> their servers
As novel as the Xserver might have been, let's not pretend it was anything more than an unimaginably small surface area for a product
Apple makes well-designed products, mostly. But let's pump the brakes on the idea that everything that comes out of Cupertino is flawless, as you seem to imply.
Who else is doing what they're doing? No other consumer hardware company goes top-to-bottom from the software to the chip, and no other company has such a cohesive ecosystem. Google EOLs a product once a week, Microsoft is making some nice stuff these days, but is nowhere near the same experience ("Windows is like a bundle of drivers", as in the article).
There is value to being prescriptive over their platform. It gives them skin in the game to make things good; they are much less willing to just blame a vendor.
The biggest area of improvement in health care is at the cheaper end. Many people die annually from being unable to afford the $2.50 it costs for malaria treatment, or life saving vaccines.
The side dish problem is vaccines are insanely profitable; every dollar spent in the US on vaccines supposedly saves fifteen bucks of health care expense. I've seen numbers as low as $10 and as high as $15000. The problem is some very populous political and economic regimes worldwide are so unstable that even 1500% rate of return investments, which would seem a no brainer to fund in the west, are impossible without massive external western involvement. In a system that dysfunctional, malaria might not be the biggest problem, nor incredibly expensive and short lived apple iHealth devices. We've tried allowing infinite immigration from failed states into western states; that didn't help either. Just brain drain's the failed states while exploding welfare expenses in the western states.
Moreover, if the existing medical industry is evidence of anything, prices are jacked up in developed countries to foot the bill of R&D, and the same medications are sold elsewhere for next to nothing.
Apple giving away health technology to disadvantaged communities seems like a good next step. Perhaps existing medical companies aren’t as incentivized to do that because they don’t have the shiny brand to advertise.