It always strikes me how things that other companies obsess over and create entire vocabularies for (we don't sell products, we sell experiences!) and experiment with obsessively come so naturaly to Apple. Other companies produce hundreds of tweaked and targetted models of things in dozens of colours and patterns that are produced by different market oriented product groups and focus-tested to death.

Apple makes two products in the same category and they're both white, and they're white not because marketing, esperiences, focus groups or demographics but becuase Johny thinks it feels right for new things to be that way. Every 3-5 years or so they produce them in 5 different vivid primary colours, just for fun.

Conversely Apple absolutely obsesses at the executive level over and exhaustively iterates on seemingly trivial details like optimising the exact minimum necessary number of buttons in a UI screen, the precision and fluidity of a scrolling action and bounce animation, even just exactly the correct shade of yellow in an icon (real example). Things most companies would assign to a random intern and then forget about.