Some companies definitely do just exist on marketing. Some clothing brands are objectively overpriced crap and pure wealth signalling. Or something like a juicero.

But I agree Apple doesn't even though they've gone into a direction I couldn't follow them in.

Not really. They back it up with "good enough tech" that looks pretty and sucks people in with marketing, and then locks them into a closed ecosystem. Admittedly, some of their tech is actually very good (e.g. M-series ARM-based CPUs), but much of it is nothing special, or worse, just copying something else that competitors have been doing for years, presenting it as brand-new, and claiming credit for it.

They did this with the always-on screens for phones. My LGs had this many, many years ago. It was so bad that when Apple finally brought it out and acted like they had invented it, coworkers saw my LG and asked if I had gotten the latest iPhone, and I had to point out that it was a 5-year-old LG.

And then there's other stuff that Apple has which is just plain bad, but they present as new and wonderful, such as the "island" keyboard.