I’m not an Apple fanboy (or fanboi) but when a company produces a string of successes as Apple has consumers start to see their next purchase as an investment in future technologies. Have you noticed the number of non-Apple devices that now sport an iPod compatible docking station? Clock radios to full stereo systems that would you would normally associate with their own proprietary interface (Bose, Sony, Philips) support the iPod interface as if it were an Ethernet connection or a phone jack.

It’s going to be a long time before Nokia, Motorola, or makers of the Gphone have the same ubiquity. The first two at least have only themselves to blame, with such leads, and resources to produce something uniquely new, they continued to produce generation after generation of phones that differed in only incremental ways. Now they are copycats, and will have to scale back their expectations of profit to coincide with that aproach.