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Comment by wjnc | Hacker News Reader

Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).

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IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.

Apple products aren't just well designed, but they feel like each has specific tiny set of target audiences they are built for. That would be a very politically unpopular move in East Asian cultures, one that could socially kill the targeted group.

Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it?

For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.

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