Edible Apple

Jason Snell over at Macworld has an interesting article up discussing how Apple isn’t the type of company that sells its products, in this case the new iPhone, based on geeky spec sheets.  Naturally, though, once the new iPhone is released, you can be sure that the geekiest among us will leap at the opportunity dissect and inspect every last chip and moving part inside the device.  That being the case, Apple’s reluctance to cater to “feature whores”, as it were, helps illustrate the philosophy behind what has helped Apple become as successful as it has.  Put simply, Apple doesn’t sell you on the specs, it sells you on the user experience, specs be damned.

In regards to the new iPhone, for example, Apple doesn’t want users to fret over whether or not the new iPhone has a 600 or 700 Mhz processor.  Instead, Apple wants users to simply know that the new iPhone is a helluva lot faster than the previous model.  If the new iPhone launches apps and browses the web more than 2x as fast as the previous iPhone, then why should users even concern themselves with how much RAM they have?

Snell writes:

Apple excels at creating products that the general public likes because the company is driven by design, not by engineering. Most tech products—heck, most products in general—aren’t as good as they can be because they’re put together by the people with the technical knowledge required to build them. And so the technical aspects of the product get pushed to the forefront.

Well put.  Apple succeeds by creating products that focus on usability and design, as opposed to some of its competitors who are seemingly obsessed with creating a laundry list of features that no one wants to use.