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“It’s the small things” has driven Apple design for decades. And it’s a cultural thing, not just the “design department”. I remember back in the mid-90s when I left Apple to work at Microsoft and realized how rare it is to have software developers who view everything through the lens of the end user experience, even if they’re working on the file system or the boot sequence.

Random example: One of the first things I asked when I got there was “why, when you turn on a Windows PC, does it start your user experience by filling the screen with scary gibberish?” That got fixed, but it took many years, partially because of all the coordination needed in the PC ecosystem to do anything, but mostly because nobody really cared all that much.

That ingrained cultural attention to detail is probably the only thing I miss about working there. Too many other tech companies I've worked at just don't care about things they consider "edge cases". Make the "key customer journey" (in other words the happy-path) work and you're done. Is "making it beautiful" in the contract? No? Then don't work on it! Oh, the software doesn't work in landscape mode? P3 bug, we'll fix it later--just ship ship ship. Cheap out and make the casing plastic instead of metal so you can save $0.30 on each device. KPIs! OKRs! metrics! That's all the rest of the industry runs on.

This is the nature of lower price points: economization, doing only what is needed, not what would be nice.

The key is that Apple's product lineup is relatively small. Compare that with e.g. Lenovo, who offer a mindblowing amount of SKUs.

Too many SKUs tend to be correlated with lack of polish and attention to detail. And this comes from someone who prefers Linux, and hence ThinkPad.

Even basic user experiences, such as buying online, are vastly better at Apple. For instance, lenovo.com is handled by a third party in many markets, including the EU.

"Too many SKUs tend to be correlated with lack of polish and attention to detail."

So true. Back a decade ago, Nokia had an enormous amount of SKUs. The firmwares were usually crap, and even the hardware was often subpar. You were obviously not expected to keep the same Symbian smartphone for 5+ years, with the possible exception of the Communicator.

Blackberry, on the other hand, had much fewer SKUs and much better quality.

Yeah, Nokia was the other example that came to mind. They were really capable. When they had a small team focused on a single thing, the Nokia N9, the product they developed was outstanding. However, as an organization, they were totally dysfunctional. Lots of internal fights, politics, etc. I sadly know that well as I interacted a lot with Nokia during the mid 2000s.

I programmed Nokias back then.

The technical talent of their R&D was top notch, and it was sadly wasted by a dysfunctional decision making culture.

People here on the HN tend to value engineers highly and look with disdain on mere managers. They may be right when it comes to the Pointy-Haired Bosses, but good management is a large force multiplier when it comes to the capabilities of any org. And bad management will easily drag a good engineering corps into an endless mire of meaningless work.

Hard to disagree!

> filling the screen with scary gibberish?” What scary gibberish was that again? It's been too long ago for me :')

Not OP but they are almost certainly referring to the BIOS POST self-health and status messages.

Aw I find that gibberish reassuring, it means the magic is working!

You used to be able to get the scary gibberish on Intel Macs by setting an NVRAM boot arg. Not sure that works anymore on the Apple Silicon ones.

> It probably costs barely anything to make the box better like that

On the contrary, it costs a LOT to make the box that good.

I can't find it now, but I recall some article posted here about how lots of startups spent insane amounts of money trying to make their packaging as good as Apple's (UHD foam, aluminum milling) when they should be working on their actual product instead.

Their hardware is pretty good, but my overall impression (as a mainly Apple user for 30 years) is just that the experience sucks less.

I don’t actually know, but my impression is that they work harder “under the hood” than on the user facing stuff (which ironically is what I want. But in applications and user interfaces, in many cases they have simply lost their way.

But the physical quality from, as you say, the box to the device does feel like it improves the quality, making up in part for indifferent software.

The double irony here is that I can afford to buy expensive goods, but I won’t buy a Prada pullover any more because the zippers are functionally poor. Apple provides a luxurious experience (a nice box with a lovely watch inside) at a cost that a supermarket worker can afford.

> This is something Apple does amazingly well.

