Bit harsh, but I sympathise with your frustration. The "only marketing" trope is so shallow that it is annoying how it survives.
Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT industry with many rising competitors. That is it.
That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.
Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.
They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing everyone on the way down.
My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products and ripped off other people's work persistently.
The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.
I'm fed up with reading all the tripe about him.
The hype and popularity exists because Apple has produced very compelling products. The iPod and the iPhone were both leaps and bounds ahead of the competition at their launch. It's also clear that Jobs was the driving force behind their vision.
You say that "even [you]" waited on Apple announcements because "they usually stepped up the game" which translates into the fact that Apple made better/interesting/more innovative products. Note you didn't say "even I waited on Apple news announcements because their marketing was so amazing."
You say that Lumias are treading on their "innovation" territory. Not their marketing territory, their innovation territory.
If it was all marketing, they would still be winning by your argument. Has their marketing dramatically changed in the past few years?
The only rational way to reconcile this is by you saying "oh, by marketing, I mean the whole product package, user interface, software, and hardware design". In which case, you just are simply defining marketing wrong.
The differentiator was the marketing hype.
They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on them. That is still marketing.
Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.
Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.
Marketing here is purely spin.
What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer.
On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.
The iPhone was way ahead of Nokia Symbian phones in power of its web browser, display, touch sensitivity etc.
Sure, Apple's marketing is better than that of their competitors. But good marketing and good products aren't mutually exclusive.
That said, since the original iPhone, the updates have gotten increasingly incremental, and the competitors have closed the gap.
The problem here is that you appear to have no idea what the word "better" means to a consumer, as opposed to a hacker.
And that's why you can't understand Apple's success and write it off to "marketing".
Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser (with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch browser, you'd know there is no comparison.
I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor (unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.
Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But, in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia phones, and apparently, so did the market.
The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera. None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in 2002).
Apple however made it successful through marketing.
And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)
If they "stepped up the game" then surely there is (or was) something more happening than simply "hype"?
Who knows what will happen next - maybe others have or soon will catch up and Apple will crash and burn. We'll see. Still, to dismiss a pretty remarkable run over the last decade as "just marketing" is really to miss a lot, not to mention implicitly reducing everyone else in the industry to idiots who for some bizarre reason couldn't hire a good ad agency.
Unfortunately they have nothing to throw out now - it's all minor improvements on something they've already sold.
None of their most "innovative products" are remarkable - it's all hype.
In the end, I want what's best for us all. Healthy competition.
Apple's legal team haven't ever been nice guys, since way before the iPhone (maybe even before Jobs' return, I don't know).
This is a false dichotomy, Apple is not suddenly forcing its engineers to study law.
For example, with the iPhone 5, they doubled CPU performance in a year - better than Moore's Law. It's not a new vision, but it is an engineering accomplishment.
Yes, marketing is their greatest strength, but "marketing" includes more than advertising, more than design, it's also knowing what will be wanted, and making it happen. Jobs actually cited Sony as a great inspiration - and perhaps we forget now, but they did create the first commercially successful transistor radio and the walkman (also Trinitron TV and the first playstation, and a bunch of other stuff in their heyday). I would say these are close parallels to Sony with the iPod, and arguably the iPhone and iPad.
My point is that Apple doesn't do invention of new technology, but commercialization of technology. A great example is the mouse: PARC invented it, Apple commercialized it. I think it's a cool and impressive thing to commercialize technology, but it's no more than that (unless Apples starts doing fundamental research like PARC, Bell Labs and IBM used to do).
Yes, they built a mouse and shipped it as part of an integrated product, but it had been invented by others more than a decade earlier. It had even shipped in a product well before they did it. PARC is actually in pretty much the same position there that you're putting Apple - they took an existing idea and made it a bit more commercial than it had been. Englebart's mouse was unreliable and uncommerical; PARC's mouse was more practical to make, more reliable, but way too expensive; Apple's mouse was finally reliable and cheap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_%28computing%29#Early_mic...
Interesting that Engelbart patented the mouse. http://www.google.com/patents/US3541541?printsec=abstract#v=...