1. MAKE PROFIT on all of its products and services. For a company that has less than 5 % of the worldwide market of PCs and less than 2 % of the cell phone market and with iPods making up only 14 % of its income, Apple makes 75 % of the income and 56 % of the profit of a behemoth like Microsoft. And Apple has more cash in savings ($ 24 Billion) than Microsoft ($ 20.7 Billion). This is expected to reach over $ 30 Billion in 2009.

2. CREATE LUST AND LOYALTY FOR ITS PRODUCTS. To become such a money-making machine, Apple has to create products that people LUST FOR and are willing to pay TOP-DOLLAR. Money is not as much of an object for the Apple product user as for the user of other electronics products. Even poor people are willing to shell out bucks for the iPhone. They understand how much better the iPhone is than the competition.

3. DESIGN GREAT PRODUCTS. Design is NOT only the surface. Design is THE WHOLE THING. QUALITY is in THE WHOLE PRODUCT. Apple designs the entire product. Other companies let someone else design the software (e.g. Microsoft, Linux, Google) and even the hardware (e.g. Intel reference designs). But this make the design of the product dependent on 3rd parties who may have a different vision than your company’s vision. Design becomes patchwork. With Apple, much more than other companies, the product JUST WORKS. As Steve Jobs said, great design forces the designer to make choices of what to leave out. Apple makes the best choices of what to leave out compared to other companies.

4. ECOSYSTEM and INTEGRATION. Apple’s products are a family of products that work well with each other. Apple also strives to make its products work well with 3rd party products. It is SO NICE to be able to add a printer to a Mac. The Mac more often than not will automatically add and configure the printer. It is a breath of fresh air compared to adding a printer to Windows, and the nightmare that is Linux. Apple has also created a strong ECOSYSTEM of 3rd party products dedicated to its products. The iPod/iPhone ecosystem is a multibillion dollar market, where the manufacturers make lots of profit for creating Apple-specific products. This allows Apple’s products to integrate to a much higher degree than other companies’ products. It also allows the user to CUSTOMIZE their product to suit his or her personality. When you purchase an iPhone or iPod there is a whole universe of custom-designed products for you. Get a Blackberry, Windows Mobile or Android and there is hardly anything out there.

5. TARGET 80% OF THE MARKET. Apple’s products target the vast majority of people. They don’t target the poorest or the highest end geeks and gamers. Targeting them lowers profitability, quality, and design. Geeks want tons of complexity and customizability. But this would confuse most consumers – who want to simply do their work.

6. INNOVATION. Apple pushes the design of products farther than other companies. It invests a lot in innovation. Other companies barely do any research (e.g. Dell or other white-box makers). Apple was the one that killed the floppy disk, that championed USB, etc. Other companies blatantly copy what Apple is doing.

7. USABILITY. Apple’s products “just work” – to a greater extent than other company’s products. The integration of the product’s parts and to 3rd party products is fantastic. Yes, not every geek’s dream is there. But this brings a simplicity and quietness in work. The focus becomes GETTING WORK DONE, not endlessly tweaking the computer. Compared to Windows, working on a Mac is SO QUIET. There is no din from adware, anti-virus software, endless dialog boxes. The computer does not get in your way. There ARE NO VIRUSES. There is LESS FEAR of using the Mac than other computers. The user doesn’t have to always be a constant repairman or IT worker for their computer. It just works. It gets out of your way.

8. SURPRISE. Yes, I agree. We all love surprise. Apple gets enormous FREE ADVERTISEMENT for its products because it doesn’t talk about it for months or years until we are bored and angry that it doesn’t work as promised (e.g. Vista).

Apple’s products are NOT for everyone. They are NOT for the cheap penny-pinchers. They are NOT for the geeks that tweak endlessly.

Choosing an Apple product is simple. There are only two criterion after choosing the model you want:

1. CHOOSE THE MOST THAT YOU CAN AFFORD. Thus between a 32 gb iPod Touch and a 8 gb iPod Touch, if you can afford the 32 gb one, go for it. It’s that simple.

