"Apple could have put a strap on a wooden block with a shiny Apple logo on the back and easily shifted a couple of million units."
Please explain to me how that would work. Seriously. What you claim is idiotic, you know it, and everyone else know it. The purpose of saying what you said is denigrating the real product, by claiming that for some unfathomable reason any Apple sales are not due to creating a good product, but are due to some weird attraction of the Apple logo. Do you think they hypnotise people? Hold a gun to their head to sell things? Or what?