From Mark Damon Hughes:

Competing with the iPhone: It’s got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it’s not like they’re doing something fucking crazy. Everybody’s had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren’t possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn’t make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it’s too late.

You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all – they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.

I’m not saying this to be mean, or get my kicks, or to engage in psychic vampirism. Competing with these fucking people must be a genuinely harrowing state of affairs.

That’s the thing. It’s not that Apple always creates better stuff by all definitions of “better”, is just that they seem to get the whole picture better.