By that definition, Apple is absolutely in the commodity products business.

I'd rather say IBM got cannibalized by "financial engineers", this wasn't a decision made because of "it's a commodity".

There used to be a time when IBM actually meant quality (that's where "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" came from, after all), but nowadays? A loooot of stuff is either sold (Thinkpad went to Lenovo, Lotus Notes to HCL), faded into irrelevancy outside of extremely few niche markets (anything mainframe), got left for dead (the PC - it used to be called "IBM compatible personal computer"!) or got spun off (Kyndryl).

According to Wikipedia, IBM has 282.000 employees worldwide. What the fuck are all of these people doing?