Chris, if anyone has only just recently realized that Apple isn’t a technology company, they haven’t been paying attention!

Apple is now, and has been for decades, a technology MARKETING company. Take the iPod: the concept wasn’t new, and the implementation was only incrementally better than their competition. Ditto the iPhone… (I mean I saw the iPhone launch using a Nokia that could do pretty much everything Jobs was touting as “revolutionary”, although the Apple styling and UI was prettier) but even going back to the Mac (and the Apple II) the deal wasn’t that the technology was new or innovative, but the packaging and promotion certainly was.

None of the above conflicts with most of what you’re saying, but what you might be glossing over is another inevitable consequence of the fact that Apple is a marketing company, not a technology one: Apple buries its mistakes. If the Air Buds work out, they’ll claim credit for “inventing” them… and if they don’t (and there are many reasons why they *might* not), Apple will quietly kill them off (as they killed off FireWire, as they killed off the Power Macs, as they hid the failures like the first Apple TV).

And that’s the key: as a marketing company, Apple manages perception. So people think what Apple wants them to think. So I’d hesitate before dismissing the idea that Silicon Valley may be doing precisely what Apple wants them to do, for reasons that are unrelated to the quality or otherwise of the product… such as perhaps they want to polish their (possibly undeserved) reputation as technical innovators!