If you wish to admire Apple for proving there is a market for wealthy demographics who are willing to pay a premium for design and materials not unlike the fashion industry, then so be.
Good design need not cost more and there are far more lofty goals reached by other OEM's by bringing technology to the masses at affordable prices that make a more worthy difference to peoples lives IMO.
I feel “good design” goes beyond simply looking different or being marketed to a different demographic.
Here’s a few examples of how I feel Apple has used design to set itself apart from the competition.
1) The MBA. At a time when most laptop manufacturers were attempting to cram as much hardware as they could into a device (which kinda defeated the point of a portable device), Apple went back to the drawing board. They distilled what they felt were the essentials to a good laptop (keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery) and scrapped everything else. The end result is a thin and light device which people ended up using more, because it was easier to bring about with them. Drawbacks like the lack of a cd-drive or a VGA port were compromises people found themselves willing to live with.
It’s easy to take things away. It’s hard to do so in an intentional manner that enhances the user experience. I feel like many companies hesitate in removing features often deemed “essential” for fear of coming across as being inferior to the competition, spec-wise. Meanwhile, maybe the “stickiness” of the apple ecosystem does buy them some leeway in this regard, and I am thankful for it.
It’s the same with smartphones. Jony Ive and Steve Jobs believed that a larger, sealed battery was better than a smaller, removable one, plus it didn’t interfere with the unibody design of the iphone.
This is what I like about Apple. At a time, and in a world where everyone’s definition of “innovation” is just adding this, squeezing that, cramming everything in, it’s refreshing to have one company actually be willing to sit down and ask themselves - what’s truly essential in a smartphone, and optimise for that. And have the conviction and “courage” to remove stuff if need be.
It’s why I believe Apple can release the iPhone 16 with a straight face, even as the rest of the industry mocks them for lacking 120hz refresh rate or this or that. It’s not about being first or doing the most, but about being the purest distillation of what makes an iphone, an iphone (or a smartphone, a smartphone, for that matter).
2) The square face of the Apple Watch vs the round face of the Samsung-branded smartwatches. It felt like Samsung felt like they had to be different from Apple, and the result was them opting for a form factor which I feel is not conducive to consuming content on the wrist at all.
3) AirPods - from widely-mocked to now being aped by basically everyone in the industry, even Samsung. Except they felt like they had to add glowing LEDs to make themselves stand out. Again, additional features for the sake of being first / different, not necessarily to be better.
4) Apple products cost more because more does go into them. Apart from the hardware (people like to point out Apple’s insane margins), Apple also develops the OS, apps and services that run on their devices. As we speak, they are maintaining iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS (that’s 6 OSes), plus siri, iMessage, Maps, mail, iCloud, Apple Music, TV+, arcade, their own satellite calling service, the list goes on.
Meanwhile, everyone else just piggybacks off Google’s existing infrastructure and services. It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s convenient, and it doesn’t really do much to help Android smartphones in standing out from one another.
That Apple makes the money they do is no fluke. Microsoft tried and failed to build up a third smartphone ecosystem. Apple’s profits is the result of a design-led product strategy which integrates hardware and software to create a sufficiently-differentiated experience that customers are willing to pay a premium for.
I could go on, but I need to go for a meeting soon, and so this is my interpretation of what passes for “meaningful innovation”, not just about having more ram or more megapixels or being first with folding screens or whatever the tech buzzword of the month is.
