Innovation
"Burgers are burgers, soft drinks are soft drinks, cars are cars. Not much innovation to be had on those anymore."
All the action is behind the scenes.
It's actually the same with computers. The vast bulk of the innovation and important technology is all manufacturing that lets computers become continually smaller.
Design, ideas, concepts? Those are just a long list of features on big, ancient UNIX systems that gradually find their way into cheaper and cheaper systems thanks to the manufacturing mentioned above.
I see Apple finally got a desktop pager. Took 'em long enough.
OS X also has other innovations like:
*A dock
*A command line with a Bourne shell clone
*Simple, intuitive key sequences like Control+Shift+Apple+3+Space+Mouseclick so that three armed men can take screenshots.
*A menubar at the top
*Multiuser, multithreaded, protected memory core based on........UNIX.
*Scrollbars, buttons, windows, tabs, menus, context menus, more key combinations to access the context menu...
*An Intel integrated graphics chip
Oh, and a really pretty case to make people think the parts inside aren't commodity bits.
As for BRANDing, yeah it'd say they did a pretty good job. Somehow they have everyone thinking they spend all their time innovating and crafting brilliant masterpieces with only the highest quality parts.
Is it a bad computer? No. I love this little Mac Mini. But it's nothing special.