By being the first to make it useful.
I simply pointed out that smartphones existed at least a decade before the iPhone so saying Apple invented the market is simply, oh lets use your words, deliberately obtuse.
The market for smartphones before the iPhone was limited to a tiny market of geeks, and I say that as someone who owned three Treos. You could say the same thing about digital music players before the iPod and tablets before the iPad.
With the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, before Apple's product came out, nothing on the market looked or worked like it; within a year, every product on the market looked and worked like it (or was trying to). That might not constitute a giant technological leap, but it's certainly creating a market.
Not necessarily. Plenty of times the competition was more useful, but they didn’t have the market penetration. Apple is really good at making sure the faithful know about the new stuff.
The smartphone market is still actually pretty small and still actually dominated by gadget geeks.
No that’s not creating a market, that’s creating a style and having a bunch of competition that’s dumb enough to think that’s why Apple products sell. Notice their most successful competition AVOIDS looking like Apple products, because they’re smart enough to realize that’s a dead end, people that want stuff that looks like Apple want Apple, people who don’t want Apple don’t want Apple knockoffs either, they want something else. Probably, especially in the current market conditions, something that isn’t touchscreen, OK that might just be my bias talking as I absolutely loathe touchscreens. But really a lot of the successful competition in the smartphone market is avoiding the touchscreen, so maybe it isn’t just me.