Apple's market cap is 300 billion. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are both at 180 billion. Pfizer is 160 billion and Pepsi is 110 billion. So why exactly is Apple a silly example?
But for big companies in the food & beverage, homecare sectors etc, they have a lot of sub brands. They want to de-emphasise their company name (because nobody cares about them) and sell the brand.
For example, do you know off the top of your head the brands of P&G?
However, if I told you Old Spice, Gilette, Oral-B, Pantene etc, it starts to make a lot more sense to have .oldspice, .gillette .oralb .pantene and so on.
http://apple/ might make sense.
But what would .pantene do? blonde.prov.pantene? They are not going to subdomain them under .pg.
This is what I'm talking about. Apple doesn't do that sort of thing, making them a silly example for a TLD.