Amiga's situation....none of it is really to do with marketing as such.
In 1985 the Amiga arrived, it was so advanced it could have fallen off the back of a UFO compared to Apple Mac 1984 version or EGA PC. Now the problem here is the Amiga did things people didn't even know they needed, didn't know were possible or how it could be used to benefit them or their business/home computing.
Now here is the problem, basically you are complaining a company who owned the technology which was so advanced nobody in the world knew what to do with it except possibly make kick-ass arcade quality exceeding games. Right OK problem with that is the OCS chipset was massively expensive as was the 68000. Add to that the development and purchase costs racked up and the fact Commodore had no rip-off scumbag scheme to screw game developers out of money like Nintendo via game sale royalties and all profits had to come from hardware sales only then you appreciate the complexity of the situation. So....how do you convince someone they 'need' a business computer that can do desktop video, photo-realistic static displays or a sound system that could interpret sample files from the Fairlight series of samplers? You can't, these were not even established paradigms in the mid 80s. People didn't even know what to do with speech. The business world was simply not ready for Multimedia.
Also storage technology was decades behind the capabilities of the Amiga, can you stream a video from floppy or crappy DOS MFM 20mb hard drives? No you can't. Was 512k or 2.5mb enough in 1985? No because you can do some incredible things still with 68000/OCS but with 10mb of RAM. What if the iPod had been designed at a time where solid state memory technology hit a brick wall and was stuck at 16mb? How far would the iPod got if storage technology had not increased in leaps and bounds ahead of the core technology of MP3 hardware playback? This was Amiga's problem in the 80s cost of memory and storage technology was just out of home users, and most business users, financial scale.
Apple schmapple, let's face it the original Mac was for airheads and clueless fanboys who valued style over substance (even though A1000 is a much more elegantly designed machine sorry) and it did not do much more than a Timex computer with a 68000 super CPU upgrade tacked on, and the innovative OS was pre-designed for them by Xerox Parc. Useless machine, cost 3x as much as the A1000 and didn't even have colour. Basically it was an overpriced over styled Amstrad all-in-one word processor with greyscale not green screen.
The iPod and iPhone are different, they produced an elegant machine and brushed under the carpet all the serious bad points of both, BUT the MP3 market was already established as was the touch screen cell phone market. Their success was excellent styling and due to them locking you into their stores (iTunes/Appstore) and DRMing and locking both systems completely...hence they made bucketloads of cash. The iPhone was launched with a camera 24 months backwards technically and the original iPod had very mediocre sound quality, people didn't care though which I find really strange.
So again I ask the question, how does this snake oil rubbish apply? Because Microsoft certainly didn't take this approach and they basically annihilated Apple in the 80s/90s/00s/today. 5% of the desktop computer market after 25 years of selling Macs is pathetic. During the reign of the Amiga/ST Apple almost went bankrupt with their stupid overpriced underpowered custom chip absent machines, Apple would have easily gone bankrupt if Commodore had invested in proper R&D or upped the CPU early on. And it wasn't until the Beige PPC Quadra Power Towers with the Wings A/V solution they even cottoned on to desktop video...this is years after things like VLAB and airlink or VLAB PAR let alone Video Toaster. Alan Sugar of Amstrad made millions with a very basic marketing strategy of 'give the people what they want in a single package'. Nobody thought their low rent products would get anywhere...but they got very far in the 80s and 90s without such Psychobable.
The reason Commodore went bust was penny pinching and greed, simple as that. AGA was too little too late (A1200 needed to include either a CPU or custom hardware to allow for Doom type games to run as well as they do on a 25mhz 80386 PC). Also all that fannying around with A2500 and A3000 but no improvement on OCS basic abilities until 1993 was a joke. 8 years in the computer world is the difference between the Atari VCS and Sega Genesis or SNES. A500 came out in 1987, in 1990 what should have come out is 3 layer flexible parallax scrolling, 8 channel sound, 128 colours in any resolution, hardware scaling of bitmaps Sega Outrun arcade motherboard style. Instead we got the A500PLUS with double the chip ram and the same limitations as an A1000 *sigh*
There are only so many people who 'need' a genlock based machine. Bulk of sales went to gamers via A500, this was clearly the right move end of story. How many people sold their Atari ST/PC because it didn't multitask or display 4096 colours in 320x512 or have high quality 8bit DACs? 0.00001% that's how many, it was simply because their action games were rubbish and looked/sounded worse. Job done. Shame about the lack of development until it was too late
And if you look at Apple today they are riding on the marketing coat tails of Sony. Sobering thought...the PS2 was very much inferior to the Xbox 1 technically, both had very good games...and yet they sold 90 million more units, sometimes at a higher price, simply because it has a Sony badge on it. Apple do the same, people buy iPods/iPhones/iPads for the cachet of the brand and for them it works. This was achieved at the expensive of selling rubbish products for 300% more than the competition for 2 decades...a risky business strategy indeed. Macbook air is inferior to the lightest Toshiba Portege, and it looks worse IMO but there you go...Toshiba badge is akin to a Toyota badge on your car...does the job without fuss. Apple enjoy the same sort of badge cachet as BMW or Mercedes though, despite their products being so-so technically.
