few billion dollars to pay for the design, hardware and software engineering, manufacturing and QA, and to pay for the massive amount of marketing required to establish a new luxury brand.

Then, in order to beat the network effects of the App Store, I'll need another billion dollars or two in order to bribe the most popular apps to make ports for our new platform, and hire more software engineers to make an API emulation layer... and hire lawyers to defend against Apple claiming the emulation layer violates their IP rights.

(There's no guarantee you'll see a return on those billions, btw.)

Nope, not hard to replicate at all.