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I'm sure this will be downvoted into oblivion but I have Karma to burn preaching some truth. Between big phones (even the small iphone 6 is bigger!), the watch and NFC, Apple is clearly repositioning themselves as fast followers and letting Samsung et. al. foot the bill on R&D and market building.First, there's not much (if anything) they have gotten off of Samsung about these devices, except maybe how not to do some things.
First, if you have seen the prototype iPads and iPhones tested, they've actually built all kinds of prototypes in different sizes half a decade or more ago. And obviously the same thing holds for the Watch and the bigger iPhone: they were in development for at least a couple of years, iterating and refining them.
Unlike the iPad, which at least also had a redesigned GUI library (and thought behind it) to take advantage of the larger screen, a slightly larger iPhone is not something not obvious. Apple could have made the iPhone 5 a 6" model if they liked to rush things, it's not that they missed some key insight. What they actually did was wait for several things to fall into place, like baterry capacity, CPU/GPU power to provide a smooth experience with the bigger screen, etc.
If Samsung provided anything is just some early "market research" in the feasibility of selling a large phone. There's nothing technical or UI-wise here that was copied, or needed to be copied, from a Samsung phone.
Second, Samsung only started on their watches when rumours of an iWatch pending had already surfaced (and it shows, since theirs was mostly a hack job of mashing existing stuff and rushed decisions). Apple was building the thing for a long time, and I'd say has put far more thought and polish on the whole thing that anything we've previously seen from competitors (including Peeble).
>I'm also reminded that the "c" model has been dropped. Sales figures didn't seem to be very high and I think the experiment has been deemed a failure.
Actually, it sold very well. "From the constant harping about the supposed "failure" of Apple's iPhone 5c, you'd think the phone is selling poorly. The reality is that middle tier model, while dramatically less popular than Apple's top of the line iPhone 5s, still managed to outsell every Blackberry, every Windows Phone and every Android flagship in the winter quarter, including Samsung's Galaxy S4.". http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/03/22/apples-iphone-5c-f...
In general it was constantly in the top-3 to 5 best selling phones for all US carriers. Most phone companies (including Samsung) would kill for a "flop" like this.
Second, it wasn't dropped. It's still available, and just rolled on the $0 with contract tier.