> "Integrating with other devices" is not their goal. Selling desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, tablets, watches, keyboards, mice, trackpads, ear buds, and to a lesser extent subscription accounts, that's their goal.
Obviously, but offering better integration (even if only with their own ecosystem) is how they are trying to sell more right now.
> There's plenty of useful innovations they could still make that doesn't require them to focus on up-selling me new hardware
I didn't say there weren't, just that it's not likely to advance beyond a certain level in a certain time period. This is about feedback and learning what ideas survive in the market. To their credit, Apple is fairly good at coming up with radical leaps (or, at least implementing those leaps on a mass scale)[1], but they are fairly bad IMO at listening to whether they are working out well in practice (Google has the opposite problem, they so aggressively remove failed ideas that the few people that liked them feel betrayed, and express it loudly). Throwing a few hundred million dollars right now at word processing, or the browser, or any particular thing and then ignoring it is probably not as efficient as a few tens of millions spread out over years, just because there's only so much you can do to advance a field in a short period.
> I guess the one upside you could say is that they're probably not selling your data and/or profile to advertisers. So at least they have that going for them.
Apple ran (runs?) their own advertising service for mobile apps, iAd. I'm not sure the status currently.
That said, Google isn't selling your profile or data to advertisers. That makes zero sense for them to do, and they probably have quite a lot of safeguards to make sure absolutely the bare minimum of information about an individual an ad is served to makes it back to the advertiser (preferably nothing). This isn't because they are stalwart defenders of privacy, but because it's in their best interest to not give away the data that they make their money from. I trust them to act in their self interest.