Apple was one of the most disruptive companies in technological history, their gui is so much more innovative then windows that you see Microsoft trying to catch up as quickly as possible (IE the quick release of Windows 7 and then Windows 8 Beta, along with them considering scrapping the "Windows" os for something universal across all their devices such as ios from apple) The iPod was one of the biggest hits with the general population when it comes to technology, it made the Zune look so bad that Microsoft had to scrap Zune as well lol. They do make mistakes by being so proprietary, but at the same time it forces the rest of the industry to innovate as well, such as their decision to to add
Thunderbolt ports to their computers, if the rest of the industry wants to keep up with the speed of the connections on Apple computers they will now have to add Thunderbolt ports to their different devices. For a retard company they made a lot of money in a short amount of times with a mountable list of successive devices they released, even with iOS not being as supported as Windows OS has.