If you follow the money, you can see it flowing in to Apple's bank account from consumers.
At this rate, if you show someone a laptop that's genuinely better than a Macbook they'll complain that it's missing a notch. Setting a nebulous standard of "equivalent hardware" is a lazy goalpost intended to waste the time of good-faith commentators. It's an ivory throne in the swamp, if it suits you.
Okay, let’s test that: try being the first one in the thread to do so and see what responses you get.
But I don't think every other OEM would have the same success even if it ended up being higher quality.
I mean, are we pretending that Microsoft also isn't a trillion dollar company? They are the only one with an incentive to do that strategy, but they probably got a good share of money from licensing their platform to other OEMs.
The next closest thing to "full OS vertical integration" are game consoles. Specialized devices focused on entertainment instead of general purpose ones.
