You've been listening to that troll extraordinaire, John Dvorak, who predicted a few years ago that Apple would drop the Mac OS and start making Windows machines.
Apple is not a hardware company, a software company, or a content distribution company. It is a user experience company, and its control over the whole widget, as Steve likes to say, is what allows it to maintain that user experience -- and along with it, its cachet and its profits. There is no upside for Apple in tearing that down and getting into the undifferentiated commodity hardware business.
Lol, I haven’t listened to that troll Dworak in years, I came up with the same silly idea on my own ;-) I agree that there’s no upside or even a sideways-side for Apple to stop making hardware, only that they probably *could*, provided they kept the business model intact otherwise.
You said it better than I did with my reference to “use case”. They create a user experience that their customers prefer and are willing to pay for, above all other alternatives. That is, as they say, “the secret sauce”. Thanks.