I would say this might be true when it comes to creating the initial version of their products. I feel that the way you make an iPhone is not by saying "let's

I would say this might be true when it comes to creating the initial version of their products. I feel that the way you make an iPhone is not by saying "let's see what our competitors are doing and do the opposite of what they're doing bad". If you do that you ground yourself to at the time what was pretty terrible HCI. By separating the design of the iPhone from what your conventional competitors are doing and re-imagining things they were able to create something that was very usable. I felt that they did this again with the MacBook Air. Like others have pointed out I feel that Apple definitely cares about it's competition. That's why you're seeing aggressive lawsuits against it's competitors, swapping out Google Maps, and restrictive App Store policies.