[adorno]

Apple is a software company with a hardware delivery model.

Actually, you have that backwards.

Apple is a hardware company, which has to offer software to support their devices. Providing the OSes and apps/applications and services, is also a way of keeping their customers locked-in to everything Apple.

The software company which also offers hardware, is Microsoft, but Microsoft does not attempt to keep their customers locked-in to MS stuff exclusively.

It's a good thing that Apple supports their phones for a bit longer than most Android phones, but then, for the price of one iPhone, one could pay for an Android phone and 2 years later pay for another Android phone, and still have some cash left over. IOW, I could purchase the latest-and-greatest hardware from the Android ecosystem, a couple of times (or more), and that hardware and software would be more up-to-date than what Apple would be offering.

[MountainWalker]

You need to buy Apple’s hardware to get their software. It’s a software company with a hardware lock, if you will. You can’t get their source code to port it over to your own hardware. The software is the heart of the Apple experience.

Android oem’s don’t have much interest in you after you buy their phones. Android is already developed - they just port it to their model phones and tweak it. Practically all their money comes from the device sale of the hardware. They don’t get a cut of Google Play sales unlike Apple with their app store, and few people are using their own specialty upsale bloatware apps unlike native apps in Apple’s ecosystem.