Don't forget marketing. I don't think anyone plays the marketing game better than Apple. They are essentially marketing themselves as different and the fact that it works is nothing short of miraculous in the face of actuality!
Marketing, at best, gets customers in the door. It doesn't generate brand loyalty or repeat customers, and marketing alone certainly doesn't sustain a company or product line for years (or decades!) on end. The "Apple is all marketing" trope is usually invoked in discussions that are more about tribalism than analysis, by otherwise-rational people making a conscious decision to not accept the fact that there are other rational people in the world who see value in things that they don't.
I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will read this and immediately have a knee-jerk reaction along the lines of, "yeah, OK, maybe Apple spends way less on marketing than those other companies, but that just proves that they have magically effective marketing, because there's no other possible explanation for their success!" If there is a litmus test for rationality, they just failed it. A more plausible explanation is that success in business is a combination of a lot of different things- every company/tech/device/platform has a unique fingerprint of pros and cons that help it or hurt it in different market segments, and there is no perfect combination of any of those things. It's the ability to say, "I don't see value in this, but I can see how other people who care about different things might like it". This is an incredibly valuable ability to have, and people should be actively cultivating it if they want to make a positive difference in the industry.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732409640... [2] https://twitter.com/asymco/status/396253597551570944
Samsung is estimated to have spent, in total, $364 million in 2013 in the US. Apple is estimated to have spent $350 million. Is that really "significantly more", especially given that Samsung's total mobile device market is wider than Apple's (e.g. feature phones and so on).
Indeed, thinking in terms of purely smartphones -- I see at least four Apple ads for every one Samsung ad I see. Maybe it's just my market (Toronto area), but there is absolutely no question that Apple's conventional ad spend, and their partnerships with carriers (that pollutes the numbers a bit), absolutely dwarfs Samsung's.
But of course Apple succeeds because they achieve excellence in all areas. As I mentioned elsewhere, they sure as hell are trying to compete, and anyone that argues that they live on some other plane, free of competition, is deluded.
The "bonuses to retail staff" thing, as an aside, seems to be some invention that appeared to justify Android sales, which clearly had to be caused by nefarious interference than consumer choice.
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/02/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...
