Comment by ylee
2 days ago
>At its soul, Apple is a software company that also makes their own hardware. Nokia was a hardware company that also made their own software.
... and bad software, of course. Worse than that, multiple versions of bad software.
Apple is the only company in history to build consistently good hardware and good software and UI. Not IBM, not DEC or the other Seven Dwarfs. It really does go all the way back to the Woz-Jobs duo providing a maniacal focus on UX and one of the most brilliant engineering minds of the century.
(I'm told that Tesla also qualifies.)
Nokia did had software chops, just on another metric than UI: According to a presentation at my university they were very deep in testing and verification and had a lot of expertise there.
And in all my years of using Nokia phones I can’t remember a software bug. But of course we wanted more from our phones than just stability, we wanted features and better UI.