Do you work for Apple, or are you an iOS only developer, or something? Throughout this thread, your gushing praise of everything Apple and disparaging remarks about literally everything every other company does is so over the top, even by HN standards, its hard to figure out where you are coming from.
By "Apple's competition", I assume he is referring to Android. Considering that Android has 80+% of the market, and Samsung is the worlds largest seller of smart phones, its difficult to justify saying that they have "squandered their potential".
He has been spouting rubbish like this all over the thread.
If he was just saying that Apple make great hardware, I dont think anyone would be disagreeing with him.