alt Hacker NewsI don't know why you're coming to the rescue of the iPhone here. Everyone knows it was a successful product, no one said that the iPhone was "unappealing in the market".
Quite the opposite, the demand was so high that Apple could set requirements to carriers that were impossible before AND after...
"The way Apple destroyed the competition was by creating so much hype around their product that they could demand concessions from carriers" is very easy to read as people buying iPhones because of hype and not because they were meaningfully better than the competition in ways that many people valued. Is that not what you meant?