Bono's quote on why Apple is so successful is perfect | Hacker News Reader

Bono's quote on why Apple is so successful is perfect

beliefagency.com

15 pointsmstkrft14 comments

I'm not one to buy into Apple exceptionalism, but today when setting up a new Lenovo laptop I was just flabergasted at how terrible the experience is. I opened IE to be hit with both the vendors ad-laden OEM page and MS's own news page which is ad-laden and is full of outrage and low information stories. The laptop is chock full of lenovo apps that get in my way, or worse, cause me issues down the line.

On Android its almost as bad. Every app has big obtrusive apps and they all sample my location without even asking, because according to google, they don't need to ask. This also ignoring the clusterfuck that is OEM customizations.

Apple's biggest strength, imo, is that its not terrible beholden to OEMs (it doesnt have any) or ad networks. It doesn't need to put up ads. It doesn't need to worry about OEM customizations. It doesn't have the federal government on its back from 1990s excesses. It makes its own hardware and its own software. That right there is very liberating. End users are sick of being seen as just eyeballs for ads and third-party software they don't want. There's something shameful about paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of technology only to end up with something covered with ads and hostile to you.

That's Apple's big benefit. They simply don't play that game.

What the fuck is up with all these clickbait-y articles on Hacker News lately? The title reads like an Elite Daily headline I might see on Facebook, and the actual content is just blogspam rehashing a 2 year old article(http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/04/18/bono-on-apple-you-can...).

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Y_tciYE...

There isn't much there so I'll paste: What is Apple's secret sauce? Bono knows, and I think he's right.

Check out this quote.

“Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity. His genius is not just his ability to see what others cannot but also how he applies it. To watch him with his workmates in the holy of holies, Apple’s design lab, or on a night out is to observe a very rare esprit de corps. They love their boss, and he loves them. What the competitors don’t seem to understand is you cannot get people this smart to work this hard just for money. Jony is Obi-Wan. His team are Jedi whose nobility depends on the pursuit of greatness over profit, believing the latter will always follow the former, stubbornly passing up near-term good opportunities to pursue great ones in the distance. Jony’s values happen to add value — emotional and financial. It takes a unique alchemy of form and function for millions of people to feel so passionately about the robot in their pocket.”

This seems extremely over the top.

I think it's unrealistic to assign success to a single cog of a large production, but I do think there is truth behind the power of intrinsic motivation over extrinsic motivation.

It's interesting that no-one ever gives credit to Apple's marketing department, because they are very good at their job. We only get these religiose screeds about the designers.

Other companies have good marketing departments. They're not the unique part of Apple.

But, all parts are important. Every link in the chain holds up the final experience. Attempt to reduce it to any one part and you miss the point.

Quality is the word. It is holistic and irreducible.

The products are their own best marketing.

At the moment, they are. But Apple has had plenty of flop products, and it was their marketing that kept them in the game and brought them to the fore, along with the iphone.

Spoken like a true fanboy.

if all Apple made was junk, the best marketing department in the world couldn't get them anywhere near their level of success

I didn't say the design was bad. I said that no-one talks about their marketing department with this kind of fervour.

The converse is true, by the way - there are plenty of excellent designs that were relegated to the scrapheap because of poor marketing.

Anyone have a cached version? I'm getting this when trying to access the page:

"The "Active Class" extension is not enabled in "404"."

This is the actual article, that other one just has a quote and a link to this: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/04/18/bono-on-apple-you-can...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com