Since BlackBerry gave up on making smartphones, there is no other phone manufacturer trying for the same market. Sure you can buy an Android with cutting-edge tech specs, but you don't get the Apple customer experience and the brand recognition.
Also, high-end phones aren't really like luxury goods. I think the margins on a manufactured phone are only ~50%. That may sound like a lot but is pretty close to manufacturing of most not-dead-simple stuff.
This was ten fricking years ago, and I never really looked close to know what it really was, but it was enough to put me off the brand forever.
Until recently, of course: I thought about getting a TV from them. But I ended up with an "OK" brand dumb TV instead of a Samsung because the Samsung TV on the shop also had an AD in it.
Samsung can become another Apple, but it's gonna take some effort.
For sure, and I hope they will, further competition is always good. I dont know numbers but I guess the ad revenue must be significant since the "generational leaps" and innovations on the mobile department arent there.
On Android phones, the margins for OEMs are a few % at most, sometimes even in the negative.
If Microsoft only allowed installs from their App Store people would switch to Apple en mass.
Oh, sure. Heck, I can do that for you. I'll just need a few billion dollars to pay for the design, hardware and software engineering, manufacturing and QA, and to pay for the massive amount of marketing required to establish a new luxury brand.
Then, in order to beat the network effects of the App Store, I'll need another billion dollars or two in order to bribe the most popular apps to make ports for our new platform, and hire more software engineers to make an API emulation layer... and hire lawyers to defend against Apple claiming the emulation layer violates their IP rights.
(There's no guarantee you'll see a return on those billions, btw.)
Nope, not hard to replicate at all.