I'm not sure how you can simultaneously say: "I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game" and also "They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had".

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.