The TV market is an excellent example of the sort of market you think smartphones are in. Everything you said makes perfect sense and would find consensus here

The TV market is an excellent example of the sort of market you think smartphones are in. Everything you said makes perfect sense and would find consensus here if the context was TV sets. They are not marketed for their design aesthetic, because the audience doesn't care. They look at headline dimensions (screen size, bezel size, thickness), bullet-point features[1], image quality and price. This is not remotely similar to the way the iPhone was marketed. At the time it looked utterly distinctive to all its competitors so Apple used that as the key differentiating feature in its marketing. Samsung released a product that was so aesthetically close it wouldn't pass the masking tape test, certainly not with the iPhone's target audience. It's important to remember that nearly everyone being marketed at had never bought any modern smartphone before, ever, from any brand. [1] This is why Samsung aren't making sets that mimic LG's OLED industrial design—they're making old-school backlit LCDs with the marketing label "QLED".