Re: Design goals 101...
Hold on a moment, are you seriously comparing Apple stuff - which if you search for any objective survey of brand reliability consistently rate highly - to 1970s British vehicles? Okay...
Hell, that was the time motorcycle dealers would place a drip tray under British bikes with leaky sumps and quickly whip them under a Japanese bike when a customer approached. Britain once exported left hand drive car with only one door lock- on the right hand door!
You say that Rolls Royce concentrated on the engineering, yet they trained the chauffeur mechanics to never say 'broken down' but rather 'failed to proceed'. What's that if not brand management? Yes, they were beautifully engineered (my mechanic, out of curiosity, tested how long a RR cylinder would keep its compression... absolutely bloody ages*), but that sort of over-engineering is possible if you're charging 400% more than a mass market model, instead of say 20%**. RR have survived not because they were competitive, but because there will always be an ultra rich elite who don't know the meaning of the phrase 'diminishing returns'. Witness the failure of Merc's Maybach in China, where it just wasn't a Rolls.
*His favourite of the vehicles he gets to service is a Bentley Blue Train Racer... nominally a two seater, but has a rear seat at ninety degrees for the butler, who mixes drinks from the integrated cocktail cabinet for the driver and navigator. Fantastic!
**Or, according to Tom's Hardware, next to 0% if built with like for like components, and that's not including the cost of the OS and included software. Exchange rates might have shifted since they wrote that report, but not by orders of magnitude.