Another quote from Tim Cook, "The philosophy [of Apple] has always been to be the best, not the first. If you look back in time at Apple, the iPod. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. It was arguably the best, and arguably it was the first modern one. But not the first. The iPhone was not the first smartphone. BlackBerry was shipping phones, Palm was shipping phones. iPhone was the first modern smartphone. And then if you look at iPad—tablets were shipping a decade before. And yet, iPad arguably was the first modern tablet, and the first one that met any level of commercial success."
And he's right! Apple is not a short-sighted company like Samsung. You can see this just by looking at the development cycle of their products. They took 3 years to come up with the Apple watch, and they are still working on it right now, choosing to ship it in 2015 and missing the crucial Christmas 2014 season.
Samsung, on the other hand, rushes products to market. And most importantly, you can always get the sense that they themselves do not have confidence in their products. Let me give you an example. They moved forward the launch of the Note 4 and slashed the price in certain regions because iPhone 6 and 6+ sales are doing incredibly well. If they have a good product on their hands, why rush to market and compromise the quality and integrity of their products? Another example. They released the Galaxy Alpha, with a 4.7" screen and a aluminium frame to tackle the iPhone 6. Their strategy is to use the Alpha to counter the iPhone 6 and the Note 4 to counter the 6+. But didn't they release the Galaxy S5 a few months ago? And that's not forgetting they also released countless variants of the S5 in the past few months. They have a S5 variant with a QHD screen, 3GB Ram and Snapdragon 805. They have another one with with a 1080p screen, 2gb Ram and Snapdragon 805.
So which phones are the flagships? And can you tell me how many smartwatches Samsung has released in the short span of a year?