I'm curious what your defense is to their success with the non-Apple faithful, though. That always seems to be left unsaid. The good ol' common "marketing" play from the Android diehards may have accounted for some of its success, but I think it's immensely dense to attribute a large proportion of Apple's current (and recent past) success to it (you might get to fortune 500 with that, but getting to #1 wealthiest company in the world solely on marketing is a bit of a stretch, at a certain crossover point you'll need actual good product). In fact, I would call that the counter-distortion field among the "Android faithful." Somehow, as people love to point out, on paper, Apple devices are underspec compared to the competition. But they do well anyway. "MARKETING! The zombie sheeple faithful!" Of course, I'm not saying you believe it's purely marketing, but I raise that just to give example of the other distortion field.

As you have pointed out, the iPod succeeded because of synergy with iTunes (though many of the replies to your comment raise excellent counterpoints, and I think it's revisionism to call what Apple had back then as an empire - like many others back then, we were 90% dismissively sure Apple was going to file for bankruptcy soon). I partly agree with you, but I disagree it was due to iTunes as software, because, quite frankly, iTunes has and still sucks. The iPod succeeded because Apple made sure to have business deals in place with the big dogs of music and to offer individual tracks for (at the time) very cheap prices. You may recall, but CDs were kind of a rip off at that point, and the music industry wanted to charge quite a bit more per track.

The iPhone itself succeeded because Apple coordinated with carrier(s) while requiring certain conditions - no pre-installed apps, and design autonomy. Recently, it's been trying to coordinate with the cable networks to get Apple TV some traction (though I believe they failed). With Apple Pay, it coordinated with all the major credit card carriers. To me, it is that kind of planning that shows Apple's commitment to polish. I could be wrong, but Google seems to be more on the "here's our plan, we'll open it up, and hopefully people (and other corporations) flock to it. But if not...well, we have our bread-and-butter search to subsist on." It's worked with some things, and it hasn't for others. Google Wallet and Google NFC payments may have come out first, but they seem to be dead in the water. But hey, my swiss army knife has more attachments than yours, right?

> but you have to understand that a lot of people are derisive because we've been hearing the Apple faithful railing about these same attributes of competitor devices for months.

My experience is pretty different. I don't really hear the "Apple faithful" very often, short of online journalists. In terms of actual end-users, the Android house seems way more vocal, and usually in two buckets: "we had it way before!" or some kind of flock of sheep comment. Take a visit to r/technology on reddit, and do a search on Apple, then do a search on Android. The negativity is no where near 1:1.

For all that noise, I must cite my favorite tech blog: http://anandtech.com/show/8414/a-month-with-the-iphone-5s/. I believe this is far fairer than most of the vitriol you'll find out there.

As for the watch? I think it looks bulky, just like all the other smartwatches. I'm skeptical about its battery life, which they seemed to have not mentioned. But I gotta admit, the feature set looks pretty polished to me.