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.
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.