Are you forgetting about the decision to create Apple's entire retail division, i.e. the Apple Stores? An idea which people thought was ridiculous at the time?
Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?
Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?
Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?
Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?
Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?
Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?
(Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)
I would classify many of those as design decisions. Many of those seem like unavoidable were natural consequences of other decisions, but I agree the distinction isn't clean cut.
One of Tim Cook's strategic manufacturing decisions, as I recall, was to literally corner the market of NAND flash memory since the heyday of the iPod. Apple did and probably still does preorder a commanding proportion of the world's NAND flash production every year. Is that a strategic decision or just the natural consequence of consistently forecasting that you'll need that much NAND flash?
It sounds like I'm minimizing everything by deeming it "not strategic", but if you're going to characterizing the work Apple does, I don't think you'd be that far off characterizing it as intelligent people working out the natural consequences of a very small number of strategic decisions. If you're Apple, and you're going to make a touchscreen phone that doesn't suck, using Mac OS X technology, keeping Flash off, setting up the App Store the way it is are all consequences of that.
Or the abandonment of support for clone hardware?
Or the decision to go into the media business by inventing the iTunes store -- but not to rely on media as the primary profit center, but rather as a way of driving sales of extremely profitable hardware?
Or the decision to base iOS on Mac OS X, but not to make them exactly the same thing, with the same apps running on both platforms?
Or the myriads of strategic decisions around the App Store, such as the strict review policy, or the pricing model?
Or even the decision to keep Flash off of iOS, at the possible cost of good relations with Adobe, a company that has traditionally been a bulwark of the Mac OS creative scene?
Or are you trying to deny that these are strategic decisions?
(Note that this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. For example, Tim Cook's list of strategic manufacturing decisions has got to be twice this size, but it's also composed of items that remain secret, or that I don't know about or understand. But why have companies been struggling for years now to match Apple's hardware prices? That's not a fortunate accident.)