Except they did their very best to just make their 'premium' products a blatant money-grab and little else.
Despite plunking down a pretty penny for premium brands or product lines, Dell and Sony would still nickel and dime you with LOADS of pre-installed crapware. (No experience with other manufacturers' 'premium' lines..)
Of course they gave up -- it is bloody annoying to buy an expensive piece of hardware and then spend loads of time simply fighting with it; the market just couldn't stand it any more and jumped ship when a crap-free out-of-the-box experience presented itself.
Personally, because I have more time and skills than money, I use cheapo Dells and Lenovos which I wipe and set up from scratch. But for my parents and other relatives who really couldn't care less, I'd recommend an Apple laptop in a flash and not have to waste hours upon hours as tech support. (Now that they're more easily available, I'm cautiously considering moving this recommendation to a Dellbuntu...)
They failed, and to be fair, most have failed. The fact of the matter is that is hard to dominate your market, everybody will downplay your success. And nobody will ever give credit to your product, or to your strategy, or to your business. It's always luck, customers with more money than brains, deception.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. They were all flukes in history that are going to be corrected when the market corrects itself. Excuse me?
The truth is, Apple, and Audi and BMW, must be doing something right. It's just not something for you.
It's not like they didn't try, it's more like they just gave up.