&gt;Good brands have been able to scale historically. GE has countless appliances designed with quality and care.<p>I might be able to concede GE; I don&#x27;t know enough about GE to make an informed opinion.<p>&gt;HP in its heyday had 100s of products known for its innovation and quality.<p>Right. In their heyday. Then what happened? They tried to do so much that each product became shitty. So shitty that they ended up having to rethink their business and split. And then continued to do poorly. HP is like the poster child of doing so much that they ended up fucking themselves over. They even bought webOS at one point (did nothing substantial with it and sold it for a big loss years later).<p>&gt;Microsoft in its heyday had dozens of products that were either in top or close second in their category.<p>Again, in their heyday they had a lot of stuff.. then promptly lost their darling factor. Now that they&#x27;ve shed a lot of the dead weight and are focused on more of a singular experience, they have been receiving more critical acclaim than at any other time in the past decade. It&#x27;s actually that reason that most of my tech stocks are in MSFT these days.<p>&gt;Pepsi Co produces 100s of products under different brand names, many of them huge market leaders.<p>Sure, but they sell essentially the same type of drink but in different flavors. The jump from one drink to another is different from a Mac to a microwave.<p>&gt;Google has dozens of products (Email, maps, news, book search, scholar, docs etc etc) - all of which are pretty high quality and either in top or close.<p>Google has a terrible reputation for reliability in most of their products. They have search, email, maps, and docs. That&#x27;s about it. The others are either limping along (Google+) or not widely used (Scholar). They have a notorious reputation for shuttering projects. I will not pick Google Compute over AWS or Azure.<p>&gt;The rules of economics detects that fat margins are not protectable over long run.<p>All companies die in the long run too, if you wait long enough. For a reasonable span of time, I&#x27;m not too worried about Apple. They have the best mobile SoCs. Qualcomm even shit their pants for an entire year (look at the 810 and 615) just trying to catch up.<p>Samsung just had miserable results and dropped 40%. They won&#x27;t even release units sold for the S6 line; that&#x27;s how bad it was. Considering that Qualcomm also dropped 19%, and market news in general the past two months, I think we need to expect most companies to report a negative change compared to the previous year. Currency headwinds are certainly not helping. The fact that Apple even grew shipments on an S year when every other company is contracting is pretty good.<p>&gt;iPad sales are already 25% down. Tablet market is actually booming but people are just buying cheaper ones<p>I agree that the iPad needs to be rethought. At the moment, they just aren&#x27;t useful enough to justify upgrading so often. I haven&#x27;t seen any numbers that point to the tablet market booming (source please. This is interesting), but Apple don&#x27;t give a shit about market share. It&#x27;s about the profits. I don&#x27;t care about market share either.