After 25+ years of living in the Apple ecosystem, I definitely understand that; I was making that case in the 90s when Classic was a buggy, crashing, horrendously baroque outdated pile of crap and the ONLY argument was for the combined product.
That being said, fifteen years down the road from my first posts in comp.os.mac.advocacy, I'm a little bit more tempered...circumstances at the time kept me from iOS, and now that I'm invested into the other one, the additional fit and finish of iOS, while quite lovely and something that would make the decision easy if I were entering the market, isn't compelling enough anymore to make me switch. I'm also more of a gearhead/techie than Apple's target market; I almost always have a shell open on my MBP, I know what plists are and how to use them - I've broken a few iPhones and rooted a ton of Androids and I actually prefer the rawer design of the latter. Especially AOSP, the reference basic implementation built directly on the source code from Google...if you want any bells and whistles you have to specifically install apps for that, but man, it FLIES.
You're dead-on with Apple being in the content/consumer electronics business, but I can see that being their Achilles' heel as well as their strength. The Economist (IIRC) a few years ago had an article detailing how Apple would need to survive after Jobs; the crux of their argument was that Apple needed to look at themselves as a design house/fashion label as opposed to a tech company, and manage themselves accordingly. Think Chanel, post-Coco. It makes perfect sense, but the problem I'm already starting to see is that Steve and only Steve had that ephemeral ability to take academic-intellectual innovation and transform it into the most beautifully revolutionary usable products on the market; Tim Cook just ain't got the chops.
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