I think this points to Apple's fundamental weakness: when they can't control the experience, their efforts are second-rate.
It's a weird binary behavior that's tied to the pre-internet days. You buy into Apple's ecosystem and you do Apple-y things and you'll have a world class experience, a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale.
But as soon as you start interfacing with anything else, especially something messy like the Internet, and hold onto your pants because you have no idea what the experience is going to be like, but you can guarantee it won't be better than a 5 out of 10 at best.
As much as other companies might like to provide an Apple-like walled garden (and I'll completely agree that previous attempts by non-Apples have been 3 out of 10s at best), they fundamentally understand that there is a bigger world out there. It's much harder to interface with the rest of the world, it is messy, but you can bring some kind of sanity to it if you work at it. These companies work really hard to provide a 7 or 8 out of 10 experience while Apple provides a 5. And they're rewarded for it. They hit these perfectly reasonable experience levels in-spite of the underlying mess they have to deal with, and they manage to make viable businesses out of it. What's more remarkable to me is that despite Apple controlling 100% of the experience in the Apple ecosystem, they aren't a perfect 10.
I think this magnifies the flaws even more and makes them more damning and I think a surprising amount of it backfires. Otherwise Apple would absolutely dominate the market, but it doesn't.
Where Apple does talk to the outside world, it's an acknowledgment that it's simply cheaper to deliver content through proprietary end-to-end points over the Internet rather than build the infrastructure themselves. But it's such a begrudging acknowledgment and the result is a collective "meh" out of Apple. "It's not part of us, so why really try?" Make no mistake, if Apple could replace Internet connectivity with a global AppleTalk network to deliver music and videos to you and ensure no unclean non-Apple users weren't dirtying up the bandwidth, they would.
The goal of other companies then is to try to hit the feel of this kind of tight vertical integration that Apple has, but to do it across vendors, networks, software, etc...to do it in a non-integrated way. And you know what? It's not bad. It's not Apple-level, but you have to admit the Internet, the Web, etc. all that is pretty bad ass. These things that we take for granted are the result of a decidedly non-Apple, very open, approach that benefits people far more in the balance.
>Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.
Then again, Samsung and Apple are two of the largest companies in the world. So maybe they're doing something right.