While that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.

They do great at consumer services as well. Worth noting that no other company in the world has more credit cards on file than Apple.

"Monopoly abuse"? Apple Pay was a huge leap forward in preventing credit card info theft, to the point that I only buy gas at stations that use Apple Pay to avoid having my bank account emptied by someone running a pump skimmer.

Uhh, do you mean contactless payments? That wasn't Apple. Apple wasn't even the first to offer it on phones. Android beat them by 3 years.

...Apple didn't invent the credit card proxy. Their biggest "innovation" was locking it into their walled garden.

It's worth mentioning that those personal computing devices have enabled them to make bank on cloud services.

Yeah and part of that specifically came by sacrificing a personal computing endpoint product they used to sell, networked storage, at the sacrificial alter.

The funny thing is that Time Machine still works, and works better than any local backup solution for Windows that I'm aware of (let alone what comes with Windows itself).

Not to mention, they are generous enough to allow it to work with a non-apple NAS setup. I feel like that would be a different story if they were still in the NAS business.