What Apple consistently does is produce a better next-gen than others do (or care to do, or are able to do), so little nuisances like a different power cord isn't of any concern. As a poor guy, those practices always put me off, but no company (with the possible exception of Ford and big food companies) ever got rich selling to poor guys.
Each time Apple has moved into a different product area they've gone their own way; the iPod wasn't the first portable digital music player (the Mac guys I know in real life all were using the SanDisk player before that time), but it is the best there is, and that product line has a spectrum of different models. The success of the iPod led to massive market penetration and awareness among people who'd never considered an Apple product.
Now there's a continuum from the iPods, through the iPhone (again, not the first smart phone, just the most successful), into iPads, into Mac notebook computers, into desktop CPUs. The iTunes platform exists across the lines, and is also present in AppleTV, which is often predicted to be the next big thing for Apple. The Apple Watch is a high-markup solution in search of a problem IMHO, but its eventual stagnation (or outright failure) isn't going to do anything bad to the company. If an Apple car actually emerges, I'll be surprised. Building a successful passenger vehicle is no joke, and trying to do it more often than not leads to a realization that one hadn't known what an ass-kicking really is.