They make them for channels, not consumers, and, it's partly 'an east Asian' supply chain business culture thing. They're not thinking about how the brand/product appears as simple form in consumers minds, but about deliveries, parts, channel customers, optimizations, national differentiations.

It takes an incredible amount of organizational discipline to do what Apple does and without that ingrained into culture it has zero chance of working.

And yes - they are trying to fill a lot of holes - all sorts of holes, in all sorts of different ways.

It may be true that this is actually an optimal 2cnd place strategy. Samsung may possibly be dong the right thing and consumer confusion is the price we pay for not paying a few extra $ for an iPhone.