They've achieved cult-like customer behavior; will not even consider alternatives.
I agree with you on marketing but Nvidia's relationships with the big cloud providers and big companies is more important. It locks AMD out.
You reminded me of the many "let's hope that the next AMD GPU is super fast so Nvidia cuts the prices on their XXX GPU" I regularly see on hardware boards.
To me this indicates that AMD and intel have the potential to compete with Nvidia, but they haven't managed to translate that into the general AI/non-HPC market.
Besides developing category-leading hardware, Nvidia advanced both graphics and general-purpose GPU computing with CUDA and a software stack that competitors have still failed to match (though AMD is trying.) CUDA fueled the gaming GPU and crypto waves, as well as the AI wave which has enabled Nvidia to turn itself into an end-to-end AI company, from desktop to cloud to supercomputing.
For a majority of the people of the world most of the Apple products are irrelevant, because they do not fulfill any of their necessities better than the non-Apple products.
There is only one Apple product developed after 2000 which has really transformed its category when also considering non-Apple products: the iPhone, which has led everybody else to imitate its user interface in mobile phones.
Besides the iPhone, there has also been a second innovation introduced by Apple after 2000 that had a significant influence on others. After more than a decade of stagnation in computer displays after the transition from CRTs to LCDs, which had resulted in a lower resolution in displays instead of a higher resolution, the introduction and intense marketing of the Apple "Retina" displays has determined all the manufacturers of laptops and monitors to finally raise the resolution of their devices, resulting in the transition to 4k screens.
Between 1990 and 2000, the most important influence of Apple over the entire world was their cooperation with Microsoft in typeface and multimedia file formats and rendering, which has resulted in de facto standards like the TTF font files.
As you note, marketing on its own was not enough for Apple to be successful in the 1990s, much less to become one of the richest companies on the planet, and one with a trillion dollar market cap.
Intel and AMD have had decades to provide an ecosystem that could rival in C++, Fortran and polyglot compiler backends, alongside great IDE and graphical debugging experience, coupled with a rich library ecosystem.
At least Intel is doing its part in SYCL, Fortran and Python GPU JITs.
Support your hardware with excellent software. Do this with minimal fuss, support it for a long time, and you will do better than 99% of other companies.
If I buy something I want it to be supported 5 years from now, not in some cupboard because software support was dropped and the company needed another sale out of me. If I’m expendable, they’re expendable.