>You say that as if that's some easy, cheap thing to achieve.

No, I don't. I say it as if there are more important things to consider in the products you buy.

Maybe for YOU, but considering Apple just posted their most revenue ever last quarter, there are billions of reasons to disagree.

(Their products are also not _just_ sexy/trendy, clearly. They basically invented this entire category of modern smartphone despite many previous attempts by others.)

Logical fallacy. Just because a product is successful doesn't make it the best product - in fact I'd wager that it isn't more often than not.

The question wasn't "what's the best product," it was "Why do so many prefer the walled garden?"

Because to the average, non-technically minded user, they bought the phone for the logo on the back.

Sadly, average, non-technically minded users make up a large proportion of the global populace.

Like Beats headphones?

I've met many musicians who actually prefer Beats in the studio for recording. They argue that they don't care for sound quality that much, but they're much more comfortable on their head than any conventional studio monitots. Personally, I found that for DJing, I don't care about sound quality either - it's much more important to be able to quickly move headphones on and off and how comfortable are they on one ear.

Sound quality is not the only important quality headphones can have. Could the same be true for phones as well?