The short answer: A laser focus on user experience.
Long answer: Broadly speaking there are two paths to profit.
One is to add value by taking a number of components and combining them into a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. If you can put together a more coherent whole more efficiently than your customers or competitors could on their own, you add value and can claim a profit as your reward.
The other is to seize market control, and there are quite a few ways of doing that. You can stimulate demand with advertising, you can lock in customers by subsidizing entry costs and collect rent on a subscription thereafter, or you can make deals with distributors so your product has exclusive availability, or you can merge or acquire the competition to claim a larger slice of the pie, or you can just make what the other guy makes with some cut corners so you can squeeze him out on price.
I happen to believe that a product which earns it's profit by offering superior value is better than a product designed to leverage market control. For decades now, businesses have focused on seizing market control as the path to profit. Fashion companies use marketing to build their brand, printers sell below cost to secure a de facto supply contract, cola companies secure exclusive distribution deals with restaurants and schools, and media companies borg everything from web pages to record labels into content empires.
Along comes Apple, dedicated to making complicated technology as painless as it reasonably can and maximizing the user experience, and becomes the most profitable company in the world by doing so. Sure, they need marketing, distribution and cost control just like any other company, but they refuse to make it their basis of competition (people who say otherwise are deluded).
The competition has noticed. Already we can see a renewed focus on design and user experience. No way would the Microsoft of ten years ago ever contemplate releasing something like Windows 8. In other sectors, businesses will focus less on mega-mergers and distribution deals, and more on creating a compelling customer experience that rivals find hard to replicate.
A lot of people still seem to think Apple is some kind of fluke, but many others have already clued in that Steve Jobs was the Henry Ford of the 21st century.
"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event." — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.
