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Comment by emdd | Hacker News Reader

They identify an existing market and try to do it better than the existing players. It's not just marketing. That's an unfair statement.

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People who say it's "just marketing" are more right than they know for the wrong reasons. They think they're saying "it's just branding and advertising". In reality, it's the fact that Apple spends a ton of time understanding the market for their devices, and goes out of their way to make products that are a good fit for their needs.

Marketing is so much more than branding and promotion. People should stop using the word marketing all together..

Considering tbeir R&D is relatively low, they do tremendous market research.

They haven't done anything better with Apple Music though. The client for the phone and for OS X are both atrocious. The experience is significantly worse than the experience provided by Spotify and other competitors.

But, that's okay. Throughout history they have had hits and misses. It doesn't change that this is their approach for how to be successful.

True -- I tried it when I came out but I can't see myself going back. I appreciate the artist-focused approach to the platform and the focus on radio, but I had to have a phone replaced because of the app when it was initially launched (it caused the phone to heat up to the point the battery was damaged and Apple replaced it).

name one thing (with the exception of macbooks) that apple did better than anyone else

phones

the iPod? the iPhone?

One could argue that they did pretty well with the iPhone

OSX, Messages (SMS relay in particular), phone hardware, iOS security, privacy, and battery efficiency.

Hey, you were only supposed to name one ;-)

They bought NeXT better than anyone, so Cocoa, still best GUI toolbox 25 years after it was originally created. What a sad industry we are :-/

It works. So if it ain't broke don't fix it.

Something being old doesn't mean it isn't still great.

Trackpads too. Laptop displays. The original iPhone for sure.

Seriously it took PC MFGs until 2015 to get trackpads to be not awful, when Apple had great ones like a decade before. The clickpad was copied by basically every PC laptop maker and I didn't use one that wasn't terrible until last year. For better or worse, everyone rips off what Apple does, even if Apple didn't do it first, and the rip-offs are generally really bad. People buy them thinking that "it's the same thing".

MP3 players.

The iPod. By specs, no, but by interface and by usability, very yes. (Also I think they were among the first to include headphones that weren't complete junk?)

The iPhone. I use an Android phone, but...I'm not gonna front on this one. At least for a while, and there is an argument that this continues to today, nobody was touching the iPhone.

The iPad. Android tablets, to this day, are really kinda lousy (source: the stack of them sitting on my desk, unpowered) with poor application support. Windows tablets are okay, but they're a different market; iPad competitors, the Surface RT line, plunked without a trace.

iPod had better specs when it came out if you look at battery life, transfer speed, and charge speed. Turns out if you get those right people don't care as much about WiFi and FM radio.

As much as I love hating on Apple as much as the next person... they have developed taking products (iPod, iPhone especially) - and turning them into fairly polished products - into an art.

I'd get my mom and iPhone/iPad before I got her an Android/Tablet.

It's that simplicity that "ordinary" people gravitate towards - which I, as a power user, hate.

You could argue that Android/Windows gives more power to the user - but Apple makes better "appliances" than anyone else. Appliances don't get tweaked or twiddled with.

I think the better way to look at it is that Apple doesn't produce gadgets to appeal to early adopters, they produce gadgets to appeal to everyone and get early adopters to try it.

There were lots of MP3 players before the iPod, and they all had lots of features, most of which were terrible and confusing. No one had made an MP3 player to appeal to the mass market, they were designing them for the existing users of MP3 players, the early adopters.

Along came Apple and designed a device that everyone could want and use, and a lot of the early adopters saw that it was a superior product in a lot of ways. After that they iterated on it to improve it and make it more appealing to more and more people.

I agree with your sentiment that Android, Windows, and, I assume you would agree, Linux, provide more customization options to the user, and there's a huge part of me that loves being able to tweak things to work exactly right. I bought a Mac to replace my Dell, however, because I was tired of having to tweak things to work exactly right and I was happy to invest in a known quantity. There's nothing empowering about a system you have to work to maintain constantly. That's the appeal with Apple's products.

Don't forget the "rip. Mix. Burn." Marketing campaign that mainstreamed cd ripping and that Pepsi giveaway of music.

- iPhone

- iMac

- OS

- retina displays

- fingerprint reader on phone

- no-install peripheral support that "just works" from the typical user's perspective

- iPad

- keyboards

- trackpads

- general product design

- OS-level security

Their software quality has, of course, been declining for several years now. Their software design choices are becoming increasingly questionable. Their hardware quality is beginning to show some problems (merely anecdata from experiences I've had with recent hardware for the first time).

Of course, determining what Apple has done better than competitors is frequently a subjective decision.

Yes re: security. UAC was awful and annoying, but I don't have much of a problem entering my admin password in OSX.

RIP

Wow, you're so compromised you can't even see it.

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