Most people try Apple products first, and THEN buy them. They try them out at the store or they play with a friend's. This is the common pattern. Have you ever

Most people try Apple products first, and THEN buy them. They try them out at the store or they play with a friend's. This is the common pattern. Have you ever been to the Apple store? It's one big room full of people playing with iPads and iPhones The user experience is unbeatable and everyone knows it, the non-techies just don't call it "user experience". But they play with the iPad/iPhone/iPod and then they play with a few other competitors and the difference is beyond obvious. And this keeps them sticking with Apple. Especially with phones -- everyone has tried blackberries, androids and iPhones because it's so easy to try out other people's phones. There are a few really nice android phones that are as beautiful as the iPhone but they are rare - it's rare to run into a person with one of them. Most of the non-iPhone phones people own are ugly pieces of crap. This is negative advertising for the Android/Blackberry platform. Blackberries in particular are incredibly unintuitive on the first usage, while typical Android phones (admittedly cheap, but no one talks about the price at a party) suffer from blurry screens and clunky animation.