Its difficult to think different if you're the world's largest company and dominate the phone market. In laptops it looks like they are differentiating themselves very well.
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Debatable. If anything, modern Android designs are cleaner than iPhone looks.
> aesthetics
Again, debatable.
> and, most importantly, profit margin
This is the key factor, and it's tied to something you missed.
Apple products and iPhones are ahead in profit margins because Apple consistently delivers reasonable quality goods, with few disappointments, so that users trust them. They've gained user trust despite obvious "design, aesthetics" mis-steps such as the notch or the touch bar.
The key words are: consistent delivery, reasonable quality and few disappointments. That's how they hook users in. Apple mostly delivers on time something very close to what they promised and that thing doesn't have catastrophic flaws. That's a much taller bar than you'd think, in the tech sector.
Why? The alternatives are a smaller screen or terrible audio when using one’s phone as a phone. It’s different. But it makes perfect sense and made perfect sense the first day.
Otherwise, it's great: the status indicators you want anyway go up in the corners and don't take out a full row of the "actual" screen.