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.
More useful, like the Archos Jukebox? The Treo? The endless Windows tablets that amounted to laptops with the keyboard hacked off?
The smartphone market is still actually pretty small and still actually dominated by gadget geeks.
Half a billion smartphones shipped in 2011 alone. There aren't that many gadget geeks.
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.
Capacitive multi-touch screen covering nearly all of the face, no hardware keyboard. That describes no smartphone before the iPhone, and the vast majority of smartphones now. That describes no tablet computers sold before the iPhone, and every one trying to compete with it now. If they're trying to avoid looking like Apple products, they're doing a piss-poor job.