Agreed, but not before they went through very painful times in the 90s and came close to getting shutdown. OEMs fell into a rut so Apple had a chance to ramp up

Agreed, but not before they went through very painful times in the 90s and came close to getting shutdown. OEMs fell into a rut so Apple had a chance to ramp up the design, and OS X was amazingly better compared to OS 9, not to mention that Vista was terrible as Microsoft tried to remedy some of the issues with XP like everyone running as admin. Probably companies go into a pattern alternating cycles of leapfrogging innovations and then to milking cash cows and then back again to innovation as the cash cows go dry. But it does feel like Apple is transitioning into milking cash cows w.r.t. to the iPhone (while perhaps concentrating on things like iTV).