Comment Re:"Not intentional". Right. (Score 2) 370
The fact is that in general, people want to own their stuff, not have their stuff own them. Apple taught manufacturers a very poor lesson; namely, the way to make huge profits is to create and cultivate a walled garden that the manufacturer controls and collects the tolls. But Apple wasn't successful because it has a walled garden, it is successful because plenty of people with lots of disposable income like the Apple user experience. You can argue that the walled garden is a necessary condition to the iPhone user experience, and at the very least it makes it easier to define the user experience when you control everything, however necessary != sufficient.
Good UI takes lots of hard work from talented developers, designers, and artists. Apple may not always succeed at this (e.g. maps) but it seems that no other big manufacturer is willing to put in the hard work to make a product that people actually like. So instead of making money by "locking" people into a system that they choose of their own free will, they try to make money by 1) making crap software to save money on costs, and 2) monetizing everything the possibly can, from DRM on a coffee pod to putting commercials into locally stored video.