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What I love about Apple's success?

It's mostly based on design: good UI design and good aesthetic design. Apple is almost a fashion company.

It's not based on any of the things that the windup MBA idiots always harp on: marketing, performance, salesmanship, connections, etc.

Sure, Apple has those things. Apple is great at marketing, their stuff performs well, and they have plenty of salesmen. But so does everyone else. Apple's success is based primarily on aesthetics and user experience, which nearly all players in the industry have ignored completely in favor of the cliches beloved of MBAs.

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> Apple's success is based primarily on aesthetics and user experience.

I cannot say that Marketing and Salesmanship is not as important factor of the success of the company, which has undoubtedly the most charismatic CEO of this era, and one of the best salesman in the business.

Steve Jobs is not in the least bit charismatic. He's obviously brilliant and a good, not great, speaker, but every other sentence out of his mouth could be "I'm better than you" and people wouldn't flinch. He's not the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with, unless you get off on being talked down to. Jobs has a legion of followers, but not because of personal charisma.

every other sentence out of his mouth could be "I'm better than you" and people wouldn't flinch

To my understanding, that's pretty much what "charismatic" means. It's not a synonym for "friendly".

I'm not interested in semantics but I always thought that a requirement of charisma is that people like you. That doesn't mean you're friendly, but enough so that people like you. We're probably hitting some grey area here as people are obviously devoted to what Jobs has created, but it's nothing like a "cult of personality" ala Porfirio Díaz.

I never get this. Sure Jobs is a good salesman. But do you think Apple would be such big news on HN if it weren't for the product. I mean just look at the damn things... some people don't like OSX or iOS, but the sheer polish of the Air, Macbook Pro and the ipad are amazing. They've come a long way from those horrible beige boxes in the mid 90s.

I am certainly not saying that Apple products are not excellent. I am just saying that Marketing/Salesmanship/PR etc. also has a part to play in Apple's success.

I agree with most of your thoughts except the 'fashion company' bit. What fashion companies do is 'frivolous' design, a shirt is a shirt is a shirt. What Apple does is on a totally different level - mouse is not a scroll wheel is not a multi-touch sensor. They are all fundamentally different ways of interaction that change the things you _can_ and _cannot_ do with the device - you can't have the precision of the mouse on the iPhone but you can't do the iPhone's multi-touch gestures with the mouse. The design fashion companies do, doesn't have the same impact. Totally on-board with you on the rest of your thoughts.

As an aside, for people who are interested, at MacWorld 2007, Steve summed up the whole thing in just 1 slide... http://i.imgur.com/gMIjp.jpg

To a lot of people 'design' means white/gray rounded rectangles, but that's really not why Apple is where they are today. As Steve said 8 years ago - “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

I disagree that fashion is frivolous. A shirt is not a shirt is not a shirt. One whole half of the human brain seems dedicated to aesthetics. Are you saying that one half of the totality of the human intellect is worthless and frivolous?

Aesthetics are practical.

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