Since then, competitors caught up, and Apple's quality of both software and hardware has started a steady decline.
There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds.
I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives.
In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue.
Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!
And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software?
The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software.
The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...
It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0...
And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.
When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made."
That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...
I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.
I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.
Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?
The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing.
They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC.
On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one?
The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.
Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.
(Follow the Principle of Charity, please.)
Things were much harder to disrupt then, too. It was much tougher for someone to get access to short-run PCB design and assembly services and you couldn't get SOC do-everything modules for random tasks nearly as easily back then. You really needed to be an established manufacturer who could order a big run of products and/or custom chips. The smaller you were, the smaller the production run, the more your products would cost.
Personal electronic Kickstarters are still some of the most likely to fail. There's lots of reasons for that. It's hard to execute well, and consider how easily HTC loop-the-looped Oculus' design and out-ramped their production. And that's in 2016, using a new design for a sophisticated product. China will have knockoffs of most products on Alibaba literally before your product is in stores.
There were some good competitors but it's a really, really hard market to break into, even if you've got a great product. Apple is the HTC of this scenario, they were a big company that saw a great idea they could do better and executed well, jumping ahead of the original creators.
I don't hold any particular grudge against Apple. I resent the scroll wheel being patented, but that's because I am generally opposed to design/UI elements being patentable. You shouldn't get a 30-year monopoly on something like that.
Well, that's not strictly true, is it? You have to make something which actually feels good. And iPods definitely ended up doing that.
I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman.
For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.