Having done the hardware game, it's not so much the clones that get you, it's the VCs/shareholders.

You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.

Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.

So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.

You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.

I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.