Comment by mieubrisse
3 days ago
I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?
They focused heavily on the quality of things you can see, i.e. slick visuals, high build quality, even fancy cardboard boxes.
Their software quality itself is about average for the tech industry. It's not bad, but not amazing either. It's sufficient for the task and better than their primary competitor (Windows). But, their UI quality is much higher, and that's what people can check quickly with their own eyes and fingers in a shop.
This is one of the best descriptions I have seen of Apple, very well put
"Market comes first, marketing second, aesthetic third, and functionality a distant fourth" ― Rob Walling in "Start Small, Stay Small"
Apple's aesthetic is more important than the quality (which has been deteriorating lately)
Not on Macintosh. On iPod, iPhone and iPad.
All of those were marketed as just-barely-affordable consumer luxury goods. The physical design and the marketing were more important than the specs.
Its because the claim that many cynical people have where everything always gets worse are simply wrong. Quality matters very much for a lot of products and the results clearly show this. Apple provided something people liked and people bought it, are happy with it and buy it again. I'm myself am not a big fan but I can understand it, and it has a certain quality.
I simply don't understand how people can live in the real world, look around themselves and claim quality is getting worse. This is simply not the case for 99% of product I have consumed over my few decades of being an adult.
A typical day. I get up, mattress I have now is better. I brush my teeth with a powerful electric toothbrush that is much superior then the once a decade ago. I use a amazing induction stove that is far better then what I had a decade ago. I ride a beautiful electric bus to the train station. From there I take modern fast train to work, much better and faster then 10-20 years ago. I set on my desk that goes up and down, has a insanely large beautiful monitor on it, incredible. I turn on my laptop that 100x more powerful then my first one. I start a IDE that is much better then what I had when I started. I use a programming language better then the one I used when I started, and I have a much larger library ecosystem. I spin up VM and containers, both locally and if I need in a waste internet cloud. I go for launch, I have like 20 options, food from one end of the globe to the the other, much better then I had 20 years ago.
I could go on about almost every single product I tough on typical day. The only thing that is actually not much better are things like backed goods, and mostly because they were already amazing. At most its now faster to buy them and I can buy them at more places.
I really don't why so many people inhere are crying about how everything is getting worse all the time.
By being a luxury consumer company. There is no luxury (quality) enterprise software. There is lock-in-extortion enterprise software.
Apple's supposed high quality is mostly marketing.
They have constant, frequent, hardware design issues that they just don't even acknowledge and somehow people still treat their hardware as "high quality"
They once shipped a phone that lost signal if you held it with your hand. Their solution, after insisting that people hold their phone differently, was cheap plastic cases.
They shipped a new keyboard that would fail after singular grains of dust got into it, in order to save a millimeter of thickness on a product that was already quite thin. In order to repair or replace the keyboard, you have to replace half of the whole machine, for half the price of a brand new laptop.
Apple does not spend real effort on hardware quality.