They certainly chose their strategy consciously -- it was just a bad strategy, relative to the counterfactual. Apple was wise to launch on just AT&T, you're ri

They certainly chose their strategy consciously -- it was just a bad strategy, relative to the counterfactual. Apple was wise to launch on just AT&T, you're right that it did in fact let them create the (clearly very popular) experience that it did. But once the iPhone was a mega-hit, they went 4 years before getting Verizon in on the game. That was a huge mistake, and Apple clearly had the power to negotiate a pure iPhone experience with Verizon and get out of its exclusivity contract with AT&T far before 2011. Certainly getting onto LTE early and increasing screen size earlier than they did would have provoked little missed steps in their UI and general experience -- and once Android was an entrenched competitor, perhaps that was exactly the right decision, since purity of user experience is a core part of the iOS versus Android value prop. But back when the Android user experience was just purely awful, it's pretty hard to argue that the iPhone would have been materially hurt by a few little grinding points. The Motorola DROID wasn't released until Nov 2009, and I had one of those -- it was clearly far, far behind the iPhone of the time in terms of UI. If Apple had followed the path I described, the iPhone might well be materially worse now than it actually is -- but it would also have 80%+ market share with no serious competitor, rather than 21% market share.