Apple flush with money....?
Yes, sort of. But I dont think that is the full story by a long shot.
Apple basically bet their existance on iPhone and iPad latterly. In order to fund said they have shaved the majority of their other lines into wintel boxes with out the Win part. Should I wish to, and Hell will freeze over first, I can make of a Dell a Mac computer with relatively little a: money and b: time. Certainly cheaper than I can buy the same box from Apple. The only thing thats keeping their full size business afloat is prettiness & litigation & ridiculous prices.
In the tablet and phone arena, they still lag behind in everything bar UX. When the apple bubble bursts (which it will, all bubbles do) where is their differentiation? They arent very secure, the walled garden is Jobs' answer to that. Theyre about as innovative as banana & custard. So thats advantage RIM/Symbian and Nokia & Samsung respectively.
They wont apparently make a QWERTY phone, which shuts them out of that market, in fact it shuts them out of two.. The E71 and BB market and the slide QWERTY market - E7 and others.
There is a limit to what can be achieved when your entire framework is fundamentally and artificially limited as Apples is.
Given that this is the case, and that Apple probably know this already, it is imperative for them to go all out to get everything they can before their products.. iPhone and iPad are yesterdays news, because theyve literally got NOTHING ELSE to work with.
Yes Apple are successful but is it true success or are they doing nothing more than financial trickery? After all, up to 2008 it was possible for a bank, perfectly legally to post their biggest profit the day they went bankrupt. Apple could end up in the position of being the worlds biggest one hit wonder since history began - and the tablet and touchscreen phone industry an evolutionary dead end.
Pedalling overpriced desktops and laptops with no more product differentiation than a different OS just isnt glamorous, or more importantly a high margin business.