[Prestidigitweeze]

I don't think Samsung is in the position to be confined to annual updates. They aren't selling their business as a clique of designers sequestered from the world in fortresses of coolness. It doesn't operate that way because it wasn't conceived as a boutique to begin with.

Of course Apple is involved in collaborations, too, but Samsung's are simultaneous, active, and open, and involve customers and companies at near-live levels. If you're working with all those carriers in all those countries on a software platform, with carrier modifications, that aren't within your control, and you're also a company that researches and manufactures the parts from which the phones are built, including the screens, and that's only a tiny part of the kinds of consumer products you sell and support, you're going to end up making iterations of different kinds of hardware on an almost monthly basis.

Samsung could try to slow down, of course. But is that what third-party manufacturers and other interconnected companies want? Their task is to create, adapt and adopt newer tech on a schedule that would make you think they were reporters writing about it rather than people designing and building it.

Apple started by making only desktops and laptops. They've slowly added phones, media players, tablets and peripherals, all either based on the idea of personal computers or supporting their own exclusively.

Apple is a boutique hardware-software company that became a major corporation without having to create products designed only to support other people's products. Many other companies are compelled to tailor their products to Apple's.

Samsung makes products that have to support everything: Their own products and, seemingly, everyone else's. Even with the Galaxy S and S2, dedicated support by other companies seems to come down to cases, batteries, software modifications, and a small number of dedicated apps that have grown to include other manufacturers and hardware anyway. All of which puts Samsung in the position of having to tailor hardware to other people's constant software, manufacturing and release schedules.

There's a partial solution for consumers, you know (though it isn't future-proof): Buy the thing that works best in that moment -- and after careful research -- instead of being fixated on the newest. And don't succumb to envy or resentment.

I've had the same old Samsung phone for almost two years and will probably only update when Android implements the support of external DACs. This despite the fact new iterations are released constantly. And since my next phone might or might not be made by Samsung, that doesn't even include the hectic hardware releases of other phone manufacturers.

Apple sells quietude around product design and their release schedule's part of it. But that sense of quietude should be in the consumer's head no matter what product they're looking at.