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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

What the customer wants is not often what they need, listening to your customers without understanding what they need can be the killer of innovation.

Henry Ford has a famous quote:

> If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses

I don’t think anybody needed a mouse that needs to be flipped to be charged. However, among the dozen things Apple got terribly wrong, there are also a handful ones that they got so right, that became fundamental pillars of technology.

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>Henry Ford has a famous quote: >> If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses

False: https://checkyourfact.com/2019/10/10/fact-check-henry-ford-q... and https://medium.com/@adrianh/faster-horses-50ff8bb1bb62

Well, I’ll be damned. Apparently the famous product designer I borrowed the “fact” from also mentioned the quote was “dubiously” attributed to Henry Ford.

I believe my point still stands, but yes it was incorrect of me to use the quote as if Henry Ford said it.

Hubris and arrogance (and “courage”) can only get you so far:

- iPod Hifi (which Jobs claimed would completely replace his audio gear )

- the butterfly keyboard

- the touchbar

- the original (uber pricey) Homepod

- the trash can (also pricey) Mac Pro

- and I’m pretty sure in a few years’ time we’ll all be looking back at how stupid the “notch” was

They are the most valuable company on the planet with a $2.5 trillion market cap. Surely it's fair to say they've gone far?

And that they’ve had a number of flops (not just ‘one’) along the way.

All this means is that they're adept at parting fools from their money with "feel-good" marketing and such, to benefit their shareholders (those are their "real customers", not the consumers of their stuff), and to benefit themselves - huge bonuses etc., and have you seen their campus? That kind of opulence is on the same level as Trump's gold toilets.

I agree that the HQ is a navel gazing exercise of the highest order.

But their ability to sell a full line of computing devices with so few SKUs is pretty amazing. Dell sells like 30 different laptops. Apple sells 3.

> Dell sells like 30 different laptops. Apple sells 3.

So Dell offers 30 different choices in price/feature ranges, from lowest to highest. Apple only offers at most 3 - likely all in the more expensive range.

Kinda fits and confirms the "telling you want you want" mentioned above.

Apple historically has been a tiny player in terms of share. They are able to punch over their weight and be profitable making hardware. The original iMac, at the company’s nadir, was the #1 computer model, which gave them supply chain advantages in the market.

The other thing is that while Dell is stuck with Windows, Apple owns a few platforms. They sell cheap iPads as their entry product.

You may not like the strategy or the particulars of it at a given time (ie shipping a defective keyboard for years for inscrutable reasons), but they have a differentiated strategy because that’s what makes sense to them. They are not a commodity. Dell, HP, Lenovo can’t do that because they are merely a channel for delivering Windows - just like Exxon or BP are middlemen brokering gasoline, the only way to make more money is to ship more stuff.

> All this means is that they're adept at parting fools from their money with "feel-good" marketing and such

It’s hard to square comments like this with things like the M1 - what should the fools be buying instead?

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