Sometimes. Other times not so much. Sometimes they make changes just for the sake of making changes so that they can continue to be the "cool new thing" and in so doing they make things objectively worse. The canonical examples were the butterfly keyboard and the touch bar.

Another example is the move away from discoverability and towards hidden controls. In mail.app, for example, the controls to save attachments are hidden until you hover over them. There is no visual clue that they exist until you hover. You either have to know where they are, or stumble upon them by sheer luck. There is, obviously, no manual to clue you in.

Everyone else copies apples boxes now.

>windows has ads and malware built into the OS

windows "ads" are suggestions about what software to use, the same as mac has

>the charge you for os upgrades

not for either 11 or 10

> The laptop hardware doesn’t cut corners. Yes, it’s expensive, but everyone knows of its quality. in 5 years it still has value. Try and sell a 5 year old windows laptop.

you can find plenty on resellers at a considerable fraction of their original price, same as with mac hardware. obviously laptops that were cheap when they were sold don't fetch much.

> I pay more to not be the product, and to have privacy.

you pay for a fashion statement. nobodies blaming you for that, but lets be honest

I agree with most of this and generally like Apple stuff, but...

The first touch point on a new Apple product is the box, and they use high end, thick cardboard that’s got a great finish.

...I can’t agree with this. Their boxes are bad! They’re probably really proud of their boxes and think they’re the best, and they do have a nice surface sheen, but they’re bad.

They’re too heavy, too hard to open, near impossible to break down to recycle.

Every time I mention this somebody says “that’s out of date, they’ve really improved recently”, but I’m still seeing the same shitty plastic-infused boxes.

Nintendo are great at doing amazing things with simple cardboard. But there are plenty of other companies doing this now. Apple is well behind the times.

Anecdote: I recently received a new M3 MacBook Pro at work, and the box was 100% recyclable, as well as everything inside of it - instruction manuals (why?) were held together with paper, the power cord had paper around it, and the keyboard/screen separator was also tissue paper.

I'm not denying that there's "plasticized paper" in the box, but as far as I could tell, it was 100% recyclable. As for "breaking down the box", if you flip the lid around to the bottom of the box, and then stack them together, then it saves a good bit of space. But yes the moulded cardboard that held the laptop itself was a pain to get out of the bottom section.

Was it a box you opened via a flap? Or one of those board game style boxes with a close-fitting lid, but manufactured in super heavyweight material with sub-micron snugness of fit? Those look nice but I find them pretty annoying.

I agree with all the points here but I would argue that even Apple experiences have degraded over time. Specially the in store purchase experience degraded miserably. I used to be able to walk into a store and be guided to purchase what I was looking for. Now unless you have a time slot all you can do is schedule one.

The attention to detail and completeness in the APIs was why I switched to the mac many years ago.

I find that developers who disrespect Apple and use Android, Linux, and Windows, have almost never written a single GUI app with the platform tools. Which I find baffling. The desktop environment is what you interact with all day, why wouldn't you learn to customize it?

Mac has ads, when you search the store you get sponsored listings.

The box? Really? The box does not matter at all. As long as it's not a plastic clamshell, it's good enough. The box just not justify the 2x price over mostly similar products

The box isn't the only justification for the higher price. It's just an example. If apple cares that much about the box, imagine the effort they put into the rest of the hardware, software, and experience.

I'm not an apple user but it is obvious to me that apple users aren't paying more just for the box.

> If apple cares that much about the box, imagine the effort they put into the rest of the hardware, software, and experience

faulty logic. if that was the case, they would intentionally over engineer the box, and leave everything else shitty, in order to save money. the box doesn't matter, the product matters.

But their customers would quickly spot that. In fact, other companies now get close to / match apple's packaging attention to detail, but the rest of the customer experience itself rarely matches that first impression.

So the box matters; and the product; and the customer service. Focussing on just the product is missing the big picture.

Faulty observation(?)

The box matters to some people including me, it is, after all, part of the package that you buy, and the most visible one.

That does not mean that I would buy worthless product just because it has a great box. It just means that I appreciate work spent on the box design, too.

…the fact that the behaviour you describe is precisely not how Apple works is the reason I am their customer.