"Those companies were rendered irrelevant by radically new products they couldn't compete with." True for Nokia, but not RIM. There was nothing "radically new"

"Those companies were rendered irrelevant by radically new products they couldn't compete with." True for Nokia, but not RIM. There was nothing "radically new" about the original iPhone compared to the Blackberry devices that existed at the time. The iPhone is better designed and more attractive, but RIM had good hardware with a rudimentary app store and integrated services (messaging) long before Apple. Blackberry was the default choice for business, then for a while became the fashionable choice (the "crackberry" period). Then their non-business customers moved on to the next new thing. And the reasons for this have everything to do with fashion and popular culture, and nothing to do with quality or features (even though the iPhone is better in those respects). I suspect that Nokia and RIM will hang on with a miserable future as "another device manufacturer", albeit owned by Microsoft or Facebook or $ChineseCorp. In that respect I think your worst case for Apple and my prediction about it amount to the same thing.