Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of the replies are pretty vague, like they’re just “good at product” or they just “understand this or that” as if it’s some kind of mysticism. But why, and how? What is the formula? I think this reply chain starts to get at why.

I’m imagining a typical business school 2-axis chart where one axis is “willingness to take and commit to risks vs unwillingness/noncommittal” and the other axis is “acts independently vs. reacts to commercial/competitive pressures”. I guess what I want to understand is why is Apple kind of all alone on that plot, where the rest of the industry are clustered together far away from them? What are the business processes that lead to their position? Can a company follow a playbook and change their culture and have similar results? Are there other examples?

A lot of our industry are so extremely risk averse, have tunnel vision trying to copy each others’ feature checkboxes, rush things to market to try to make money before they are fully baked, and then give up when they aren’t instant successes. Everyone seems to follow this playbook.

As someone who is deep inside the Apple ecosystem after making enough to afford the devices, it’s because they make it pleasant to use. Before my first MBP, I had a Dell Inspiron which has good specs, but it was heavy, the plastic was flimsy and the screen was not good. The trackpad was abysimal. In my last work position, I got a Dell XPS and it was the same, so in the span of 8 years, nothing changes to show that they care for me as a user.

Most people don’t want to think about how to do something or care about optimizing it when they can get it done and not think further about it. But companies seems to want to put a lot of barriers into what I want to get done, like popups, complicated screens, ugly interfaces. For the majority of user workflows, Apple offers a simple, unobstrusive way to do them. Starlink routers are almost the same in that regard (the mobile app could use some work, and perhaps add a desktop interface)

My advice (as a user) is for to simplify the usual workflow to the point you only ask the few (0,1-3) indispensable questions, and then get out of the way. Further options can be buried inside Preferences and Settings. And then you perfect the apperance, ease of use, and general enjoyment of using the application/device.

Being pleasant to use also requires some courage to remove features, make compromises and spend extra time on the right things, rather than box-ticking.

In the end you need courage both to make it pleasant to use and to give it a big price.

Apple makes devices for the users. Dell makes them to sell as part of a service contract to a company. Microsoft makes an OS to sell to enterprises to provide a heavily managed experience for their employees so they can maximize productivity and profit. Apple makes an OS for people to use. (and get a 30% cut on almost every purchase the users make with it lol)

My personal machine is an M1 Air, and have to use PCs for work. The time it takes the PCs to wake from sleep until I can do actual work is a constant annoyance. The MacBook Air wakes just as quickly as an iPhone.

It’s details like that, which set Apple apart.

There’s a Jobs story about that one.

The MacBook team had this whole presentation planned for him, a usual dog and pony show about better specs and batteries and whatnot. Instead he just put an iPhone and a MacBook on the table, “woke” them both up, and said “why can’t this (the MacBook) do that (the iPhone)?” End of meeting.

I think they view design, especially of new products, as an intensely iterative process to identify and solve every problem they can find. And let that process lead them to a new very cohesive product definition.

That takes a very wide set of skills, to follow the series of discovered problems to be solved wherever they lead.

Other companies look at what parts are available, define a product from that, design have different teams build the different parts, each maximizing specs and reducing cost.

For the vast majority of already well defined products, the second path is the right one.

So that path is very familiar to every level of management at every corporation, and doing something completely different from the ground up isn’t easy or natural in that context.

For Apple, the other holistic discovery path is their mission.

Even “big” differences like being super vertical are a second level strategy for Apple, in service of being able to more easily follow problems to product definitions.

But even for Apple, that path is very risky. They have had a few half baked lemons in products that didn’t get as much discovery and attention as they needed.

You're getting close. Over the past 30-40 years, American corporations have focused more and more and more on profitability, and "making the numbers go up." They have sacrificed employee retention in order to pay executives eye-watering packages to focus on eliminating literally everything that doesn't contribute to that goal. They gutted all the R&D they can, years ago. Apple seems to be almost alone in retaining enough business acumen to think further out than the next quarter. It's not magic. They're just continuing to do what places like IBM and HP were famous for, decades ago. It's like the quip in Days of Thunder (and I have no idea why it sticks with me): "I'm not going faster. Everybody else is going slower." Wall Street has killed the future of America, and slowed human progress around the globe, in order to buy a bunch of already-filthy-rich people even more stuff.

Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.

Apple has in house expertise for everything from designing their own processors, writing their own OS and applications, world class designers, manufacturing at scale, and sourcing parts and negotiating favorable pricing.

No other company has all these competencies at the same level.

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