"Really the issue is that hardware is hard to get right and requires a lot of resources, resources that Apple has and many other companies do not."
More than just that, Apple also has the considerable advantage of owning almost all of their stack. They make their own chips to power their hardware which runs their OS which uses their applications and their infrastructure. Apple has aggressively taken control of the entire top to bottom stack (eg App Store reviews, acquiring PA Semi) like nobody else has been willing and/or able to.
They don't own their whole stack, but they do control it - especially the critical stuff - to a larger extent than other verndors. They've done this by making large bets on component manufacturers: first on flash memory, now on displays or touchscreens (or both).
"The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4 is thought to use performance enhancements developed by chip designer Intrinsity (which was subsequently acquired by Apple)[10] in collaboration with Samsung.[11] The resulting core, dubbed "Hummingbird".. is also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC."
The Samsung Galaxy S has the S5PC110 processor. This processor combines a 45 nm 1 GHz ARM Cortex A8 based CPU core with a PowerVR SGX 540 GPU made by Imagination Technologies which supports OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0[21] and is capable of up to 20 million triangles per second.[3] The CPU core, code-named "Hummingbird", was co-developed by Samsung and Intrinsity.[22]
Sure, but basically every mobile processor "is just a customized version" of some ARM design. My point is that Apple goes out of their way to control the design/performance instead of taking an off the shelf TI/Qualcomm/NVIDIA etc chip
But the context of this discussion is that getting to market with hardware is hard. "[C]ontrol[ing] the design/performance" is only going to make that more difficult, not easier, than going off-the-self.
More than just that, Apple also has the considerable advantage of owning almost all of their stack. They make their own chips to power their hardware which runs their OS which uses their applications and their infrastructure. Apple has aggressively taken control of the entire top to bottom stack (eg App Store reviews, acquiring PA Semi) like nobody else has been willing and/or able to.