I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).