> but the choice was selling $200 iPods or $500 iPhones I don't think we are in disagreement. But the fact is very few companies do this regardless. When it co

> but the choice was selling $200 iPods or $500 iPhones I don't think we are in disagreement. But the fact is very few companies do this regardless. When it comes to the product that's their bread and butter they tend to put it on a pedestal never to be touched until it falls into irrelevance. Apple didn't launch an improved iPod and retire the old. They didn't try to sell a phone and a music player by artificially differentiating them, or by sabotaging one of them. They didn't try to make $250 off the iPod and another $250 from a phone that "shouldn't compete too well". They launched 2 product lines made by different parts of the company, knowing that the iPhone may undermine the iPod userbase and then still fail, possibly souring those customers. They wouldn't necessarily do this today. iDevices now are clearly (and artificially) differentiated from the Macs: different OS, no options to use them in a way they truly compete despite having such similar hardware theoretical capabilities. Again to give the Google example, when they tried to have competing lines (Google/Nest) they managed to fail at both and lose the customers completely.