2. IF THERE ARE REPLACEABLE PARTS THAT ARE CHEAPER ELSEWHERE, GET THE MINIMAL CONFIGURATION OF THOSE PARTS. Thus, if you can get RAM cheaper elsewhere, that choose the Mac with the lowest configuration of the RAM, buy the RAM elsewhere and install it.

WTF are you talking about.

A disk drive (or memory card) necessarily has to be a fixed capacity for good engineering reasons, but an iPod or a computer does not.

I hope you are right about 4, but Jobs recently made a big point of announcing Apple is not interested in the WebBook market. I bet if they do go this way, they’ll spoil it for me with some “Jobs knows best” restriction on its utility!

1 – how do you decide the same for hard drive in your PC choices? Surely we all have to make such choices on every device we buy?

4 – I wouldn’t be surprised if we do see something like that soon. See Apple’s machine is working on you – you’re starting to want such a product in advance, add that to their marketing machine, and Darien’s point 5 about surprises, and you’ll be hanging on Steve Jobs’ words next year to see if he finally announces such a device.

1. Confusion through profusion.

I have been able to resist buying an iPod Touch for over a year now because every time I get close to shelling out I cannot decide which fixed memory capacity to go for. I am paralysed by being asked to make a decision for which I have no logical basis – I do not know if 8GB will feel restrictive or if 32GB will go unused and make me feel like I wasted money. One model with a memory card reader and I’d feel safe making a purchase decision!

2. Feature impoverishment.

I am told the chip used for WiFi in the new iPod Touch also supports FM Radio and Bluetooth, yet the device itself does not make either feature available to users. They clearly have the software for Bluetooth, because it is in the iPhone. The MacBook Air gratuitously omits wired Ethernet and skimps on USB ports. Why does Apple do this? Is it deliberately holding back features for future product refreshes?

3. Gratuitous difference.

I recently fell in love with the stunning design of an Apple keyboard and bought one for my PC. I’m typing on it now. I had to do some research and write my own keyboard map for it, but that was expected. Harder to take is the absence of a hash key (how do Apple people write code?) and an insert key plus a number of “magic” keys that do not generate usable keycodes.

4. Failure to build on success.

Apple’s touch screen technology on the iPod Touch and iPhone is a stunning improvement, both in hardware and software implementation, over anything else on the market. Yet they almost make a virtue out of refusing to extend it out of the specialist phone and music player markets. This technology could make a killing in the “web pad” or “web book” space with very little development effort. Think of an A4 size screen designed to sit near-flat on a desk acting as a web 2.0 terminal. Think of a pocket size clam-shell format with touch screens in both halves (like two iPod Touchs hinged together).

5. Monopolisation.

Apple is so used to being the plucky underdog in the computer market, attacking the claimed monopolistic abuses of Microsoft that it has failed to notice its own growing dominance of the digital music market. Its behaviour risks running into exactly the same legal and perception problems Microsoft experienced if it continues to refuse to open the market. Think what would have happened if Sony/Phillips had tried to control the CD market from manufacture of the player right through to retail of the disks!

However you missed out marketing- they do this better than anything. “The AppStore- genius !”. Ummm… Nokia have had the software market for years- surely it’s just a well-hyped version of the same thing ? And the problem I find with Apple is that they aren’t streets ahead; when I actually use an Apple I don’t find they’ve saved me years of effort or that they’re considerably quicker than an equivalent PC, and integrating into an AD domain is getting better but still causes nightmares.

As far as the naming conventions.. yes, PC manufacturers are rubbish. Dell’s server line is reasonably easy to figure out- everything is a PowerVault, and the family numbers sensibly start with the number of U’s the server takes up- 1950 (1U), 2950 (2U) etc etc. At the end of the day, I build my own PCs anyway so don’t really care !