Why Apple is differetn II – great today, not sometime tomorrow

by Vince Maidens Photography

Great since day one
[Via Marco.org]

The original iPhone was great on day one. It couldn’t do as much as today’s iPhone, but it performed its feature-set extremely well. There were almost no rough edges or unpolished areas in its hardware or software, and nearly everything seemed justifiable, well conceived, and well executed.

Apple tends to do that a lot. It’s deeply ingrained in their culture, priorities, and product development practices. In brief, their philosophy seems to be to ship only what’s great and leave out the rest. That’s why, instead of having a bad copy-and-paste implementation for the iPhone’s first two years, we just didn’t have one at all.

Android as a platform, both in hardware and software, doesn’t reflect this. Nearly every hardware and software release has major shortcomings or rough edges. Many details and design decisions are lacking, wrong, or inexplicable.

Neither Google nor the current Android device manufacturers embody the part of Apple’s culture that allows them to release a great product on day one. They have a different pattern: It’s always getting better. We’re always supposedly one or two releases from it being really great.

Much like desktop Linux.

The joke of “next year will be the year of Linux on the desktop” is almost as old as the internet, but it’s true: desktop-Linux fans always say it’s “getting better”, and there’s always a major distribution update a few months away that’s about to be awesome. But it never is. And it never will be, because the reasons why desktop Linux isn’t awesome today will still hold tomorrow: it’s still an extremely fragmented development community for which the non-geek user experience is one of the lowest priorities.

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Apple always releases something that is great right now. Everyone else, from Microsoft to Google, releases something that will get better sometime in the future. Of course, it very seldom every really is a good as Apple’s products because Apple does not stand still.

By the time someone else gets out something that is on the way to great, Apple comes out with another great product.

Perhaps the era of “Just good enough” is on its way out.

Why Apple is different

FaceTime and Why Apple’s Massive Integration Advantage is Just Beginning
[Via MacSurfer's Apple]

The success of iPhone 4 has been astonishing to witness, despite the antenna issues, proving once again that Apple has a unparalleled ability to differentiate around design and integration, not simply “features.”

Perhaps the best example of this so far is FaceTime, Apple’s take on video-calling. FaceTime makes video-calling on the Android-based Sprint HTC EVO look silly, because the EVO awkwardly requires users to sign up and download a third-party app, then launch it every time they want to talk. Normal people simply won’t do this.

Apple eliminated this friction by innovating at the confluence of hardware and software—hit one button mid-call and the feature just works. It really is amazing (yes, I am channeling Steve Jobs).

But FaceTime is just a teaser of Apple’s deep integration capabilities. Below the surface of hardware / software, Apple is on the cusp of differentiating on a much deeper level, a result of its strategy to vertically integrate at the component level. The advantages of integrating so deeply are subtle but incredibly powerful.

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A really nice discussion at Techcrunch detailing why Apple is able to differentiate itself from other cell phone makers – because it can do it all.